08 Art and Music in the 1970s: Part Two

Site-Specific Art, Earthworks, and Performance Art

In this chapter, we continue our discussion of art and music in the 1970s. The last chapter explained Minimal Art and Conceptual Art, which broke away from subject matter you would recognize in the surroundings you see. The next three genres are Site Specific Works, which are any forms created for specific sites, and Earthworks, which use the earth (soil, rocks, etc.) or the altered landscape as media, rather than manufactured art materials. We will also discuss Performance Art, which expresses a narrative through bodily movements and behaviors, using the body as want performance artists might consider the most authentic kind of expression. The summaries will lead you to biographies and more information about the artists for you to study.

Site-Specific Art and Earthworks

Site-Specific Art is art that has been designed and built for a specific place. Such art had a long history before the twentieth century, usually in relation to architecture or as architecture itself. Certainly, most large buildings are designed for specific places and works commissioned on or in those buildings are also site specific. A good example of a historical site-specific work of art is the Sistine Chapel ceiling, located in the Vatican in Rome and painted by Michelangelo during the 16th century.

Most, but not all Earthworks are site-specific. These works of art use the earth as the medium and either bring elements of the earth inside or use outside elements as the medium for works that are site-specific.

Earthworks also have a long history before the twentieth century. Ancient people in various parts of the world built mounds from earth and in doing so inscribed designs on the earth. It is assumed by many that they had some ancestral significance to the those who worked on them.

In the 1960s and early 1970s a number of artists turned their attention to making site-specific paintings, drawings and sculptures and many of them became interested in the environment, the sometimes powerful and sometimes subtle forces of nature, and the earth as a medium for their artistic expression.

Working inside, Sol LeWitt, began to create large wall drawings for specific places. Daniel Buren, working both inside and out of doors, began to paint stripes on specific pieces of architecture. In the late 1960's, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer began to move elements of the earth indoors and in an even more radical move, began moving their art out of museums and galleries altogether and into the landscape, using the earth itself as a medium for extremely large works of sculpture.

Both site-specific artists and artists building earthworks were influenced by the turbulent political situation in the 1960s and both groups of artists attempted to get beyond the art establishment as represented by galleries and museums and the business aspects of the art world. In many respects, their motives in getting out of the traditional art system with art as a commodity were similar to those of the artists involved in Performance art (as discussed below). Both groups intended to produce art that was difficult or impossible to collect. Earthworks and site-specific sculptures were often so large that they could not be contained in any museum.

Michael Heizer's "Nine Nevada Depressions" are placed intermittently over a span of 520 miles. Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" is a 1,500-foot-long, fifteen-foot-wide spiral sculpture made from almost 7,000 tons of rock that projects into Utah's Great Salt Lake, not too far from Salt Lake City. Christo's "Running Fence" was 24 miles long, eighteen feet high and was in place for only two weeks. Obviously, all of these works, as well as many others, defied the conventional notion of collecting, purchasing and possessing.

Many of these works are intended to help us to better see and understand our environment and our impact upon it. Some demonstrate the rather extreme differences between nature and human endeavor, often revealing our desire to understand, control, and conquer natural processes. Since they are aesthetically motivated and show great care for the environment, they present a dramatic contrast to the willful destruction of the environment that has been part of human progress.

Continue to biographies of Site Specific Artists on this Biographies menu: 1970s Biorgraphy menu.

Performance Art

Throughout the twentieth century artists have used their body as an artistic medium, and this practice became a dominant force in the creative expression in the 1960s and 1970s with Performance art. Performance Art is a general term that applies to an extremely broad range of categories such as film/video, dance, music, and spoken word, elements of which are often combined within a single piece. Other terms used to define performance art are body art, action art, live art, or temporal art, because the artist is physically expressing concepts and ideas with their body, the events take place in "real time" and for this reason only exist temporarily.

The roots of performance can be found in theater, dance, literature, ancient spiritual and religious rituals, and cross-cultural traditions of body adornment and manipulation. However, contemporary performance art finds its most specific origins in the work of avant-garde artists (Marcel Duchamp) and movements of the twentieth century such as Dada, Fluxus, and Happenings of the late 1950s (Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine).

Performance art is intentionally confrontational, spontaneous, improvisational, and usually requires the presence of an audience who often becomes part of the work. Similar to Conceptual art, Performance art is not concerned with the art object of finished product but rather the creative process and issues raised as a result of witnessing the event.

Additionally, many performance works were documented through video, film and photography. However, like some aspects of conceptual art, these byproducts are usually nothing more than evidence of the event having taken place. We can observe photographs of Vito Acconci pulling the hairs from his navel, or we can buy a can of chocolate frosting that Karen Finley used to smear over her body, and we can discuss the reasons why an audience licked jelly off a Volkswagen, but we can never physically view these works, since we were not there.

This becomes complicated by the fact that artifacts from performances are often collected and valued as works of art. Whether they are works of art or souvenirs is a matter of considerable debate within the art world and the issue resists an easy solution. In some cases, let's say when a performance takes place in private and there is no audience, the artist intends the documentation to become the work of art, and as such, the documentation should be considered art.

Performance art of the 1970s was also influenced by the simplicity of Minimal Art. Often performance works involved few props or objects beyond the artists' own body and were written, directed and performed by one person. The fact that many performances were unrehearsed accounted for their impulsive and unrefined quality. Additionally, performance works were raw and often disturbing, if not unnerving; incorporating social criticism, protest and shocking displays of violence and sexuality.

Nudity was a common element of 1970s performance works as both men and women shed their clothes to communicate ideas pertaining to sex, gender roles and most notably feminism. Like fighting fire with fire, performance works functioned as an affront to accepted values in art and society although audiences and critics were often offended (perhaps deliberately so) by this more confrontational and controversial aspect of performance works.

The radically innovative, experimental and often controversial methods by which performance artists expressed ideas is still viewed with a degree of skepticism, however, it has revolutionized traditional concepts of what art can and should be and continues to influence a broad scope of media and artistic disciplines.

The performance artists we will cover in this course are Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Hannah Wilke. Other important performance artists include Eleanor Antin, Dennis Oppenheim, Karen Findley, Otto Muehl, Herman Nitsch, Rebecca Horn, Gilbert and George, and Carolee Schneemann.

Continue to biographies of Performance Artists on the 1970s Biography menu.