The Sixties: The Art in Question

When, in 1968, the youth of Europe - especially French youth - took to the barricades, they were protesting against ... what? Slogans were conveniently vague and motives were mixed and obscure. A quarter of a century later, little has changed politically (if change was the object); however, the art that emerged at the same time - in many ways a natural development of the Pop Art of the earlier sixties - has survived, though it has never ceased to be controversial. The major question that has always hung over the art of the happening, of the performance, of the assemblage, has been: is it art at all? Pre-dating the mass student violence of the late sixties, the first recorded happening was staged by American Alan Kaprow in 1959 in New York. It took many forms thereafter. Chris Burden remained in a room for twenty-two days without eating, hidden away; Gina Pane made gory self-mutilations - a sanguinary direction also pursued with considerably greater elaboration by Michel Journiac and Hermann Nitsch. Minimal art pays close attention to landscape and cityscape; Sol Lewitt programs computer graphics by artificial intelligence algorithms; then there are sculptors as diverse as Naum Gabo, Henry Moore, Jean Dubuffet, Isamu Noguchi, Eduardo Chillida, François Morellet, Alexander Calder and Mark di Suvero. Land artists work outside, like Robert Smithson with his Great Salt Lake Spiral, but Richard Long reverses the same idea, erecting natural-material constructions inside four walls. Finally comes Conceptual Art: the artist makes of himself the work. The film also features the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Wolf Vostell, Tanaka Min, Arnulf Rainer, Bruce Naman, Larry Bell, Walter de Maria and many others.

© 1998-2001 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.