A Quick and Dirty Guide to Art, Music, and Culture

Clayton Funk

,

The Ohio State University

Columbus, OH

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Art, Music, and Culture by The Ohio State University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Contents

- 1. Introduction: Where We Begin

- 2. Abstract Painting in the 1950s

- 3. Rock and Roll and Youth Culture

- 4. Pop Art and New Kinds of Rock

- 5. New Art and Music for New Consciousness

- 6. Television and Utopia and the 1970s

- 7. Art And Music in the 1970s, Part One

- 8. Art and Music in the 1970s: Part Two

- 9. Neo-Expressionism, Punk, and Hip Hop Emerge

- 10. MTV and Music in the 1980s

- 11. Art and Music in the 1980s

- 12. At the Millennium: Art and Music in the 1990s

- 13. Who Makes Art in Century 21?

1

1. Introduction: Where We Begin

Introduction

Clayton Funk

Begin Here

Creativity: Privilege or Human Right?

Wikimedia Commons

To create means to produce an action or an artifact, but how does this creation occur? A student of religion might refer to “divine creation” as making something from nothing. But when humans create something, we usually consider the term scientifically, changing the state of a material or an idea, or making something from something. The artifact is the sum and substance of what you sensed and the decisions made during the process of making it. Depending on any limitations and/or controversy in this process, you may feel free to do what you want or you could be concerned about what others will think of it. When each maker finishes their processes and reveals their creations, they may place them in a public setting where they are open to critique and things can get competitive or even political. So even though one who makes an artifact or a song may feel they have the right to create whatever they want, they still have to answer to their critics. We can boil these dynamics down to three considerations: which forms are most important, who decides this, and who decides who gets access?

1) What Visual and Musical Forms are Most Important?

Most of us tend to associate visual and musical forms with varying degrees of power and social status. Walk in to most any art museum or concert hall and you might think you had entered a temple. Many museums were built in the U.S. during what Harpers Magazine called “the Museum Boom,” in the 1880s. They were designed specifically to house art forms that were considered works of genius. Most refined Anglo-Americans believed that studying these fine art forms would inspire what they considered “good character,” but mainly for that privileged, elite class of people. Such visual forms as painting and sculpture were regarded as “high art” and the same social privileges were associated with classical forms of European music. In fact many scholars and artists considered these visual and musical forms to be elite because they derived from their ancient heritage. They were sanctioned by European aristocracy and the predominant Christian denominations, which were regarded as the bedrocks of ordered European civilization at that time. In contrast, these Europeans disregarded the visual and musical forms produced by the indigenous groups, already in North America before the Europeans arrived, as products of cultures they termed “savage.”

This compartmentalizing of art and music by social class and cultural differences may not sound relevant for our time, but remnants of these prejudices are still embedded in American cultural history. The significance of the visual and musical forms of one genre or another depends on which cultural group they come from. Some still consider the visual and musical forms of American Indians or African Americans as different, or even less than the works done according to European “classical” traditions. Even in the 1950s, traditional White parents tended to regard jazz and blues music created by African Americans as improper for their daughters and sons to hear. the creators of elite cultural hierarchies positioned Classical European forms in museums and concert halls as higher and better forms.

2) Who Decides Which of these Forms are Important?

Robbie Conal installs political posters (image courtesy of G. James Daichendt)

The hierarchies of visual and musical forms are usually backed by the professional expertise of scholars and critics, whose opinions are often regarded with merit because of their advanced knowledge. Ours is a culture of professionalism where experts have an elite body of knowledge they draw upon in service to their clienteles. Teachers, journalists, critics, lawyers, and doctors have had rigorous training and we tend to trust their opinions, or even weigh and compare the opinions of more than one expert. In the art and music world, these professionals have acted as gatekeepers for artists and musicians who have also had advanced professional education. A review by a well-regarded critic gives an artist or musician an advantage over those who go unnoticed. We will study how a Disc Jockey’s (DJ’s) endorsement of recording on radio, in the 1950s, could boost sales into the millions. So for many individuals, what they regard as important art and music tends to depend on what the professionals tell us is high quality.

All this political activity in the distribution of art and music was very common in the twentieth century and still is now; but today’s professional gatekeepers have new competition, thanks to the Internet. Everything from consumer reviews to star ratings provide additional critique from consumers. Even more so, the relatively new process of self-publishing has provided artists and musicians ways of marketing their own work while sidestepping gatekeepers in the middle. In fact anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can now market visual and musical forms. Consequently, the definition of what is regarded as “good or bad” art and music and whose opinion matters, has changed with advances in digital publication and communication.

3) Who decides Who Has Access to These Forms?

Finally, even though the hierarchies ranging from critically acclaimed art and music to the self-publishing of one’s own work have had influence, who finds out about these resources and can benefit from them can still be limited. One hundred years ago, audiences at art museums and concert halls were usually White, gentrified middle and upper class individuals with the money to pay for it. These days, limited access to the commercialized Internet can also stand in the way of someone’s access to online visual and musical forms and learning about them. It is true that public libraries and coffee shops often provide free wifi (even computers in some places), but the power of personal access to the Internet still depends mostly on one’s ability to afford it.

In this course we will study not only art and music to better understand these forms. We will also study where those forms came from and the cultural and economic impact they had on the public. We will also learn about how the artists and musicians dealt with or got around gatekeepers, along with who could get access to these forms of art and music.

More Reading

With the framework, above, in mind, it is time to jump to other discussions that address art and music more specifically. follow this link to a menu of readings in our web book,  Artist and Musician Biographies: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1945.php

Or just follow this list of links:

- Introduction

- Movement and Form

- SpaceTime

- Electric Guitars

- Hammond B-3 Organ

- The Savoy Ballroom

- Marcel Duchamp

- John Cage

2. Abstract Painting in the 1950s

Clayton Funk

Action Painting

Jackson Pollock at the MoMA, by joansorolla Creative Commons site

Abstract Expressionism is a form of art (mainly painting) that developed after one of the most difficult periods in human history. This period began during the great depression in the 1930’s and ended with the end of World War II in 1945. When the war ended, Germany, Italy and Japan had been defeated and much of Europe and Japan were in ruins. The human loss in the Nazi concentration camps had been exposed in all of its horror and the United States had dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, unleashing destructive power of an unprecedented nature. All of this, of course brought about a worldwide examination of basic human values and ethics and a period of dramatic change in art.

Although both the Great Depression and World War II were great disasters, these events were important in forcing a number of the European avant-garde artists to flee Europe for the safety of the Americas, where they also influenced many younger artists in the United States. It is difficult to know exactly how much this migration affected American art, but part of its impact was that for the first time, American artists became internationally recognized for their new vision and a new artistic vocabulary, all of which soon became known as Abstract Expressionism.

Clement Greenberg was an important critic in the twentieth century, who was very influential in the promotion of Abstract Expressionism. Watch this video to learn about this perspective on art. See this video at: https://youtu.be/3zozMksqnYk

These artists, like others earlier in the century, began to express their feelings and thoughts in abstract form. However, the difference here was that they expressed these abstract ideas and feelings with an energy that had never been seen before as they tried to draw upon their deepest essence, or a pure expression,  from which generated excitement and even torment into a concrete form. They also took artistic license to an extreme that had never been seen before; and in doing so, they redefined what could be considered art and artistic process.

Because this art movement was centered in New York, it is often referred to as the “New York School.” But Abstract Expressionism is often called “Action Painting” because the movement of painting, they felt, drew from innate parts of the artist’s mind. These artists often applied paint rapidly, painting on large canvases, sometimes applying paint with large brushes, sometimes dripping the paint onto the canvas or even throwing it onto the canvas. What appears to be painting done by accident, chance and random activity, was actually the result of planned and highly controlled attempts to tap what they considered was most essential and true in the subconscious. In this way, they often considered the process of making the painting as important as the painting itself.

Like most other modern movements, which have been defined by critics and historians rather than artists, Abstract Expressionism does not describe only one particular style, but rather signifies an attitude toward making art. Confusing as it may seem, not all the work classified as Abstract Expressionism was abstract, nor was it all expressive, at least on a grand scale. This art stood in sharp contrast to the social realism and regionalism that characterized American art of earlier years, and the Abstract Expressionist artists valued, more than anything, their individuality and spontaneous improvisation of their artistic methods. This attitude was also characterized by a spirit of revolt and an intense belief in freedom of expression.

Now we turn to reading biographies of major Abstract Expressionists. Read the artists under Abstract Expressionism on the web book menu at http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1950s.php

Or follow this list:

- Elaine de Kooning

- Willem de Kooning

- Grace Hartigan

- Lee Krasner

- Jackson Pollock

Others include Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline,  Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and Sam Francis.

Post-painterly Abstraction

Post-painterly Abstraction is a movement given its name by the prominent American art critic, Clement Greenberg (as in the video above), in 1964, to distinguish a certain type of abstract painting of the 1960’s and after from the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The paintings of the abstract expressionists often involved a very strong personal and emotional approach to painting, expressed through a “painterly” quality involving spontaneous, very visible, and often vigorous brushwork.

Helen Frankenthaler, the most prominent of this second generation Abstract Expressionists, had begun to eliminate this “painterly” approach through the use of thin stains of paint on ungessoed (raw) canvas in the 1950’s.

The artists classified as Post-painterly Abstractionists, influenced by Frankenthaler’s groundbreaking work, approached painting with a more impersonal, austere, and intellectual aesthetic. Their paintings dealt with the formal elements of abstract painting: pure or often unmodulated areas of color; a flat, two-dimensional space within the painting; monumental scale; and in the work of Stella and occasionally Noland, the rejection of the traditional rectangle as the shape of the canvas itself.

They also rejected the painterly and spontaneous style of the Abstract Expressionists and instead they often stained raw canvas with thin wet paint to avoid any trace of brushstrokes. Among the styles included in the term post-painterly abstraction are “minimal painting” and “color-field painting.”

Important painters associated post-painterly abstraction include Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella.

Now we turn to reading biographies of major painters. Read the artists under Post-painterly Abstraction on the web book menu at http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1950s.php

Or just follow this list:

- Helen Frankenthaler

- Yves Klein

- Morris Louis

- Kenneth Noland

- Mark Rothko

- Frank Stella

3. Rock and Roll and Youth Culture

Clayton Funk

Rock and Roll Music

Creative Commons Image

It is hard to believe, but there was once a time when the term rock music was not heard. Most historians trace the beginning rock back to the year 1954, when a new type of music, then called Rock and Roll, appeared and revolutionized musical tastes, at least among young people, and pretty much changed the world.

This new music, of course did not develop in a vacuum and it really wasn’t new. It resulted from the convergence of two earlier musical styles, Rhythm and Blues and Country. The sound of Rock and Roll was also unique because of technological developments in electric instruments and amplification that created a new market for music.

The Blues

Ray Charles was an important bridge between the Blues and Rock and Roll. Listen to this video and listen for the edge of the blues played against the fast excitement of Rock and Roll. See this video at: https://youtu.be/HAjeSS3kktA

Rhythm and Blues developed from the music called the Blues, which grew out of African American religious music and work songs sung by African-Americans who lived mostly in the South. Many of these people had been removed to the United States as slaves, and before the Civil War they labored in difficult situations on the Southern plantations. “Call and response” was often used as a means of communication among the workers in the fields. The workers fooled the plantation owners into thinking that their music was the “‘happy’ music of hard working slaves.”

