 art. Even more than the poetics of Fluxus, the conceptual art movements of the 1960s provided artists with opportunities to stake out positions in regard to social reality. Art became a form of investigation, and the exhibition became a report of findings. This is a soft spot in this essay, since the way in which conceptual art laid the baseline for social sculpture is a subject that requires more explication. Working within the style of conceptual art, artists worldwide acted almost like an impromptu research institute, marking out and developing vast territories of social experience for aesthetic investigation.
Bob Says, “The Art Ain’t Here”
One concept basic to the development of conceptual art was the sculptor and earthworks artist Robert Smithson’s notion of the “non-site.” That is the place where the object is but the art is not; that is, the non-site is the gallery. The site is the place where the art action has taken place; the gallery installation is secondary to the “real” art. This strong concept grew out of Smithson’s research into quarries, dumps, and the “monuments” of contemporary urban civilization. As artists began to play with Smithson’s theories, all these sites opened up as fields for artistic activity. For example, the place where the raw materials of art came from, the stone for the sculpture, became the place where art could be done.
Certainly it was among artists committed to the feminist movement that the impulse to work with the social remained strongest. On the west coast, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly began the sex-segregated feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971. With their students, the artists produced the collective house-scale installation Womanhouse. This collaborative environmental work was concerned with the domestic situation of American women, with a nude model penetrated by a clothes closet and egg/breast wallpaper in the kitchen. Together with the accompanying dramatic performances and discussions, Womanhouse had a galvanizing effect on women artists. Chicago and others forged a collective working method in feminist art, which informed art and educational programs first at Cal Arts, then at the long-running Los Angeles Women's Building.
By 1971, Joseph Beuys told critic Achlle Bonito Oliva he was losing interest in art.
“Q. It seems to me that your work is the extending of a kind of 'Socratic space' in which the works are no more than a pretext for dialogue with the individual.
“A. This is the most important side of my work. The rest – objects, drawings, actions – all take second place. Basically I'm not that much connected to art. Art interests me only in so far as it gives me the possibility of dialogue with individuals.”
In 1972 Joseph Beuys appeared in the prestigious international German art exhibition Documenta, setting up what he called an Office for Direct Democracy. Inside the exhibition, Beuys and his compatriots met with people for intensive discussions of political processes, and handed out plastic shopping bags which diagrammed a new political scheme. Beuys had moved past performance into a pedagogical phase of lecturing and talking. By the mid-1970s Beuys was touring the United States promoting universal creativity – “everyone is an artist” – and social sculpture.
Joining the Band
In New York, the demonstrations and guerrilla theater of the AWC and related groups was succeeded later in the 1970s by intense reflection and analysis among artists on the left. The Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (1975) was decisively influenced by the cadres of Art & Language, a British conceptual art group operating in New York. The AMCC produced An Anti-Catalog criticizing a bicentennial exhibition of historical U.S. art for its exclusions, and A&L put out The Fox, a mordant journal criticizing nearly every facet of the New York artworld.
This activism and analysis seeded more groups in New York during the 1970s and ‘80s which sought to develop exhibitions that expressed the critiques of the earlier generation. The group Colab produced the 