ART IN AMERICA

Art in America

There was a move away from a product-based aesthetic in the arts (sculpture, painting, etc.) to event or performance based art in the fifties; cite some examples as to why this occurred. For instance: Was this due to a changing political climate? Was it in reaction to what came before? Be as specific as you can.

The move away from product-based art was partially philosophical, rooted in the move to a more postmodern aesthetic, in which art that impacted the viewer's imagination 'in the moment' rather than art that had to 'stand for all time' became en vogue. After the recent horrors of World War II, the idea of permanence began to seem like a lie to ordinary Americans and American artists alike. However, the fusing of art and performance perhaps first became popularized much earlier, in the 1920s, with the rise of cinema in world culture. This was true not simply in popular cinematic art but in artistic works such as the collaboration of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali with the filmmaker Louis Bunuel in their silent classic "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) and other impressionistic, nonlinear art films. Such films exhibited the potential of living, performance-based art to the new century. Art did not have to exist as a static image.

In the 1950s, photographs and films of the techniques of the American painter Jackson Pollock made 'Jack the Dripper's art more accessible to the public, as it exhibited the process of his abstract impressionism and showed that it had more deliberation than mere splattering. "You cannot imagine the impact these photographs, as distinct from the paintings, had on artists world-wide when they were first published in the fifties, to see a man making up art like this. To see him standing into his canvas, to see him throwing down paint was so radical that the pictures had a huge impact on the popular imagination of Pollock" (Varendoe 1999).

The pictures of Pollock at work took the emphasis off of Pollock's product on a canvas, and diverted the audience's focus to his process as an artist. Gradually, the focus on process increased in the minds of the art-consuming public as a result of the rise of the Pop Art movement of Andy Warhol. While former advertising graphic designer Warhol's earliest works were static graphics, like his representations of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's Soup cans, his reliance upon the viewer's familiarity with these cultural points of reference made viewing the work the ironic artistic act -- in other words, the 'act' of transposing the image onto a canvas and displaying it in a venue devoted to high art was the point of Warhol's project, not the prefabricated lines of the silkscreened image itself. Later, perhaps inevitably as a consequence of his fascination with cinema, Warhol began to make films and to engage in non-static works of performance-based art ("Andy Warhol," PBS: American Masters, 2006).

In such art of the 1950s the way in which the art was perceived was as equally important as the image of the art. Disposable and even trashy images and products could be, with the use of irony and a performance space that put the works in 'quotations,' turned into artistic works, to make a statement about American popular culture. Not all Pop Art 'happenings' were inspired by cinema, however. For example, Claus Oldenberg 1961 created a plastic 'store' of manufactured goods, like pies, that reminded him of his childhood general store: "Unlike the slick, mechanical appearance of some pop art, they [the pies] are splotchy and tactile. Oldenburg's manipulation of scale and material unsettle our expectations about the objects he makes, forcing us to see them within a different frame of reference ("Teaching Art Since 1950" NGA, p. 39).