One of the individuals who researched the Blues was John Lomax, a scholar from the University of Texas. In the early 20th century, ethnographers (scholars who observe the social and cultural patterns of people) made their way into the countryside. Lomax was a song hunter interested in documenting cowboy songs. Later he turned to the songs of African Americans. He traveled the Southern United States with a large recording machine that produced aluminum phonograph discs, which would survive the heat of the summer. The machine and its two large batteries weighed 300 pounds. He had to remove the back seat of his car to fit the whole apparatus in the trunk.

Lomax’s recording machine was so large he had to remove the backseat of his car to put it in the trunk. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center

On a trip to Angola Prison in 1933, Lomax met an individual named Ledbelly (also spelled Lead Belly) who accompanied his songs on a twelve-string guitar. Keep in mind that in those days, a Black man could be jailed for merely looking at a White woman, so its safe to say that many African Americans did not deserve to be in prison. Once Lomax had recorded several of Ledbelly’s songs, he sent them to the governor of Louisiana who granted the muscian clemency. Lomax took Ledbelly on tour to promote the blues.

Although Lomax’s work advanced the genre of the blues significantly, another matter to consider is that when Lomax submitted the printed transcriptions of the songs he recorded to Library of Congress, and because that library is the clearinghouse for all US copyrights, those songs were copyrighted under John Lomax’s name. As owner of that intellectual property he was entitled any royalties for those songs. Very few of the musicians he recorded received a share of those proceeds.

Blues and Country Make Rock and Roll

Around the time of World War I the majority of African Americans lived in the Southeastern U.S. But the onset of war and immigration restrictions imposed at that time cut off the supply of European immigrant labor for industrialists of the Midwest and the Northeast. As a result African-Americans made a mass migration to urban centers in the North to take jobs in those industries. This exodus of African Americans from the South, became known in history as the Great Migration. The music that came with these new migrants became the foundation for a range of Blues styles, which became known as Northern or Urban Blues.

The American South was home to an infusion of many musical influences. Mostly White Communities  sprung up in the South and brought with them the folk songs of the English, Scots, and Irish. Instruments like banjo’s. fiddles, harmonicas and others to numerous to list were common. Eventually in the 1920s the rapid expansion of radio broadcasting provided a way to hear performances of country music wherever there was a radio. One of the most important programs in the 1920s was the Grand Ole Opry. This music tended to be an infusion of country and gospel genres by such groups as the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers. Like the great Migration of the 1920s, the Great Depression also caused many White and Black families to migrate to urban centers, from the countryside.

As is frequently the case, visual and musical forms tend to begin in neighborhood studios and galleries, and bars and clubs where local musicians play. These venues became part of the cultural identity for their local audiences. In this way, strains of the Blues tended to vary from city to city, for example, Northern Blues developed a unique feel compared to Delta Blues of the South. Such local musical forms took on a new life, however, once they became commercialized and widely distributed. Community genres of the Blues took a backseat to commercial producers that held a big influence over public ideas what “good Blues” should sound like, according Blues on the radio and on records.

One of the earliest musical innovations that led to Rock and Roll was a combination of Country Blues with Urban Blues. The Country Blues player Chuck Berry joined the Sir John’s Trio, combining these two forms into a new genre called Rockabilly. In 1955, Chuck Berry met the Chicago Blues giant, Muddy Waters, who introduced Berry to Leonard Chess of Chess Records, which soon launched Berry’s career as one of the first musicians marketed as Rock and Roll. It is obvious that genres of Blues or R&B and Rock and Roll overlapped, and which musician sang  which genre depended on how it was marketed.

These musical influences were a progression of Rhythm and Blues (R&B) that developed from the Blues, and then Rock and Roll, which derived from R&B. Little Richard, one of the well-known innovators in 1950’s rock music, has often said that “Rhythm and Blues had a baby and somebody named it rock and roll.” He, of course is absolutely right, and a number of important R&B artists were part of the beginning of Rock and Roll. Among them were Muddy Waters, Willie Mae Thornton, Joe Turner and Ray Charles. As influential as these African American musicians were, they were still segregated into separate hotels, restaurants, and many times received no royalties for their music. If you want to know more about this aspect of the music world caught between glamour and racism, check out the film Cadillac Records.

Music and Electricity

Something as basic as electricity led to big changes when it was incorporated into the music world. First, music became portable. While these new musical forms were developed, new recording technology also emerged. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, phonograph records were large and heavy and easily damaged. These records played at 78 rpm’s (78 revolutions per minute) on rather awkward phonographs that were usually part of a large piece of furniture (console),  often located in the living room. In many homes, the entire family would sit around the living room listening to bands like Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, and soloists like Frank Sinatra, Patti Paige, Doris Day, and Eddie Fisher. Record companies marketed such music to adults and radio stations played music that would appeal to the entire family; but all that would change.

In the 1950’s, recording technology changed with the development  the 33 rpm and 45 rpm records. The advantage of the new technology was that more music could be put on a record, and it was of higher technical quality. Thus, the 33 became a standard because more music could be put on a 33 than several 78’s and it sounded much better. The 45s, or ‘singles’ were much smaller in size and contained one song on each side. Not only were 45s much cheaper to buy than the old 78s and the larger 33s, but they could be played on a small record player that teenagers could purchase inexpensively and keep in his or her room.

This meant that there were now two markets for music, one of adults who bought mostly 33 rpm records and continued to play them on console phonographs in the living room, and another market of young people, who bought mostly 45s and played them on small “phonos.”

Music in Your Pocket

While phonograph records were improving, the “transistor radio” was invented and popularized. This meant that radios became much smaller and much less expensive, and like the small phonographs, these radios soon found their way to young people’s rooms. Car radios were also becoming more popular, and more people were listening to the radio while driving. For a long time, the radio was an expensive option in a car. It is hard to imagine a car without a radio today,  but in the 1950’s radios were only beginning to become standard equipment in cars.

Radio stations began to program their music to fit the demographics of a new, mostly white, youth-oriented audience. The audience  was divided into segments with different interests and people listened to music in a number of places, including their cars. This all meant that some radio stations played music for adults and other stations played music for teens.

Not surprisingly, young people were tired of the music their parents listened to and they started to look for something new. The White teens of the major metropolitan areas such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles began to turn to the stations that played music by African American musicians they had never heard before. It turned out that the music being played on the so-called “Black” radio stations in those cities was Rhythm and Blues (R&B). This music, was of course, familiar to the Black population in America, but many White parents hadn’t considered that their teens might or should like it. Since the White audience was so much larger than the Black audience, radio stations and record companies engineered their marketing as if a major shift in listening patterns was about to occur. In order to keep the White audience, as well as to appeal to the Black audience, they needed to broadcast and promote R&B, or something like R&B.

So-called “White” radio stations began playing Big Joe Turner’s song “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” while the “White” record companies started looking for white musicians that played something resembling R&B (in the foolish belief, soon to be proved wrong, that white kids wouldn’t buy records by Black performers). Very soon, new White musicians joined the the music scene, like Bill Haley and His Comets (originally a country band called the Saddlemen) and soloists like Elvis Presley, who also brought a strong country background to the music, and this combination of R&B and Country was marketed as Rock and Roll.

These influences combined in a simple, Blues-based song structure that was fast, sexy, catchy and could be danced to easily and with excitement. These qualities, along with the fact that it horrified mostly white adults in general and parents in particular, that teenagers were so taken with the music made popular by African Americans. Either way, what happened in the Jazz age of the 1920s happened 30  years later on larger scale, when the American White youth market, for the first time, had their own music and youth culture.

Youth Culture

Ironically, record producers were banking on the idea that mostly White parents would be suspicious of Rock and Roll music, because it derived from the Blues, sung by Black people. Young people on the lookout for their own style of music began to ignored this racist perspective became the largest recording market since the development of the phonograph, with record copies selling by the millions, instead of thousands. Young people with money to spend in a prosperous economy bought phonographs and personal radios; and the generation gap between parents and young people became much more common.

It was this way in other mass media, too. The differences between generations that we just discussed created what would be known through the 20th century as “the generation gap” propelled by the media. The Mass media, especially radio, television, and film created a multi layered culture, with the press reporting in one voice the uneasiness of a shift between Rock and Roll teens and their parents, while another voice aired television programs that focused on “good” teen life. Ricky Nelson was a teen heartthrob who started in the TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. His character “Ricky” was a polite well-mannered teen who also had a rock and roll band that played for school dances.

So the drama played out for parents and their teens, As if to model how young people who could have proper manners and still listen to Rock-and-Roll. But turn the channel and one could also find a variety show with Elvis Presley notoriously swinging his hips, which excited teens and offended the parents. Indeed, parental “finger-wagging” was often not enough to keep teens from watching audiences of young women screaming as Elvis gyrated across the stage.

In this way, the mass media was able to deliver multiple cultural narratives in a stormy experience wherein parents and teens stood on opposing sides of the ever widening generation gap.

More Reading and Listening

Keep in mind this media-propelled gap between generations as you read through through through the biographies of musicians. You can find them on the Biographies menu:

Or just follow this list

- LaVerne Baker

- Chuck Berry

- The Bobbettes

- Ruth Brown

- Bill Haley and His Comets

- Buddy Holly

- Jerry Lee Lewis

- Little Richard

- Elvis Presley

- Dodie Stevens

- Willie Mae Thornton

- Joe Turner

Next Review what you know about two important musical instruments at the time: The Hammond Organ and the Electric Guitar.

- Electric Guitars

- Hammond B-3 Organ

4. Pop Art and New Kinds of Rock

Clayton Funk

“Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything.” — Andy Warhol

Throughout the 20th Century, once-radical art movements usually shift to the mainstream culture. New generations of artists assimilate the ideas from the last movement, then rebel and push out the boundaries. This happened with the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. In America the “originators of Pop Art” include Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Both were influenced by John Cage, who, of course, was heavily influenced by Marcel Duchamp. In Europe, a similar movement developed, also in response to Abstract Expressionism, which was called “Nouveau Réalisme.” These artists were also influenced by the tradition begun by Duchamp.

Here is a link to this video: Alan Cumming on “How Pop Art Found It’s Pop”.

Social and cultural forces were also important in the development of Pop Art. The development of Rock and Roll in the mid-fifties and the unprecedented youth culture had separated young people from the adult generation. In a period of affluence and sexual liberation many young people sought emancipation from earlier values and a cult of musical and movie stars developed, including Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe. This resulting emphasis on the media brought about changes in the way people looked at images, objects and art, and as you would expect, artists led the way in bringing together the emerging pop culture in the mass media and art in galleries and museums. Pop art expanded into a major movement running counterpoint to Abstract Art, as artists introduced many new Pop Art forms across the art world.

By the 1960’s, the subject matter and artistic forms of Pop Art, as well as the rock music of the time, reflected the cultural characteristics of that turbulent time in a manner that brought the arts and everyday life together, as Duchamp‘s work had predicted. Although Pop Art is often associated with the 1960’s, it has continued as an important new forms of contemporary art to this day as Neo-Pop and Pop Surealism and other genres. Their influence has been enormous, as we will see later in the course when we examine a younger generation of artists with similar interests who emerged in the 1980s.

