Real Estate Show, a building occupation that led to a socially concerned gallery called ABC No Rio in 1980, then in that summer the Times Square Show, a large show in midtown built around social issues which drew large crowds.
Artists from Fashion Moda, an art space in the devastated slum of the South Bronx, exhibited their work in Times Square. The event marked an important moment in the mainstreaming of graffiti art and hip hop culture. The terms of a new urban muralismo – (the word names the revolutionary Mexican mural art of the 1920s) – began to be written into thinking around public art.
At the same time, PADD (Political Art Documentation and Distribution) set up shop as a nationwide networking group for artists of all kinds opposed to Reagan’s conservative government. PADD produced many innovative designs for political demonstrations and new kinds of actions to dramatize issues. They regularly workshopped radical art in NYC. The collective Group Material formed in 1980, producing tightly curated shows on political themes. While PADD tried to build a national radical art network working with labor unions, Group Material’s work was angled more toward art institutions.
Politicized performance and participation in political demonstrations marked all these groups, still their members in general had little to do with forms of social sculpture. But the New York City-based activist art groups in the 1970s and ‘80s, and indeed activist art groups around the world, formed the necessary collective conditions for the emergence of forms of social sculpture dedicated to social utility. In other words, activist art purified the forms of social sculpture.
Women Cleaning and Talking
Mierle Ukeles took feminist ideas around the injustice of unpaid housework into the realm of art performance. In 1969, she washed the corridors of the Boston Museum, and issued her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art.” Ukeles subsequently performed her actions in museums, office buildings and streets. She extended the performances to an exemplary work of social sculpture in the two-year project Touch Sanitation (1978-80), in which she shook hands with each of the hundreds of sanitation workers of New York City. Ukeles later became an artist in residence with the Department of Sanitation, and has been closely involved in the remediation of the giant Fresh Kills landfill.
Leslie Labowitz and Suzanne Lacy also made dramatic cultural activist work with In Mourning and In Rage (1977). This demonstration project culminated in a lineup of women in mourning on the steps of Los Angeles city hall in protest at official mishandling of the Hillside Strangler case, a serial killer who targeted women. Lacy subsequently developed numerous complex projects of socially engaged cultural work, giving specificity to the idea of the citizen artist, or one who works in pursuit of direct social benefit. The Roof is on Fire (1993) was a year-long project in which Lacy put together youngsters and police officers in a series of dialogue events designed to increase understanding and ease tensions on the streets of Oakland. Lacy called her works of creative social utility and the social sculpture of others “new genre public art,” a formulation which would catch on with curators.
That was in the 1990s. By then, the theoretical discussions that arose around U.S. social sculpture were based on the already thick discourse over activist art and the uses of performance from the 1970s and ‘80s. This discourse was largely confined to magazines of art and politics little known outside their communities, like PADD’s Upfront, Cultural Correspondence, Cultural Democracy, Left Curve and Heresies, and the somewhat better known journals High Performance and Afterimage.
Heavy Reading List
As many of the artists active during those years moved into academia and art schools, theory became increasingly important. As densely written analyses of the subjective states of authoritarian and institutional societies by historian Michel Foucault, of patriarchal sexuality derived from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan