Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
18 - Expanding and disappearing works of art
from Section C - Abundance, 1961–1971
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- 1 Arrival in the USA and ‘Clemsville’
- 2 Junk art
- 3 American Pop
- 4 Curator at the Guggenheim
- 5 Six Painters and the Object and Six More, 1963
- 6 Other writings on Pop
- 7 Art as human evidence
- 8 Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley
- 9 Systemic Painting, 1966
- 10 Abstraction and iconogra
- 11 The communications network
- 12 Departure from the Guggenheim
- 13 Exile in Carbondale
- 14 Arts Magazine
- 15 Arts Magazine
- 16 Return to New York: SVA, SUNY, and The Nation
- 17 Options
- 18 Expanding and disappearing works of art
- 19 Alloway's Nation criticism
- 20 Newness and the avant-garde
- 21 Post-Minimal radicalism
- 22 Historical revisions: Abstract Expressionism and Picasso
- 23 Mass communications
- 24 Film criticism
- 25 Violent America
- 26 Pluralism as a ‘unifying theory’
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
Alloway's revised model of greater options within a network of possibilities that represented “art as human evidence” was updated in a lecture given in December 1968 at the Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York, and repeated on Channel 13 on cable television. He reworked the lecture as “The Expanding and Disappearing Work of Art: Notes on Changing American Aesthetics,” published in Auction in October 1969. He used the article to supplement the object-emphasis of the Options exhibition with a wider range of innovative possibilities. The article is essentially a survey that lists examples of “the expansion or diminution of art as a solid structure,” and he identified a cluster of seven modes of art. The first was “the function of the cliché” which connects public signs with personal systems and helps to dissolve formal boundaries. The second was “the mode of intimacy” and included Happenings that collapsed detachment and distance. The third, “permissive configurations,” referred to random piling, loose stacking, and gravitational hangings in sculpture by Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, Barry La Va, and Robert Morris. The fourth was “reflecting and transparent materials” that set up the spectator “as witness of unexpected disintegrations and shifts of the object.” Earthworks, alternatively referred to as Land art or Ecological art, constituted the fifth mode. Alloway cites examples in which “Nature is not a receptive medium for big objects to be thrust on, but one term in a relationship.” The sixth mode was conceptual art, described as “Propositional art. Art separated from perceptual hardware.” The final mode was “Art and distribution.” This made use of “Art as a communication system.” Two examples were Ray Johnson's correspondence art, and Andy Warhol's “continuum”—“Silk-screened photographs in paintings, interviews in magazines or on TV, films, rock'n'roll group, A, all points of a unified sensibility using the technologies of home movies and tape recording. Warhol thrives on disintegrating thresholds…” Christo was one of the artists that Alloway wrote about around this time, emphasizing both the spectator involvement and “disappearing” aspects of his work. Expendability resulted from “The huge scale at which Christo is now able to work [which] presumes impermanence.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 244 - 247Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012