Pop Art in America developed from the new self-confidence that American art had demonstrated in the 1950s as it liberated itself from European domination with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. Major American Pop artists include: Richard Artschwager, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Edward Kienholz, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol Escobar, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, George Segal, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann

More recent research has uncovered more women artists who considered their work pop art or were heavily influenced by popular culture: Corita Kent. Marjorie Strider, Pauline Boty, Evelyne Axel, Chryssa Vardea, Dorothee Slelz. Yayoi Kunama, Martha Rosler and Elaine Stirtevant.

In Britain, artists also realized that English culture was increasingly influenced by mass media as well as social change and that this process was also leading to the increased Americanization of Europe. Important British Pop artists include: Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, and Eduardo Paolozzi.

The European strains of Pop Art known as “Nouveau Réalisme,” which means New Realism, was stylistically more diverse than American or British Pop Art, perhaps because it developed in a number of countries on the Continent with diverse national viewpoints. What brings these diverse attitudes together in “Nouveau Réalisme” and makes it similar to British and American Pop Art is the artistic interest in popular media and culture, found objects, and advertising. Important members of the “Nouveau Réalisme” movement include: Arman and Yves Klein (France), Enrico Baj and Piero Manzoni (Italy), Öyvind Fahlström (Sweden), and Richard Lindner and Gerhard Richter (Germany).

Music

Surf van: embark on the surf trip of a lifetime | Photo: Caroline Gutman/Creative Commons

Surf Rock

Surf Rock was a very popular form of Genre in the 1960s that was positioned to compete with softer genres of rock and roll and new British groups. Popular movies of Hollywood filled audience members’ imaginations with references to sunny California Beaches, surfing, hot rods, and summer paradise, as if to portray the lie off stage lives of singers like Elvis Presley and teen heartthrob actors, like Frankie and Annette Funicello. Surf Rock was characterized by reverberating guitar work, and massive instrumentals that sometimes sounded like the ocean. In terms of the range of sounds that it explored, it was revolutionary music for its time. Surf groups included the Beach Boys, the Chantays, the Surfaris, Jan & Dean, and Ronny & the Daytonas.

The British Invasion

The British Invasion was also part of the British-and-American cultural exchange that began in the 1950s, when Radio Broadcasts by DJs like Wolfman Jack were syndicated to European Radio Stations. By the 1960s the British television and film also became popular in the United States.

In music we see influence derived from youth subcultures, mainly from groups like the Rockers, and the Mods. From these groups emerged rock bands that migrated to the United States in the mid-1960s The English Rock bands invaded the American market after the breakthrough success of the Beatles. They included the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits, the Who and the Zombies.

Later in the 1960s and into the 1970s, the the British Invasion brought influences from the British Mass Media to American television and film, which we shall discuss in detail in Reading Six. In television, such situation comedies (sitcoms) as All in the Family were derived from British Programming. Monty Python was also an important British influence. His television show Monty Python and his Flying Circus challenged conventions of what Americans thought was funny on TV by introducing stream-of-consciousness narratives in which unrelated characters and props appeared to be part of what the characters considered normal. Python also produced films that are cult classics, today. They include The Meaning of Life, The Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

In recent programming such television shows as The Office were also adapted from British television. To this day, British and American cultures continue their exchange and have created a global phenomenon. Bear these issues in mind as you read this biographies:

With these perspectives in mind, study the biographies under Pop Art and 1960s Rock at the Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1960s.php

Or just follow these lists:

- Evelyne Axel

- Pauline Boty

- Marisol Escobar

- Corita Kent

- Robert Indiana

- Jasper Johns

- Edward Kienholz

- Yayoi Kunama

- Roy Lichtenstein

- Piero Manzoni

- Martha Rosler

- Claes Oldenburg

- Robert Rauschenberg

- George Segal

- Dorothee Slelz

- Elaine Stirtevant

- Marjorie Strider

- Andy Warhol

- Chryssa Vardea

Music

- Beach Boys

- The Beatles

- The Rolling Stones

- the Who

5. New Art and Music for New Consciousness

Clayton Funk

Art and Music for Social Change

African Americans at a Lunch Counter reserved for White customers. African American Odyssey, Library of Congress

After World War II and into the 1960s, Americans were getting used to the idea of Blues and Rock and Roll, and by the 1960s, new changes shook things up and parent’s worries about Elvis became the least of their worries. We have discussed how racial issues played out in the undercurrents of American mass media, but overall the music that sold the most was produced mainly as a form of happy entertainment.

American culture took a major shift at this time with the expansion of college education.  Thanks to the G.I. Bill that made tuition part of veterans benefits, a college degree that was previously affordable for mostly wealthy families, soon became possible for the middle classes.   In the late 1940s and 1950s, returning veterans who had seen the world now had a chance for advanced study, at trade schools, colleges, and universities, creating a rapidly expanding professional class of young families.

The counter-cultural currents in college of the 1950s among groups like the Beat Poets influenced these students who believed that it was possible to expand consciousness through meditation, the arts, and even drugs for some.
You can learn more about the beat movement at these websites:

- Short videos about the Beat Writers on Bio

- Beat Writers on Wikipedia

- African American Beat Writers on Wikipedia

With a basic understanding of the beat poets in mind, we can turn to art that grew out of this counter culture in the mid- to late 1960s.

Pop Art with a Social Edge

Counter culture also emerged in the Pop Art movement. A group of artists turned from the whimsical Pop Art forms of artists like Johns and Oldenberg, to social narratives. Pop Artists, Edward Kienholz, Marisol Escobar, and George Segal still worked with themes from everyday life; but instead of creating a sculpture or painting, they created environments called “installations” that displayed a narrative to draw attention to parts of society that usually went unnoticed. The idea was to draw the viewer into a narrative by presenting them with a stage-like tableau of familiar objects and figures, which took down a imaginary boundary between the art work and the viewer. Look through these biographies to get a sense of who these artists were and what motivated their work:

- Marisol Escobar

- George Segal

- Edward Kienholz

Music and Mind Expansion

One of the outcomes of mind expansion came when young people began to speak up about what they saw as injustices, which were reflected in art and music. Psychedelic experiences were to open the mind past social conventions and politics that they felt led to violence. The umbrella term “Protest Music” is in itself is somewhat confusing because it includes several styles of music, but all are about protest or alternative consciousness. Protest Music quite simply is music that protests something. There were a lot of “somethings” to protest against in the 1960’s, including the treatment of Women (the Women’s Movement) and African-American people (the Civil Rights movement). Voices were also raised against the Vietnam War, the draft, the increasingly authoritarian government, and a number of issues on college campuses.

Folk Music

Folk music is based on mostly American and British music that was passed down through generations by oral tradition. It is a simple, acoustic music about common people and everyday events. It was not composed for dancing (as was Rock and Roll), but for contemplation. Earlier in the twentieth century, artists including Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger began to add new material, which was often political, to the genre, and by the early 1960’s, Bob Dylan started the modern era of folk. Of course Dylan is included here as well as Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, ArloGuthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joni Mitchell and Country Joe McDonald.

Music in the genre of Folk Rock starts with the simple, direct songwriting style of folk music and combines it with a prominent rock back beat. Folk-rock was first developed by Bob Dylan and played by such 1960’s groups as the Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby,Stills, Nash and Young, John Sebastian, The Young bloods, The Mamas and the Papas and the Turtles. The development of new consciousness led to their expansion beyond anyone’s expectation, as counter culture transpired into a revolution.

By the late 1960s controversy over the Vietnam War and the desire to break down social barriers of race and gender reached a new pitch. Some members of Beat communities broke away and formed more separate communal groups. The most prominent group known as “Hippies” left the beat community in the North Beach, San Francisco and migrated to the Haight Ashbury area in the same city.” It is in this new community that art and music would take on new forms called Psychedelic art and music as part of mind expansion.

Keep these ideas in mind as you follow these genres on this menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1960s.php.

Or follow this list:

- Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

- Bob Dylan

- Arlo Guthrie

- Simon and Garfunkel

Psychedelic Rock (or Acid Rock)

Following the lead of counter culture and cutting edge art of the 1950s, a new generation of counterculture searched for a new consciousness that could rise above social conventions that led to the dead end of war and violence. Dr. Timothy Leary was conducting experiments with psychotropic drugs at Harvard University until he was dismissed out of professional jealously. He carried his influence to the Haight Ashbury community, where LSD became regarded as a drug that could open consciousness. In this psychedelic community were rock bands that played concerts, to raise money for the community and as part of their community rituals of mediation. This genre was called Psychedelic/Acid Rock, emerging in the mid-1960s, as a number of American bands centered around San Francisco began to develop drug inspired free-form, sometimes improvisational song structures, often incorporating elements of world music and free-form jazz in their work, as well as experimenting by altering the sound of their instruments and voices. Among the psychedelic groups were the Grateful Dead, the Doors, Love, Jefferson Airplane, Vanilla Fudge, Moby Grape, and bands led by Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. After some time, the careful control of a drug experiment eventually went out of control and this experiment came to an end.

Keep these ideas in mind as you follow these genres on this menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1960s.php.

Or follow this list:

- The Grateful Dead

- Jimi Hendrix

- Jefferson Airplane

- Janis Joplin

Soul

The multi-layered genre of “Soul” music was not part of the psychedelic movement, but it did push boundaries of racial perceptions in the U.S. For the first time in the twentieth century, “Soul” was music made and produced by by African Americans. Until this time Blues and Rock and Roll singers often did not make a profit from their recordings, but all this changed with the social unrest of the 1960s. Some of Soul was about protest, some echoed tropes of the Blues with themes from life. Though Soul was performed mostly by African Americans, it was popular among many groups. Like the Savoy Ballroom and the world of Jazz in the first half of the century, Soul brought people of different races together on the same dance floors. Today’s Hip-Hop genres have also reached around the world and brought people together.

For the sake of discussion we will cover examples of Chicago (or Northern) Soul, Motown (Detroit’s brand of soul), and Memphis (or Southern) Soul. Examples of Northern Soul are sometimes similar Rock and Roll. One of the most important figures in this genre was James Brown, who was known as an early influence in funk genres. Brown was a dramatic performer known as much for his dance moves as he was his singing. Earlier influences of soul include Sam Cooke originally with the Soul Stirrers and Jackie Wilson.

The genre of Motown was major force in Soul music, though it also held the most contrast. Instead of the raw, ornery blues influence in much of Northern Soul, Motown had a spit-polished, commercial finish to it. Led by Berry Gordy and located in Detroit, Motown records developed a sound and style so distinct that the label was called a “Wall of Sound,” with orchestras backing many of the singers. The Motown sound is easily identifiable — a strong back beat supported with bouncy bass lines and soulful but very polished vocals. Motown established very high production values and craftsmanship, which gave much of its music a manufactured quality. Singers dressed elegantly and and followed understated choreography in ways that played well on television screens. Among the Motown groups were the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Marvelettes, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye.

Compared to Northern genres, Southern Soul was more like gospel and Southern Blues. One might characterize it as an honest, funky type of music. Its directness and attention to its R&B roots is direct contrast to the highly polished sound of Motown. Some important soul artists are Otis Redding, Percy Sledge. Aretha Franklin, who is widely regarded as “The Queen of Soul,” actually came from Detroit but she was not part of the Motown genre.

Reflection

So whether you call it protest, mind expansion, or any other term at that time, the wide popularity of social and protest themes in these music genres reflected a belief that people could change and that transformation was possible. By the 1970s all this added up to a utopian phenomena that pervaded popular culture.

Keep these ideas in mind as you follow these genres on this menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1960s.php.

