Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [138]
PROCESS ART. While Minimalist sculptors went about assembling prefab parts, Robert Morris decided that the process of creating art was more important than the finished piece. Like existentialism — but also taking a page from the Abstract Expressionists — the artist discovers meaning by doing. Walter De Maria in 1961 described a Process Art project: “I have been thinking about an art yard I would like to build. It would be sort of a big hole in the ground. Actually, it wouldn’t be a hole to begin with. That would have to be dug. The digging of the hole would be part of the art.”
ENVIRONMENTAL ART. Conceptual Artists frequently do their thing far from museums and galleries. Earth-
MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE
Holzer, “Selections,” 1989, Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY. A subset of Conceptual Art since the 1970s is media art. American artist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) uses mass media like billboards to push art out of the museum and into public spaces. She began by posting small, anonymous stickers with ambiguous, fortune-cookie epigrams like “MONEY CREATES TASTE” on garbage can lids and parking meters. Then she graduated to 20’ x 40’ electronic signs flashing from Las Vegas to Times Square. From impersonal electric ribbon signs and banal sayings, she constructs a form of emotional theater to combat public apathy toward most art.
CONVERSATIONS WITH A COYOTE
Much of the public’s you-call-that-art? skepticism has been in direct response to the extremism of some contemporary art. But for the generation that emerged in the late ’60s, art could be made out of absolutely any event, idea, or material. One artist telephoned instructions to museum workers, who put together a work of art the “artist” had not seen or touched. Joseph Beuys held a weeklong conversation with a coyote. Vito Acconci crushed live cockroaches on his belly, and Piero Manzoni canned his own excrement to display at a New York gallery. Kim Jones earned the name “Mudman” by roaming SoHo streets wearing nothing but a loin cloth and mud. Julian Schnabel drags a tarp behind his jeep to weather it, then whacks the canvas with a tablecloth soaked in point to create an image.
works artists like Robert Smithson (see p. 21) devised vast projects requiring bulldozers moving tons of earth. Wrap artist Christo (b. 1935) specializes in temporarily wrapping bridges and buildings — even one million square feet of Australian coast — in plastic. In 1983 he surrounded eleven islands in Florida’s Biscayne Bay with pink polypropylene tutus.
PERFORMANCE ART. A staged event involving the artist talking, singing, or dancing, Performance Art requires artists to use their bodies in front of an audience. Joseph Beuys walked around a Düsseldorf gallery performing “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” (1965). His face covered in gold leaf and honey, he explained various paintings to a dead rabbit cradled in his arms. In his 1972 “Seedbed” performance, Vito Acconci masturbated for six hours under a ramp at the Sonnabend gallery, broadcasting his moans and groans on loudspeakers.
INSTALLATIONS. Room-size exhibitions crammed with a conglomeration of disparate objects like words, videos, photos, and ordinary objects like beer cans comment on topical political issues like AIDS. Although the objects seem unrelated, the viewer is intended to enter the environment ignorant and emerge enlightened about some pressing social theme the artist has revealed.
Jonathan Borofsky turned the Paula Cooper Gallery into a studio by drawing on walls and inviting visitors to play ping-pong on a black-and-white painted table. A four-foot stack of paper scrawled with numbers from zero to 2,687,585 stood on the floor (Borofsky undertook to count to infinity). Hundreds of copies of an antilittering handbill littered the floor. (The artist’s mother started picking them up before the opening until someone stopped her, explaining that the idea was to have them underfoot.)
DANGER ZONE
California performance artist/sculptor Chris Burden, called “the Evel