ct 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 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 wo