Or follow this list:

- James Brown

- Aretha Franklin

- Marvin Gaye

- Otis Redding

- The Supremes

- The Temptations

6. Television and Utopia and the 1970s

Clayton Funk

The former Expo 67 American Pavilion, designed as a Geodesic Dome, became the Montreal Biosphère, an environmental museum on Saint Helen’s Island. Photo taken by Philipp Hienstorfer

On of the earliest references to an idealized world called a “Utopia” is Sir Thomas More’s imaginary island, “Utopia”  with perfect law and social order, authored in 1516. In Post World-War II American popular culture, apocalyptic stories wherein Utopia was re-established appeared in comics like the avengers, where superheros and genetics triumphed over evil that ordinary law enforcement could not stop.

The 1970s it seems that many thought that Utopia had been achieved. Even in religion the notion of mind expansion emerged in Christian denominations in the form of The Charismatic Movement. This new phenomenon was thought to open the individual mind beyond denominational traditions through spiritual inspiration. Although this movement arose in resistance to other kinds of mind expansion with drugs and meditation, its effect was still mind expansion beyond the orthodox conventions.

In the 1970s, the American middle-classes were doing well. The push to reach beyond social conventions in the 1960s seemed to have taken hold and there seemed to be emerging a new consciousness where civil rights for people of color and gender equality had gotten a strong beginning. Furthermore the United States pulled out the controversial  Vietnam War, and the draft was repealed. The United States enjoyed a robust and growing consumer economy, even with Wartime spending in Vietnam, there was more money to spend on items that were considered luxuries, including the Arts. Some artists and musicians began to turn from the consciousness-raising of protest to live as artists. Despite people’s struggles and that the change was slow, there appeared on TV an illusion gentrified and liberalized prosperity.

Buckminster Fuller

With the world wide open, new ideas were advanced in science and technology. Richard Buckminster Fuller was an important architect, systems theorist, author, designer and inventor in the 20th century. Though he is not widely known enough to be seen in a high school history book, Fuller did influence science and technology in profound ways.

Among Fuller’s many inventions are his Geodesic Dome and the Dymaxion Map. The Geodesic Dome emerged as Fuller experimented with designs for houses constructed with triangular planes that made a polyhedron, a structure that would hold the most volume with the least amount of building material.

When Fuller applied his triangular geometry our largest sphere, planet Earth in his Dymaxion Map, he  re-visualized not only the geometry of a sphere, but also the power structures based on an Earth with four hemispheres. Instead of a grid of logitude and lattitude in mostly four-sided shapes, he used a grid of triangles that showed the world as one continuous land mass, not land divided between four hemispheres. This new conception of the world was physical evidence that humans could think differently, but were tied to conventions based on geographic conventions.

Challenging as they were, Fuller’s theories were not widely accepted in a world already divided into domains of power. But Fuller’s work does reflect the search for a new consciousness, not just psychologically, but geographically and politically. See more about Fuller’s influence at the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Most evening television news rarely featured intellectuals like Fuller. But television had a huge influence in the way it illuminated the imaginations of viewers with a new set of social conventions. To see the beginnings of this trend we need to rewind our story to the early 20th century.ed

Walter Lippmann, Stereotypes and Mass Media

One of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, the journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann argued that one’s opinion was actually based on an images they visualized in their minds. Similarly, he argued that Public Opinion derived from a mental image that all can agree on. But this was not easy, because authorities imposed powerful images, which they persuade or compel individuals to accept instead of their own. In sum, Lippmann thought that people were so saturated with the ideas of others that they would never be able to make up their minds about anything. Indeed with the rising popularity of radio and film, and later television, viewers were saturated with plenty of images from outside themselves.

In the 1920s, the term stereotype had a different meaning than we hear in the press or popular culture, today, which tends to limit an individual’s freedom to think and act as themselves. Lippmann and others at this time, believed that the then-new media of radio and film held the future for education, wherein knowledge would be transmitted in efficient modules, called stereotypes.

In the 1970s,  those modules of content on television, radio and film shifted to new social currents of civil rights, the women’s movement, and other changes.  Viewers may have been worried about them, but they felt comforted seeing these issues addressed in, say, television programs, like All in the Family. It may not seem much like a program you would see in a place called “Utopia,” but All in the Family and other shows in the 1970s signaled that we had come to a point where social problems were addressed in the mass media, not covered up.

Watch this Episode of All in the Family and pay attention to the way we get to know the characters and their  quirks, which include their views on social problems.

(See More about All in the Family on Google: https://g.co/kgs/BHaKjB )

Here is a video episode of All in the Family: Cousin Maude’s visit. you can link to it at: https://youtu.be/pDPogNlHORE

7. Art And Music in the 1970s, Part One

Clayton Funk

In our discussion of Abstract Expressionism artists were trying to reduce art to its essence. In this chapter we will discuss other ways artists explored the reduction of visual form  that caused viewers to reflect on themselves. Minimalism in art and music was an effort to create a form with a minimum of material and process. That means that one of Donald Judd’s cube-shaped sculptures was reduced to the simple form of a cube, and nothing more. Minimal Music was similar in that an entire musical work could be composed from a very simple tune of, say, four notes. Like minimalism, Conceptual art was a shift of focus away from representational images and to an idea as the basis for a work. Instead of creating, say, an image of something we recognize, like a figure or a landscape, they focused on ideas. The summaries will lead you to biographies and more information about the artists for you to study.

Minimalism

Minimal Art

Post-Painterly Abstraction brought the reductive process possibilities of pure painting to a logical end. But all was not said and done. Artists in the 1960s and 1970s who explored reductive notions found a new way to embody their ideas in visual form. These artists explored the reductive tradition with highly experimental three-dimensional work. This new approach to art was eventually called Minimal Art. A diverse group of artists were at one point or another during their careers classified as minimalists. These artists included Robert Morris, Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, Tony Smith, Sol Lewitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Dorothea Rockburn, Fred Sandback, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse.

The name Minimal was applied to this style because the art seemed to have a minimal amount of art content. It certainly did not represent objects and people as Pop Art did nor did it seem to have any of the emotional or expressive characteristic of Abstract Expressionism. In fact, it was usually so simple that it seemed to lack complexities even under the surface. The minimal artists were more interested in pure shape, color, and texture of the object and how it related to the viewer in space.

The work was often placed on the floor, instead of a pedestal, to occupy the visitor’s space to ensure that their attention was captured. The Minimalists created work which drew in the viewer to participate and contemplate what its meaning or purpose was to themselves. They were interested in how a space could be transformed or altered by their art.

The artists went so far as to dismiss themselves from the art making process itself and sometimes the physical piece was made by technicians in factories who followed a set of instructions or diagrams with precision. Overall, the Minimalists were interested in continuity and order. They were interested in what comes next and what the final piece was as a whole. Their work did not refer to any other subject matter, because that would designate it as inferior to what it represented. This belief is the basis of why their work was often titled as “Untitled.” For these artists, the meaning of the art could no longer be found within the piece they made, and was defined instead by its surroundings. This was a cool, cerebral approach to art that often implied that the idea was more important than the object, a line of thinking that eventually led to Conceptual Art.

Continue to biographies of Minimal Artists on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1970s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Dan Flavin

- Tony Smith

- Donald Judd

- Daniel Buren

- Carl Andre

- Eva Hesse

- Richard Serra

Minimal Music

Minimal Music is still popular today, including Aurora, by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto Vrioon (https://youtu.be/dlq-Mw299IM). It sounds best on good speakers or with headphones:

Rewind back to the nineteenth century for a bit to Robert Schumann (1810-1856), who was one of the first composers to embrace the idea of an extremely simple musical composition. Schumannn’s piece that displays this element of minimal music is “Carnaval, Op. 9”, with the subtitle of “Scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes” (translated as Little Scenes over Four Notes). Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), who was greatly influenced by Schumann, also found himself engrossed in the practice of reducing the complexities of music. As a result, he created compositions utilizing a mere two-note pattern.

However, it was Arnold Schoenberg’s idea that musical compositions should be formed around a basic shape that laid the groundwork for what would become modern minimalist music. Schoenberg’s theory allowed a musical piece to be coherent as it became highly developed without ever departing from a basic, simple element. With this idea in mind, Schoenberg developed his twelve-tone scheme for creating compositions. Strategies of what are called “Atonality” was the offspring of this method that produced serial music. The suggestion that music may have a serial quality came from the music’s constant return to the central tones and notes, or fragments, from which it originated.

Minimal Music is composed with a bare minimum of structure. Watch these two videos of the Steve Reich’s  Clapping Music. Then tell which makes it easier for you to follow along with the performance. Sometimes the music itself gains content just by visualizing the performance, as in the next two videos:

In the videos, below, (from the first reading), you see clapping music laid out in notes played against each other, in groups of notes: 3 notes, 2 notes, 1 note, and 2 notes, then repeat. But by shifting the line underneath one beat each time the phrase plays through we change the rhythms.

Trouble with the embedded video? Click this link: https://youtu.be/lzkOFJMI5i8

This next video has the same musical work as in the one above, but this time you will see the performers, not the notes. The performers have added a few effects, but they still play the same rhythmic patterns. does it still seem as minimal to you?

Trouble with the Embedded video? click here: https://youtu.be/X2-GP6LV8DM

Leaping ahead to the evolution of modern minimalist music, beginning in the 1960s, we see the tendency towards serial music and minimal structures in the work of Robert Ashley, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, John Adams and Terry Riley. These composers have produced a collective body of work that relies heavily on simplified harmonic progression and melodic line. Filled with rampant repetitiveness in rhythms, these musicians worked to reduce the excesses of expression and historical reference they found to be overly abundant in much contemporary classical music.

A key element of the minimalist music being showcased in this unit is the development of hypnotic rhythms. While this also occurred in the music of the 19th century composers, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass had modern technology to conjure up mesmerizing rhythms in new ways.

Perhaps best illustrated in the work of Laurie Anderson, the manipulation of electronics gives a contemporary edge to current minimal music. Present day minimal compositions can be recognized by their use of atmospheric sounds, such as voices and clapping, which are exploited in combination with orchestral instruments. There is always, however, a return to the core fragment of sound that allows for the evolution of the omnipotent rhythm.

Continue to biographies of Minimal Musicians on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1970s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Laurie Anderson

- Steve Reich

- Philip Glass

Conceptual Art

It is important to consider the connections between the various artistic movements in twentieth century art, and the evolutionary process by which specific styles or categories arrived. Much like with music, the preceding art forms and ideas informed what came later. Such is the case with conceptual art.

Conceptual Art is firmly rooted in early twentieth-century art and draws influence from the more contemplative, idea-based works of Marcel Duchamp, the early twentieth century, the Anti-Art movement known as “Dada,” and the Minimalist forms above. But while Minimalism sought to reduce art, stripping away the recognizable aspects that reflected particular styles, Conceptual Art took this idea one step further by rendering the art object irrelevant.

Put simply, conceptual art is based upon the idea an object or act represents, rather than the appearance, of the art object itself. The idea fuels the process of production, but the resulting physical object is viewed more as documentation of the idea. By this definition, the purpose of the artwork as we know it is turned upside down, engaging the viewers’ mind rather than their eye. We are acculturated to evaluate an object, photograph, or installation by its appearance first, then the idea. Not the other way around.

