Kunst aus Los Angeles der 60er bis 90er Jahre
€ 19.80
Kunst aus Los Angeles der 60er bis 90er Jahre
Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, Paul Mccarthy, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Raymond Pettibon, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Christopher Williams
Dec 2 – Feb 18, 2007
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White Breathing, 1976, steel plate, 14 rhombohedrons, each 15,2 × 15,2 × 15,2 cm
White Breathing, drawing # 2, 1978, pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 102 × 76 cm
White Breathing, drawing # 3, 1978, pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 102 × 76 cm
White Breathing, drawing # 1, 1976, pencil and coloured pencil, photographs on paper, 82 × 72 cm, Collection Herbert, Gent
The advance of globalization and changing economic conditions make it inevitable that there will never again be an all-powerful cultural centre like Paris or New York. In fact it is clear that there have to be several centers, and within this circuit Los Angeles plays an outstanding role. Even though it has been possible to observe this development since the middle of the last century, only single positions from Los Angeles have attained international recognition until now.
Many of the most influential and hotly discussed young New York artists began to make trips to Los Angeles with some regularity in the first half of the Sixties. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly have since exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles. The Pop Art painters found an open environment in the city that was less hide-bound by tradition than New York. A further element, albeit of short duration, was added when the new but already influential art magazine Artforum moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles from 1964 to 1966. There were at least a dozen innovative galleries and two museums (Pasadena Art Museum and County Museum) which were exhibiting modern and contemporary art in Los Angeles in 1966. One of the most important projects undertaken in this period was the transformation of the Choouinard Art Institute into the California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts), the school of art which today is still the most important institute for the training of artists in the city.
At the end of the Sixties positions in the fields of Performance Art, Video Art, Conceptual Art, and Environmental Art crystallized in Los Angeles. Bruce Nauman has continued to this day to defy strict categorization. He uses neon strip-lights in his work, employing a conceptual approach to test the reliability of perception in a way that connects him with artists like Allen Ruppersberg and John Baldessari. Ruppersberg found that the appropriate context for his work lay outside galleries and museums. For his 1969 Location Piece he installed various props in an ordinary office room and not, as expected, in the Eugenia Butler Gallery, which was kept open but left empty. Al’s Cafe and Al’s Hotel too were shown outside the framework of the galleries. These were works where enjoyable social get-togethers with friends and other interested parties were part of the creative process, which exemplifies the sort of informal conceptual art which is typical of the West Coast. This apparently casual artistic approach also appeared early in John Baldessari’s photo-text-pictures, which were distinguished by their dry wit and their inherent provocation of traditional notions of art. The influence of Conceptual Art can be seen in Los Angeles in an immense variety of conceptual work of all sorts – from the mysterious works of Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams to the crude obsessions of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Two other artists who emerged in the first half of the Seventies represented positions, which one might describe as the opposite pole from the De-Materializationist spectrum. Chris Burden, whose menacing and apparently masochistic performances earned him the reputation of the enfant terrible of the L.A. art scene, offered the public dedicated explorations of the human body as an interface in the close interchange between art and life, the ego and the other, pain and pleasure. Michael Asher’s explorations of the mechanisms that operate within social systems and the effects associated with them occupy an analogous position.
The exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig will concentrate on artistic positions from the Sixties to the Nineties and on works which explore conceptual approaches (Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, William Leavitt, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Christopher Williams) as well as on Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon’s more recent Pop-Art-based assemblages which expose everyday myths, prejudices, and tenets of belief as lies that serve to perpetuate social oppression.
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