18: Art into Life, 1960-1980

DURING THE 1960s and 1970s, new practices of artmaking emerged that overturned nearly every imaginable piety of art in Western modernity. Conventional conceptions of the artwork as a portable object for purchase, of the artist as creative, dexterous, and unique, of the museum as a timeless bastion of refinement, and of the viewer as a passive recipient of the artist's message, all came under scrutiny. This upheaval in the arts paralleled wide-ranging transformations in American society as a whole. Mass protests against racial prejudice, gender discrimination, environmental degradation, and military aggression brought these issues to the forefront of political debate, exposing deep divides in American society. The illusion of consensus that had held sway during the immediate postwar years was shattered.

American art of this period did more than merely reflect the atmosphere of dissent in the country; it played an active part in it. By collapsing distinctions between the aesthetic and the political spheres, and by adopting "real world" processes, materials, and sites, the new art practices under development imagined new opportunities for intervening in that real world. Performance-based practices blurred the distinction between life and theater by turning spectators into participants. Pop art experimented with notions of the studio as factory and the art exhibition as retail environment, thereby dissolving distinctions between art culture and consumer culture. Minimalism diverted attention away from the art object as such to the spatial and temporal conditions surrounding it. Conceptual art proposed equivalences between "art work" and the systematic tasks of workaday life in an increasingly bureaucratic society. Land Art and architectural installation escaped the confine~ of the museum entirely, occupying real land and real buildings and reconfiguring longstanding national traditions of landscape and domesticity in the process. Even the seemingly well-behaved practice of figurative representation became disruptive when familiar historical stereotypes were transformed into uncanny images intended to haunt the present. All of these new practices attacked conventional barriers that had preserved the aesthetic sphere as a realm of refinement, transcendence, and good taste.

Yet uncertainties about the efficacy and purpose of these oppositional arts always lingered. Was it truly possible- or desirable-to obliterate all barriers between art and life? Was there a danger that the critical powers of art might thereby be diluted, rather than intensified? Was there a danger that, instead of enlivening art, this process might instead tame and aestheticize life? The remarkably varied work of artists of this period reflects the care and complexity with which they responded to these challenges.

Thumbnail: DAN FLAVIN, Untitled (To the "Innovator" of Wheeling Peachblow), 1966-8. Daylight, yellow, and pink fluorescent light, 8 ft (2.4 m) square across a corner.