Conceptual art is a non-object, non-object-making, and non-art aesthetic modality, often presented in the form of charts and documentation such as photographs and visual images with supporting text. Exhibits, installations and events often deal with re-definitions of art, language, and ideas. Much of this work in the 1960s challenged the modernist views of art set forth by critic Clement Greenberg in the 1950s, aesthetics, and the art world as an economic and political system. This approach was further pushed by the rebellion of the late 1960s against the establishment, in this case, specifically the art establishment.

Some important conceptual artists were Michael Asher, Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, Les Levine, Hans Haacke, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Douglas Huebler.

Continue to biographies of Conceptual Artists on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1970s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Sol LeWitt

- Michael Asher

- Lawrence Weiner

- Joseph Kosuth

8. Art and Music in the 1970s: Part Two

Clayton Funk

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

This video shows the construction and a walk within an Earthworks. link to this video at: https://youtu.be/FVRgwEQX3zs.

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: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1970s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Robert Smithson

- Nancy Holt

- Walter de Maria

- Maya Lin

- Christo

Performance Art

This video provides a vivid cross-section of performance art and presents some perspectives that are easier to explain in video than in writing. The video pulls together performances in music, dance and experimental theater and puts them under the umbrella of performance art, along with artists who describe themselves that way. Link to this video at: https://youtu.be/CAz6a5FwZJQ

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 this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1970s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Joseph Beuys

- Vito Acconci

- Hannah Wilke

- Chris Burden

Music

Popular music in the 1970s also shifted from narratives that addressed social problems to musicians producing for the sake of making music. The economy was prosperous and the recording industry was expanding more than ever. The 1970s were a complicated time, as well. In one layer you had Disco and Funk and the glamour that went with it. Then you had the spectacle of Rock music with block buster concerts in stadiums.

Disco and Funk

While the soft rock sounds of The Carpenters, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, Barbara Streisand, Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow dominated radio stations and topped the charts in the mid 1970’s, disco was emerging from the clubs of New York City as the epitome of 1970’s excess. Although dance clubs referred to as “disco’s”  (originallly discotheque in French), had been around since the mid-1960’s, in the 1970’s the term disco came to define not only to a place, but a style of music, dress, and an 8 billion dollar industry that defined an era that some would call decadent.

At first disco music consisted of DJ’s playing twenty minute extended mixes and medleys in dance clubs created by using samples and segments of songs by rhythm and blues artists such as Diana Ross (of The Supremes), the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and James Brown.  Known as “party music”, early disco involved the sampling, or pirating, of song segments, which in the 1980’s and 1990’s became standard practice in nearly every type of music production.

Eventually, the style evolved into a more eclectic funky and danceable sound that focused on a solid, almost mesmerizing beat.  From Latin music, disco took its percolating percussion, and its sensuous and throbbing rhythms.  From the 1960’s funk music of James Brown and Sly Stone, it borrowed a kicky bass-guitar line. From Afro-Cuban music it repeats simple lyric lines like voodoo chants and like early rock ‘n’ roll it exploits the honking saxophones of rhythm and blues.

Unlike 1970’s rock, which celebrated the over the top rock star image with elaborate live performances and costly stage sets, disco put the participants in the spotlight.  Since the music played in disco’s was recorded, this allowing the dancers, dressed in platform shoes, gold chains, satin shirts, sequined tube tops, and lots of spandex, to become the star performers.  In addition to the music and attire, disco relied on psychedelic light shows, fog machines, mirror balls, and large quantities of pharmaceuticals to enhance and complete the frenzied effect of fantasy and orgasmic overindulgence.

Although disco first became popular in 1975 with Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Say Goodbye”, followed by Donna Summer‘s “Love to Love You Baby” in 1976, it wasn’t until RSO record owner Robert Stigwood released the 1977 blockbuster movie, “Saturday Night Fever”, starring the young John Travolta, that the culture of disco was accepted by mainstream audiences.

Featuring a soundtrack written and performed by the Bee Gee’s, “Saturday Night Fever” became the best-selling record of all time and inspired “discomania” which spread throughout the United States (and the world), transforming high school proms, Holiday Inn Lounges, roller rinks, and wedding receptions into disco’s.  Previous to this time disco was rarely played on the radio but managed to still achieve astonishing sales. But now disco had become trendy and many radio stations scrambled to switch their format as 40 of billboards top 100 hits were classified as disco.

Although disco embraced multi-ethnic audiences and avoided any political message, because it originated in gay clubs it inspired a backlash among many hard rock listeners and conservative audiences. Slogans such as “disco sucks” and “death to disco”became rallying cries for homophobic and racist individuals who saw the popularity of disco as a threat to decency and the integrity of rock and roll itself.

In 1979 a riot broke out at Chicago’s Comiskey Park when a DJ from a local rock station organized “disco demolition night.”  While fans poured onto the field to torch a huge pile of disco records and clothing, the situation turned violent as fans were brutally beaten.  The second game of the scheduled double header was canceled and throughout the country tension was evident as disco became the inspiration for violence, and the scapegoat for unresolved social issues.

In spite of the negative reactions to the disco era, it has endured as one of the most deliciously superficial, explicitly sexual, and mindlessly overindulgent in music history.  Many of the innovations and techniques employed by early DJ’s have had a tremendous impact on styles such as punk, rap, new wave, dance, hip-hop, techno, and even rock.  Aside from the Bee Gee’s and Donna Summer, there were few musicians affiliated with disco who were anymore than one hit wonders.  The artist we have chosen to exemplify the genre of disco is Donna Summer.

Author: A.E. C.F.

Continue to biographies of Disco Musicians on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1970s.php

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- Bee Gees

- Chic

- Cool and the Gang

- Earth, Wind and Fire

- Parliament

- Sly and the Family Stone

- Donna Summer

Rock

The impact of activism in the late 1960s and 1970s also touched the music world. The Kent State Shootings of 1970 and the assassination of John Lennon, formerly of the Beatles, diffused the stream of counter culture and popular music regrouped in stronger numbers. Many musicians had succumbed to drug overdoses and other causes, but the murder of John Lennon impacted the heroic status of rock musicians and he was immortalized. The only other popular musician whose martyrdom remains most likely as vivid is Elvis Presley.

The categories of Rock music in the 1970s are complex, with bands like Queen, and KISS regarded as strong examples of glam rock, heavy metal and hard rock. For this discussion we will discuss them as Hard Rock. British Hard Rock groups included Led Zeppelin, Queen, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, The Who, Jethro Tull, and Cream. The Beatles were also diverse, and they modified their rock‑and‑roll style into a psychedelic style, and as the progressive rock groups and as the groups Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney and Wings after they disbanded. The Rolling Stones continued recording long after the seventies as a group, and then Mic Jagger continued his visibility as a solo performer. In this section we will discuss Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath as principle contributors to hard rock, and Queen serves as an example of Glam and classical influences. Reggae and Country are also represented in this broad spectrum.

The essential change was that Most Rock Musicians after the 1970s began to see themselves as artists playing music for its own passion, and less for the social change and counter culture of the 1960s. Musicians had become celebrity artists. The 1970s and 1960s left recordings that are still listened to, today, by some younger and older listeners alike.

Continue to biographies of Rock Musicians on this Biographies menu at: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1970s.php

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- Eric Clapton

- Led Zeppelin

- Pink Floyd

- Fleetwood Mac

- David Bowie

- Queen

- Bob Marley

- Bruce Springsteen

- Tom Petty

- Aerosmith

- Emmylou Harris

- Willie Nelson

9. Neo-Expressionism, Punk, and Hip Hop Emerge

Clayton Funk

Neo-Expressionist Painting

British punk fanzines from the 1970s – Wikipedia Creative Commons

By the 1980s, the idealism of the 1970s seemed to have vanished with an economic down turn in the United States. After inflation set in during the late 1970s and much manufacturing left the Northeastern US, the economy spiraled downward. New York City nearly went bankrupt. Very quickly the attitudes of many middle class American youth became pessimistic. Some young artists went looking for alternatives to the commercialized culture that, in their eyes, had fallen apart. In this way, the scene was set for the Neo Expressionist artists and the DIY scenes of Punk and Hip Hop.

The video below is an interview with the American Neo Expressionist painter, Julian Schnabel. Link to this video at: https://youtu.be/4sajnloTFvU

Neo-expressionism is a term given to an international art movement, which began in the 1960s and 1970s and developed into a dominant mode of art in the United States and Europe in the 1980s.  The movement brought the spirit of painting back to life, although critics and other promoters of the avant-garde had proclaimed earlier that painting had died.

Young artists reacted against the reductive, impersonal character of minimalism and conceptualism, and found new vitality in painting, full of feeling, raw expression, and evidence of the artist’s manual touch. The works were large, aggressive, and took on themes that varied from  familiar imagery to referencing traditions of art history in expressionist modes.  Sometimes, elements of collage and three -dimensional assemblage were included to add a heightened experience and response from the viewer.

Perhaps the nature of the movement was best expressed by a prominent critic at the time, Peter Plagens, when he wrote the following words in his now famous article, “The Academy of the Bad,” first published in the magazine Art in America, in 1981. He began the article with:

There is now a phenomenon abroad in the land called, among other things, “bad” painting, “new image” painting, “new wave” painting, “punk” art and “stupid” art. Although it takes many forms, it is primarily realized in painting, where its trademarks are what looks like inept drawing, garish or unschooled color, tasteless or trivial or bizarre imagery, odd and impractical assemblage, maniacally vigorous or disinterested paint application, dubious craft and materials, and a general preference for squalor over reason.*

Although this may sound negative, or perhaps like the beginning of an article putting down such art, it was in fact a positive article that defined a revolutionary new art movement. Spin offs of Neo-Expressionism continue to inspire and inform young painters in the 21st century, although the original revolutionaries are now viewed almost as old masters.

Anselm Kiefer, George Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl, and David Salle are among the artists included in this movement of art.

Continue to biographies of Neo Expresionist artists on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1980s.php

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- Georg Baselitz

- Sandro Chia

- Anselm Kiefer

- Susan Rothenberg

- Julian Schnabel

Punk Scenes

One of the most important clubs in the New York Punk Scene was the Bar CBGB’s. Here is a recording of the Ramones playing at that location. Link to this video at: https://youtu.be/fX5MJB3SunQ

A popular misconception is that Punk Rock began during the late 70s in London, England. However, Punk was in fact an American creation that grew out of the tangled roots of early Rock and Roll. Punk first emerged from New York’s Greenwich village and eventually surfaced at the small bar in the Bowery called CBGB’s.

It was here in 1975, among the Hell’s Angels, wino’s, junkies, and prostitutes that bands such as the Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Patti Smith Group, Deborah Harry (Blondie), and the Ramones all launched their careers and reinvented the sound, look, and attitude of rock music for generations to come.

The New York Scene emerged earlier than others, but there were also unique Punk scenes in Great Britain, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. Straight Edge scene, Olympia, Washington and Washington, D.C. for the Riot Grrls, and the Lookout scene in Berkeley, California. Each city or region had their own flavors of Punk music, all emerging at different times, and evolving into such genres as New Wave, Heavy Metal, and Alternative rock to name a few. For more, see a summary of punk and its legacy in Wikipedia.

One of the driving forces behind Punk Rock, as with most rock music, was rebellion. The general consensus was that the rock and roll industry had become too safe, mainstream, corporate, and therefore no fun. Many of these early punk groups took it upon themselves to express their displeasure with the direction music had taken in the mid-70s and tried make rock dangerous again. Although these attitudes were shared by early punk rock groups, a similar sound was not. Each of these early groups developed their own unique sound that separated them from the others.

The word ‘dirty’ comes up frequently in a discussion about Punk Rock. Often this term is a reference to the discordant sounds produced by guitars amplified to the point of feedback, or white noise. “Dirty” could also refer to the lyrical content that is often considered vulgar. But it also has as much to do with the appearance of the musicians and affiliated community members. In this respect it is important to consider the visual aesthetic of Punk Rock musicians because of the impact these styles had on underground youth culture of the time, and mainstream culture that followed in the 80s and 90s. Additionally, Punk Rock fashion, an oxymoron to some, signified the movement as a more individualistic, and a reaction to mainstream culture.

In New York, Punk Rock might have signified a rebirth of Rock and Roll, but in London an entirely new culture emerged. Like a blowtorch, punk roared throughout the towns of England leaving the charred remains of popular culture in its path. Although Punk was stylistically a world away from 1960s protest music, both shared the same basic goal to inspire change through musical expression.

This was especially true in London where the social climate was one of poverty and frustration. Unemployment soared to record levels while the economy plummeted into the deepest depression since World War II fueling the uneasiness of the younger generation. While 1970s America offered boundless opportunities for the baby boomers, British youth were faced with few choices for their future. In addition to economic despair, increasing division between the upper and lower social classes outraged many  and sparked violence throughout the country.

These factors contributed to the deeply political overtones that Punk embodied once it made its way across the Atlantic. British youth were desperately bored and seeing no future on their horizon sought alternative means of survival. Punk Rock offered an escape from the hopeless conditions of late 1970s London, while also empowering the thousands of young people who had been marginalized by a culture in turmoil.

In addition to the raw musical aggression, Punk embraced an almost primitive fashion aesthetic which featured spiky hair, multi-colored Mohawks, and ripped t-shirts cleverly held together with safety pins that made their way into the noses, ears and tongues of those eager to push the boundaries of acceptable attire. For many, Punk fashion took the gender bending kinkiness of Glam Rock and injected it with a lethal dose of Black Leather and Gothic Barbarism in the form of heavy make-up. To onlookers, the resulting styles were caustic and offensive, however they were also refreshingly inventive, fascinating, and sublimely rebellious.

The abrasive character of Punk was as unsettling to hear, as it was to observe for many, however as it has always been viewed with skepticism by mainstream audiences, it has endured to permanently alter the look, sound and attitude of rock music to this day.

Continue to biographies of Punk musicians on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1980s.php

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- The Velvet Underground

- Iggy Pop and the Stooges

- Patti Smith Group

- Ramones

- Talking Heads

- Sex Pistols

- Riot Grrrl

- The Clash

- Dead Kennedys

Hip Hop Culture

While Music videos were becoming a profitable business for big recording companies, individual musical groups in the Hip Hop world were also producing their own videos. These videos were ahead of their time. In this video of The Message – Melle Mel, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, we see the DIY feel of handheld single-camera work, which would become more common in television and cinema. Link to this video at: https://youtu.be/PobrSpMwKk4

The development of Rock and Roll music in the 1950s and aspects of Rock music in the 1960s can be compared to the emergence and development of Rap and Hip Hop music in the 1980s, certainly in relation to the African American communities. If you will recall, Rock and Roll developed from Rhythm and Blues, which had a long tradition among African-Americans.

In the 1950s, white radio stations and record companies wanted to capitalize on and manipulate the a so-called “Black sound” without actually having African Americans perform the music. In the 1960s, record companies including Motown, which was owned and managed by African Americans, tried to capitalize on the appeal that Black music had to the White audience and tailored their music to a largely White group of fans. But by the time that Rap and Hip Hop developed, things in the music world had changed dramatically.

In the 1980s and especially the 1990s, the Hip Hop music industry wanted to have a sound that was entirely their own – with no appropriations or limitations, and certainly no apologies. Hip Hop music was produced by African Americans. Unlike Motown, record labels like Def Jam, Bad Boy, and Death Row did not cater to a White audience at all, although the music eventually found a large audience among White people, and has become one of the most popular types of music in recent years. In fact, in 1998, Rap outsold every other genre of music, including Country, selling 81 million recordings. The influence of Hip Hop on Rock has been intense and some of the most interesting music of the early twenty-first century is either rap, based on rap, or influenced by rap.

Although we use the terms “Rap” and “Hip Hop” interchangeably,  Rap is strictly a form of rhythmic speaking in rhyme, which in the world of music goes all the way back to the rhyming “jive talk” of the Bebop Jazz musicians. But in Hip Hop, the backing music for “Rapping” is often collaged from samples of other recorded songs. Basically, Hip-Hop deconstructs familiar sounds and songs from earlier music, and builds those sounds into entirely new, often unpredictable songs.  James Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic are early influences on Hip-Hop.

Rap began in 1971, in the Bronx, with Kool Herc, who was from Jamaica. At block parties, Kool Herc appropriated two turntables as an electronic instrument, actually moving two turntables by hand and mixing samples from two records to create an entirely new sound, while he rapped the lyrics. The “break”, or instrumental part of the record was played repeatedly and this became his background music. Since he did not think that Americans would receive Reggae widely, he used the break from American Funk musicians, like James Brown. He also employed dancers, who became known as Break Dancers or b-boys.

When another early Rap artist, Grandmaster Flash, heard Kool Herc perform, he set out to prove he was better and he started stretching the break, created new sounds by scratching the records and sometimes playing them backwards. Like John Cage and Jimi Hendrix, he pushed the sounds that a turntable, a needle and a record could make. He could not Rap, so he got together a group called the Furious Five to Rap to his scratching. Eventually, the first Rap group to have a hit record was the Sugarhill Gang.

Afrika Bambaadaa from the South Bronx was an important influence in Hip Hop, as well. In his youth, Bambaadaa was a founding member of the Bronx River Projects area street gang, known later as the Black Spades. Bambaadaa’s life would soon change after a trip to Africa and after seeing the Michael Caine film Zulu. He changed his name to Afrika Bambaadaa Aasim and set out to redirect the energy of street gangs towards positive community roles.

In 1977, Bambaadaa was moved by the reputation of DJ Kool Herc and he began to organize his own block parties in South Bronx neighborhoods. He became known among the best Djs. In 1980, he produced Soul Sonic Forces Zulu Nation Throwdown. By 1982, he led the first Hip-Hop tour with rapper and graffiti artists Rammellzee, DJ Grand Mixer DXT, B-Boy and B-Girl crews, Rock Steady Cre, Double Dutch Girls and a crew of graffiti artists, Fab 5 Freddy, Phase 2, Futura 2000 and Dondi. Bambaadaa and the Soul Sonic Force released a popular single “Planet Rock” on Tommy Boy Records. They mixed the melody from Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” with electronic drumbeats, along with samples from recording from Ennio Morricone and Captain Sky. This combination lead to a new genre called Electro Funk, which included styles from dance, house and techno genres. Significant endorsement came when Afrika Bambaadaa recorded with James Brown on the Song “Unity” and had roles in the international Television series, Kung Faux.*

These early Rap groups are now called “Old School.” As Rap developed, elements from Rock music such as electric guitars and intense drumbeats were introduced by Run-D.M.C., which was the first hardcore Rap group, and the earlier scratching was replaced by sampling, an electronic pulling of sounds from earlier music. Public Enemy developed a very sophisticated sampling technique, which often was based on a blend of white noise, strong beats, and unrecognizable samples. Just as importantly, or more so, they introduced social and political elements from the Black community into their music.

These early Rap forms expanded to the West Coast in the 1990s, into Gangsta Rap, which was originally introduced by NWA. Gangsta Rap emphasized violence, crime and sex, and for that reason, has been the most controversial Rap genre. Among the important Gangsta Rappers were Snoop Doggy Dog, Tupac, and the Notorious B.I.G. The first white group to gain acceptance in Rap music was the New York based Beastie Boys. At first called cultural pirates by some critics, the Beastie Boys led the way for a number of White Rap acts.

Later, the Fugees and their lead singer at that time, Lauryn Hill, took Rap in another direction, most recently blending elements of Rap and Hip-Hop with R&B. Eventually traces of Hip-Hop culture could be found in many bands that came later, whose music ranged from Rhythm and Blues to a fusion of Rock genres, as in Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Continue to biographies of Hip Hop musicians on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1980s.php

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- NWA

- The Police

- Public Enemy

- Run-D.M.C.

- Sugarhill Gang

*Exerpt on BamBaadaa from Contemporary Art Culture, 2009.

10. MTV and Music in the 1980s

Clayton Funk

- TV and Multimedia Shift

Credit: Maria Diaz with Creative Commons License

In the Summer of 1969, broadcast television made it possible for almost anyone with a television to experience in virtual space the first human to walk on the moon. Most of what we saw on the television screen was a studio simulation with actors in astronaut costumes acting out the moon walk as it happened. What was live from the Moon surface, however, was the actual radio communications between NASA and the Astronauts. In those days, viewers still perceived programming like this as a way of “being there,” as if to embody Marshall McLuhan’s theory that television viewing actually extended the range of  viewers’ senses, what they could see and hear. Then came Cable Television.

The years 1940 through the 1960s saw some of the first Cable Television (CATV) systems in the United States developed by James F. Reynolds in his town of Maple Dale, Pennsylvania, which grew to include near by cities.  But CATV was controversial, because its closed network tended to exclude some viewers who could not pay for it, which went against the grain of those who believed broadcast media carried vital information that citizens have a right to know and should be free to anyone within range.

After the complicated discourse of lawmaking and litigation in the 1960s, CATV was allowed to grow, so long as it carried local free broadcast stations; and by the 1980s CATV became more common, especially in major urban areas where reception could be bad due to signals blocked by tall buildings. As more neighborhoods came onto the cable grid, the more TV began to change.

The rapidly growing cable television industry was also changing our perceptions of why people watched TV. Instead of a network on which you heard a variety of programming from the press, to sitcoms, to variety shows; cable featured an array of channels, each with its own kind of programming. There were cable channels that broadcast only news and commentary around the clock, while other channels, like American Movie Classics (AMC), ran classic movies back-to-back. And not the least of these channels was Music Television or MTV.

MTV

Music Television (MTV) came online in 1981. It was a new kind of cable channel formed expressly to broadcast the new media of music videos and most importantly a new clearinghouse for rating and promoting recorded music. In homes with multiple television sets, young people could watch music in one room while parents watched programs they liked in another room.

Link to this video of the history of MTV at: https://youtu.be/Y6jz65YRCy8

By the 1990s, cable services were digitized and bundled with fast Internet access. This configuration made it possible to see a video on MTV and order the CD from one of the such new retail sites as Amazon.com. And as we know, in less than a decade, music could simply be downloaded.

Remember the power of radio DJs to promote recordings between the 1950s and the 1970s? Well, MTV represented a radical departure the world of Radio DJs. In its early years, MTV targeted an audience of mostly White suburban males, with music from a Rock industry made up of mostly male performers, but there were a few exceptions. Micheal Jackson was one of the musicians of color to be featured on MTV, and eventually such women performers as  Cyndi Lauper, Donna Summer, and Pat Benatar became popular. It took much longer for MTV to broadcast Hip Hop and Rap videos, thinking White audiences would be afraid of the aggressive lyrics. But sooner than later,  White viewers constituted the largest audience demographic for Hip Hop in the 1990s and beyond, around the world. This growth came along at the right time for a music industry struggling in an economic recession. And eventually the marketing of the music industry would shift to digital networks. (See video above).

Continue to biographies of musicians from the 1980s on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1980s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Alabama

- Blondie

- Duran Duran

- Eurythmics

- The Go-Go’s

- Guns and Roses

- Michael Jackson

- Madonna

- Metallica

- The Police

- Prince

- Public Enemy

- George Strait

- Van Halen

11. Art and Music in the 1980s

Neo Pop Art

Ron English’s “Cereal Killers”

While the Neo Expressionists were causing everything from excitement to worry in the art world, there were other voices that were drawn to the escapism of television entertainment, in MTV, Movie Channels, and the wealth of media that could be had on cable television. In Visual art, Neo Pop art was filled with political protest and sometimes satire.

Compared to the Pop Art of the 1960s, with Oldenberg’s enlarged wedding rings and giant soft hamburgers, Neo Pop artists were preoccupied with protest images and a backlash to the conservative 1980s. This was also the time when Punk scenes splintered into New Wave and Grunge music.  Images of protest in art and music influenced a savvy audience of college-aged generation X students, who took to the tools of philanthropy, marketing, and politics they had learned well and put them to work against the status quo.

The AIDS epidemic exploded at this time and the U.S. Federal government was largely unresponsive to the problem, so these groups of young people sought to disrupt business as usual, but they did so systematically. Young people of the 1980s, particularly in the LGBTQ communities, organized large nonprofits, like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and Act Up. GMHC was a nonprofit that raised funding and established services for people with AIDS. The other arm of this movement was Act Up, whose strategy was very organized but its medium was disruption through social protest. The slogan “Silence=Death” became folklore as they pasted their posters and stickers any place they would be seen. They disrupted official functions, chained themselves together as barriers and made a presence that is still remembered along with red lapel ribbons.

These urgent protests were also the starting ground for a new take on visual forms. The Act Up stickers were early forms of what is now called sticker graffiti. Human chains continue as a form of protest, but sometimes as performance art, and the lapel ribbons have been replicated many times over in Pink, Yellow, blue, and other colors, for other causes.

Kieth Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, were two important figures in Neo Pop because they drew images from Graffiti hip-hop culture. Some consider them opportunists for capitalizing on and misrepresenting those cultures, while others consider their works as innovations that bridged gaps between forms from street culture and forms in the art world.

The Names Project and the AIDS Memorial Quilt were also forms deployed as a demonstration of social action. Its visual impact illustrated the massive numbers of people who had died of HIV and AIDS in just a few years. The quilt was one of the first of its kind. Individuals, and groups created quilt squares in memory of someone they knew who died of AIDS. Each square was sewn together into larger blocks and arranged on the capital mall in Washington, DC. The visual impact of the quilt drew significant attention from the press and visualized the massive impact of AIDS to government officials, who had been largely unresponsive to calls for research funding. Artistically, The Names Project broke ground in the world of visual forms. The project was open to anyone who could make a quilt block, whether they called themselves artists, or not.

Continue to biographies of NeoPop Artists on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1980s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Kathrina Fritsch

- Felix Gonzalez-Torres

- Keith Haring

- Jenny Holzer

- Jeff Koons

- Barbara Kruger

- Robert Mapplethorpe

- Charles Ray

- Andres Serrano

- Cindy Sherman

- Sandy Skoagland

- William Wegman

Music

The 1980s, like all decades, can be remembered for many different historical events. John Lennon (of the Beatles) was murdered in front of his Manhattan residence in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, and the Challenger shuttle blew up shortly after takeoff. The Challenger tragedy, seen by millions over and over again on television, left an imprint on the memory of people growing up in this decade similar to the one left by the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s.

However, for many young people the most significant events (in terms of their day-to-day lives) in the 1980s were the technological advancements developed by the music industry. MTV was born in 1981 along with the inventions of the Walkman, the VCR, and boom box. These inventions are what reshaped the music of this era, and between MTV and the development of video games, made the electronic world far more visual.

MTV gave musical artists a new medium to promote their music with and to express themselves further. It also allowed the audience to heighten their experience of listening rather remarkably through visual imagery. MTV gave New Wave musicians from Europe such as the Eurythmics, the Police, and Duran Duran the opportunity to enter the U.S. market without embarking on risky, expensive tours. The fans often emulated the images found in the music videos. Madonna bracelets stacked to the elbows were “in” as was long, teased hair, and tons and tons of makeup. The multi-media exposure helped artists such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince attain superstar status.

It was a time of when dance-able Pop music and Techno sounds were fashionable as were hair bands and the beginnings of Rap. The technology of the 1980s also created a global effect on music, allowing it to reach into parts of the world that were impenetrable before. Musicians began to reach out and support humane causes around the world. Charity concerts such as Band Aid, Live Aid, and We Are The World were given to raise funds for those special causes.

Music became political again as Heavy Metal and Rap groups were formed. Speed Metal bands such as Metallica fought for justice, while Rap groups such as Public Enemy advocated Black nationalism. Technology was used to increase the volume of the music to a deafening level and to distort the sound and lyrics to a barely discernible point. Boom boxes became walking radio stations and turntables became instruments. The 80s can be best described as a time of rich musical exploration through its globalization given by the development of technology. New styles evolved from earlier ones, and entirely new genres of Rock were invented.

New Wave evolved from the Punk Rock of the 1970s. Country, which had been very important to the beginnings of Rock Music, asserted itself as genre to be reckoned with, and Hard Rock got harder and Heavy Metal emerged. In addition, Rap, which had begun in the 1970s, became widely popular and an entirely new type of Rock, Alternative, came on the scene.

We divide the music of the 1980s into the following types:

1. New Wave

2. Country

3. Super Stars

4. Alternative

5. Hard rock/Heavy Metal

Rap. Important 1980’s rap groups we cover include the Sugarhill Gang, Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, and N.W.A.

New Wave. By the end of the 1970’s, major record labels had caught on to the energy and power of Punk Rock although many of them found the genre threatening. Hoping to harness that sound but to make it marketable and less threatening, the term New Wave was invented. New Wave music was considered progressive, different, heavily influenced by Punk, but also much more mainstream, pop oriented. Important New Wave groups and musicians include Blondie, the Go-Go’s, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, Duran Duran, the Eurythmics, the Police, the Cars, and Culture Club.

Country. The controversy that we described in this area in the 1970s continued to rage in the 1980s, with some individuals and groups stressing “pure” country that closely followed traditional country music (George Strait) and others merging country and rock (Alabama).

Pop Superstars of the 1980s. Three individuals emerged during the 1980s who had such distinctive and diverse styles, and such incredible success and attention from the media that they defy categorization other than to call them superstars. They were, of course, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna.

Alternative. Alternative is a category of rock that includes many post-punk, outside the mainstream bands in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It is difficult at best to describe it as a style, although certainly a healthy dose of creative rebellion, at least early on, is a main ingredient. In the 1980s, many alternative groups recorded for independent labels. In addition, their music, when it was played on the radio, was played on the “alternative” stations. Important alternative groups from the 1980’s include The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, R.E.M., The Smiths, 10,000 Maniacs, and U2.

Hard Rock and Heavy Metal. Based on the work of bands such as Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith in the 1970s; Def Leppard, Kiss, Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses, Bon Jovi, and Metallica extended the genre in the 1980s and made it even more popular.

Page author: L.C.

Continue to biographies of musicians from the 1980s on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1980s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Alabama

- George Strait

- Van Halen

- Blondie

- Metallica

- Eurythmics

- The Go-Go’s

- Guns and Roses

- The Police

12. At the Millennium: Art and Music in the 1990s

Lines between art and culture blurred even more in the 1990s. A car decorated in this way was conceived by a designer and could be recognized as an artistic visual form.

Like other decades, the 1990s were a time of continual shifts in social and cultural affairs. DIY (“Do It Yourself” or “alternative”) visual and musical forms continued. The lines blurred between the corporate promotion of these forms and the uniqueness of communities who produced them. The 1997 car crash that took the life of a much-beloved Princess Diana cast a shadow over the decade and other important international political developments also changed the cultural landscape for the long term. In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, which brought forth both economic change and some violent conflict in the Balkans and other areas. The first attack on the World Trade Center occurred in 1993, bringing terrorism to the forefront of international affairs in the U.S. The Cold War between the USSR and the West was over, only to be replaced by new unrest between radical factions at home and abroad.

Visual Arts

Cultural shifts during these times of change also influenced the visual arts in the U.S. and around the world. The strict division between Fine Arts (painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.) and commercial art (creative work applied to advertising graphics, fashion design, and retail display and more) had overlapped by the end of the twentieth century, and Pop Art forms infused many other genres. In fact, the Neoexpressionism that peaked in the 1980s moved aside as new artists emerged among women, people of color, and other groups, adding diversity in Visual Arts. These artists used new media, conceptualized new purposes for art, and introduced new modes of performance.

Neo Conceptual Art

Neo-Conceptual art, like Conceptual art before it, is rooted in the idea-based works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s, the Minimalists, and to a degree, the works of the performance artists. The Prefix “Neo,” of course, means “new,” and that is exactly what Neo-Conceptual art is – a new form of conceptual art that has dominated much of the art of the last decade of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries, as Neo-Expressionism faded after the 1990’s.

Let’s review for a moment what we learned about Conceptual Art earlier in Chapter 7. “Conceptual art is based on the idea an object or act represents, rather than the appearance of the art object itself. The purpose of the artwork is to engage the viewer’s mind rather than their eyes. Conceptual art is a non-object, non-object-making, and non-art aesthetic modality. Exhibits, installations, and events often deal with re-definitions of art, language, and ideas.”

However, Neo-Conceptualism is distinguished from the earlier form by some rather subtle differences. Although language is still important, these artists feel free to move quickly and directly from one medium to another, which often makes it difficult to recognize a “style” for a given artist. Jenny Holzer for example, works with words. They can appear on a sweatshirt and then take on an entirely different “look” on an electronic billboard .

Visual signs and signifiers are often manipulated in a different fashion than just using them to convey communication with familiar meaning. Change the context of things we usually read, like clocks and they become new signs for viewers. Artfully arranged piles of candy become pieces of art and viewers can take a piece of it home (Felix Gonzales-Torres). The world gets turned inside out and negative space takes the place of solid objects (Rachel Whiteread). But these examples have a common theme that holds them together — the intellectual search for meanings. This highly intellectualized approach to art is the major characteristic of Neo-Conceptualism, and a very strong connection to earlier Conceptual Art.

Here are some important benchmarks in the art world that trace how Neo-Conceptualization emerged, as found in Wikipedia. The links in each item will take you to illustrations of the works:

1991: Charles Saatchi funds Damien Hirst and the next year in the Saatchi Gallery exhibits his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

1993: Vanessa Beecroft holds her first performance in Milan, Italy, using models to act as a second audience to the display of her diary of food.

1999: Tracey Emin is nominated for the Turner Prize. Part of her exhibit is My Bed, her disheveled bed, surrounded by detritus such as condoms, blood-stained knickers, bottles and her bedroom slippers.

2001: Martin Creed wins the Turner Prize for The Lights Going On and Off, an empty room where the lights go on and off.

2005: Simon Starling wins the Turner Prize for Shedboatshed, a wooden shed which he had turned into a boat, floated down the Rhine and turned back into a shed again.

Internet Art

Beginning in the 1990s and extending into the new century, the internet expanded  well beyond a network for messages and print-based transmissions, into an environment of images, products, and services available by way of a computer. For artists and musicians it became a place to market and even sell their work. Some artists and musicians actually designed digital art work known as Internet Art, or “Net Art.” These digital forms differed from commercial web development or music and video sales. Rather, Internet Art forms were usually a one-of-a-kind experiences, and environments.  Theorist and curator Jon Ippolito defined “Ten Myths” about Internet art in 2002, which broke away conventions and opened new ways of conceptualizing a form on the internet. The unique aspect of Internet Art is that it is not material in the way the paint covers canvas or sculpture occupies physical space. Internet files are made from pulses of electricity and can be lost if they are not stored in a computer.

Internet Art can take a variety of forms: websites; e-mail projects; Internet-based original software projects (sometimes with games); networked installations; interactive and/or streaming video, audio, or radio works. It can also take on a social performances networked by multi-user domains. At the turn on the 20th century virtual worlds such as Second Life became very popular. So-called Offline events have included Alexei Shulgin‘s Vienna performance , Real Cyberknowledge for Real People (1997). Shulgin printed out copies of Beauty and the East’ / ZKP4, published online and also distributed by hand on the streets of Vienna. Internet art overlaps with other computer-based art forms such as new media art, electronic art, software art, digital art, telematic art and generative art.

One development was a social space called “We Are Data,” produced by the game design firm, UbiSoft. The site contained three interactive maps of London, Paris, and Berlin, on which appeared the live movement of public transit (trains and subways), traffic lights, and public bicycles. You can also click Tweet and Instagram icons to see images, messages from individuals who have volunteered to participate. This site was recently removed from the Internet, but here is a a link to video about it: https://youtu.be/VjtlG5ElwDk

Continue to biographies of Neo-Conceptual Artists on this Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1990s.php

Or simply follow this list:

- Felix Gonzales-Torres

- Jenny Holzer

- Barbara Kruger

- Rachel Whiteread

- Damien Hirst

Music in the 1990s: Grunge

Watch this video on the top 10 Grunge Bands. Note that some of these bands have more than one classification. Link to this video at: https://youtu.be/c91dmwxaiig

The music world was also changing quickly and becoming more and more diverse. The 1990s opened with an influx of Grunge music coming forth from Seattle that unsettled the Pop artists who had been getting very comfortable with their reign. Nirvana is recognized as one the very first Grunge bands to emerge and become popular, usurping the throne from the King of Pop, Michael Jackson in 1991. Within only three years, however, Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, committed suicide at the height of the Grunge scene. Yet, Grunge still left its impact on the people as youth all over could be seen sporting torn jeans and un-tucked, open flannel shirts with chains on their wallets.

Although Nirvana helped to develop the mainstream popularity of Grunge music, Grunge is merely a sector of a more broadly reaching Alternative style of rock. Though Alternative rock music could be heard in 1980’s, the 1990’s also saw an even greater success among the alternative bands of the time.

During the mid-1990s bands like the Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers kept a strong hold on the music world. Alternative music gained much of its success in the 1990’s due to the fact that the bands signed on with major record labels, instead of independent ones as they had been in the past.

Women finally were recognized as important contributors to the rock scene in the 1990s and they were taken very seriously. Powerful female performers such as Sinead O’Connor, Alanis Morissette, Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, and Sarah McLachlan emerged to great popular success and critical acclaim. Major newspapers, in announcing the winners of the 1999 Grammy’s, headlined their articles with titles like: “No Men Allowed at This Party.” Not that men weren’t there, they just won very few awards. Sarah McLachlan organized “Lilith Fair”- a tour that celebrated the accomplishments of women artists in a way never seen before.

The 1990s generally saw a very diversified assortment of music coming over the radio waves. Folksy, funky, sometimes acoustic bands came forth like Phish and the Dave Matthews Band to play to sold out concerts often held at small, private venues. Cars could be seen with window stickers blazoned with the insignias of bands like Phish and Dave Matthews.

Other Musical Genres

In the meantime, Rap music got a makeover and boasted artists such as the Puff Daddy, and Tupac, whose murder was another musical tragedy. Rap also had another face as can be heard in the music of Lauryn Hill, who fits into the Alternative Rap and Rhythm and Blues genres.

Although the 1990s are not considered to be the decade of the music video, as the 1980s are known to be, but MTV still had an important part in music. One of the 1990s artists who best made use of the music video is the Country/Rock singer Shania Twain. Helping to give Country music a boost into the limelight, Twain used her sexy image in videos much like Madonna did in the 1980s. Twain helped to move country music more into the mainstream along with artists such as Garth Brooks. In fact, pop rock radio stations of the 1990s could be heard playing popular country songs along side rock numbers.

Like much of the music of the 1990s, modern country pulls from traditional rock sounds to become more diversified and reach a broader audience. The practice of borrowing from many genres of music has been going on for decades, after all, rock originally came from Rhythm and Blues and Country. But in the 1990s there is much evidence of the melding of musical styles as many radio stations play a wide assortment of everything. Though the rest of the world seems to be still lingering behind, perhaps the music world of the 1990s has shown more tolerance of  the diverse races and creeds in music.

Page author: N.G. & C.F.

Here is a list of the biographies of the musicians noted above. Follow this list or go to the Biographies menu at http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu1990s.php

- Tori Amos

- Beck

- Garth Brooks

- Ani DiFranco

- Garbage

- Korn

- Sarah Maclachlan

- Marilyn Manson

- Dave Matthews

- Moby

- Nine Inch Nails

- Nirvana

- Pearl Jam

- Phish

- Radiohead

- Rage Against The Machine

- Red Hot Chili Peppers

- Smashing Pumpkins

- Tool

- Shania Twain

13. Who Makes Art in Century 21?

Clayton Funk

A mural by El Mac and Cryptic, Costa Mesa California. Author’s photograph

In the first chapter of this book, we framed the social and political dynamics of the art an music worlds with three considerations: 1) which forms are most important, 2)who decides this, and 3) who decides who gets access? We could trace these observations in every chapter, in one way or another, but one thing is consistent, that change always happens.

This last chapter is no different. Most of the artists and musicians you have read about so far can be found in one history book or another, but at this point we turn to the recent visual and musical forms, which have pushed the boundaries of art and music in new directions, beyond history books. In the mural above, by artists El Mac’s and Cryptic, we see an example of a genre know as Street Art, which draws upon and sometimes breaks away from traditions of Graffiti. Like Graffiti, this work is painted with spray paint on the side of a building as a large scale mural, and the image reflects some myth or aspect of street culture. But unlike graffiti, we know who did this work and we can see that it is primarily a portrait, with decorative calligraphy, though it is not a written message.

In music, changes are similar. Musicians not only sing and play instruments, they also take on rolls of performance artists, wherein hairstyles and costumes and other visual theatrics are just as important as the music they sing and play. Later in this chapter you will see a video by the musician Sia, who is known for for the visual aspects of her performances.

Visual Art

Andrea Zittel builds a dwelling and lives in it as a performance, brings together the craft of making a dwelling with performance. Link to this video at: https://youtu.be/-93teK4M9Fg

Art after 2000 became even more diverse than in the previous century. What we call art could come from almost any one of a broad array of visual forms and performances. For example artists like Andrea Zittel (see video), who builds a dwelling and lives in it as a performance, brings together the craft of making a dwelling with performance.

Art also appears without galleries and museums. Artists co-opt spaces in the public locations in the city and on the Internet (both physical and virtual locations). All at once, artists can act as interventionists, curators, and activists. Forms can range from the simple placement of any object, the documentation of an event,  a performance, and/or graphic  and 3-dimensional forms. Deciding whether something is “art,” or not, has given away to explaining why almost any visual form could be considered art. The artists below show this variety of work.

- Tiffany Bozic

- Adonna Khare

- Robert Xavier Burden

- James Nizam

- Duke Riley

- ZhangXiao

Street Art and Culture

The “Moose Bubblegum Bubble” by Jacob Watts

The new Millennium also brought forth new visual forms of unsanctioned art, which grew out of street cultures in major U.S. metropolitan centers. By “unsanctioned art” we usually mean art that is not represented or preserved in a museum or in major galleries. We often read about these forms as Guerilla Art or Urban Art, Neo-Grafitti or Post-Grafitti, which can include Street Art, Stencil Graffiti, Wheatpaste Posters, Stickers, and Street installation or sculpture.

Graffiti and Street Art are similar in many ways, but at times they follow separate paths, even when they co-exist on the same streets. They can be a reaction to the dehumanizing effect of abandoned walls and buildings, but its effects can also transmit signifiers of neighborhood community.

Scholars who study these visual forms distinguish Graffiti as more script based, whereas street art tends to be more image based and draws upon the additional influences of billboards and commercial advertizing. Street Art has evolved into its own genre with new materials and some artists who have become regarded as professionals. Yet many street artists resist the legitimization of their work, preferring instead be clandestine, or even anonymous and create images that disturb.

Even though galleries and museums of the mainstream art world do not acknowledge it, Street Art has gained a wide audience through social media, which propels its popularity as an art phenomenon that is difficult to ignore. Just Pop Art emerged in the 1950s, The art world and popular culture have overlapped in Street Art, which now receives more attention and is tolerated and even sanctioned in some cases, creating forms regarded as a relevant visual art.

In a culture where most common visual images seem to be commercialized billboards, signs, and TV advertisements, unsanctioned visual forms represent the “voice” of an artist who has sidestepped, even “hacked” the established art world. Sometimes we don’t know who these artists are, while other artists receive public recognition and even commissions for murals. The two perspectives create a complicated spectrum of overlapping genres.

The following links take you to more information about street artists:

- Kenny Scharf

- Shepard Fairey

- Street Art on Google Art Project

Musicians

When historians look back on the first 15 or 20 years of this century, they will note that just as with advances recorded music production in the 1960s – Stereo, Quadraphonic, Five Channel systems; in the 1990s innovations were the release of digital media in the 1980s and the streaming and downloading of recordings from iTunes and other sites. Indeed, the technology of recorded music remains as important as the innovations of the musicians themselves. In the 2000s we also will see musicians, who take on the role of a performance artist — like Sia (she performs with her face covered, usually with her hair, as  in the video below) .

Trouble with this video? https://youtu.be/S_RzBeC5ZJY

The 2000s in Music (as found in Wikipedia)

The closer we get to art and music in our own time, the more artists and musicians there are to sort through. When we discuss artists and musicians from the 1950s, we don’t see as many of them, because we hear about only those with those with the most information about them and, of course, who are the most favored. Historians, however, will always dig up new data about artists and musicians who have been forgotten over time. The following list is one from Wikipedia, which breaks down the music by genre and includes plenty of links to more information about each one. For the sake of being practical, I’ve provided a range of genres to choose from, and the ones we choose for study will serve as examples of change over time in art and music. Access information about these genres at the Biographies menu: http://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/menu2000s.php.

Or use the list below:

- Post-punk revival

- Pop rock

- Pop punk

- Post-grunge

- Nu metal

- Metalcore

- Hard rock/Heavy metal

- Emo

- Garage rock, post-punk and new wave revival

- Indie rock

- Pop

- Adult contemporary

- Contemporary R&B

- Country

- Electronic music

- Jazz

- Reggae

- Billboard Artist of the Decade