I find myself at the National Gallery of Victoria, attending the Swinging Sixties British exhibit from the Tate gallery. It’s really fucking hot. I intended to simply escape the heat into an air-conditioned venue that wasn’t a shoppaplex, and quite frankly expected a boring nostalgic pop culture overview of the ‘wild sixties’ judging by the pink poster with zany pastel lettering, only to be overjoyed by a comprehensive, selective, simple and intelligent overview of the art and political movements of the era. Fucking LOVE the Tate gallery in London and I highly recommend the trip to this Tate handover exhibition.
Yoko Ono is present in this art scene, who’da thought she had a life prior to you know who? She was at DIAS, that is the Destruction In Art Symposium of September ’66 held in London, of which 'The main objective … was to focus attention on the element of destruction in Happenings and other art forms, and to relate this destruction in society.' This is her performance ‘Cut’, shot by the Maysles Brothers who cut all of her clothes off in this particular sitting whilst she remains expressionless and cross legged. Another performance she did:
"…took the form of a recitation delivered by the author with her back to the audience. On the left of the dimly lit stage there was what appeared to be a canebrake and the only other decorative item was a large garden hat, sprinkled with flowers and suspended about twenty feet above the stage. As miss Ono read her lines (picked at random from the script), she was accompanied by a large number of loudspeakers through which was played a tape recording of what might have been the cries of some creature in the terminal stage of idiocy. Sample lines from Miss Ono`s script :
Lets count the hair of the dead child .
Drink Pepsi Cola"
She was doing weird performance art way before it was popular… hang on, has it ever been popular? Among a few, yes. For most, no. I happen to enjoy watching it myself, though I was sacrificed to fits of debilitating laughter at one earnest performance, to the point where stern looks forced me to leave the hall.
Check this out:
http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index.html
It’s the auto-destructive work of Gustav Metzger that mesmerises me first, perhaps because it’s in the first room of the exhibition. There is an installation of what an auto-destructed work looks like: as if a toddler attacked a canvas with a saw. But the black and white projection of Gustav in a gas mask and goggles applying acid to a canvas stretched across a backdrop of Buckingham, watching the canvas disintegrate, revealing the palace… intercut with close-ups of acid disintegrating materials; It is fascinating viewing.
I am supported in this claim by two children whose father can’t drag them away because they want to see the whole canvas burned right out by the acid. All kinds of thoughts flow, of veils being lifted to reveal the truth about British society, of the slow and vaporous warping of ideas and perceptions. I mean, Gustav was probably on acid at the time. Nonetheless, the clichés about the swinging sixties are stripped from me as I walk through the door, replaced with a clear presentation of the political statements artists made, the conceptual breakthrough and unity of these Happenings and Symposiums which seem so tangible, so close to my understanding of the present.
And this brings me to John Latham. He burnt piles of books called Skoob towers, which represented the laws of England, and set them on fire outside the British Museum in his contribution to DIAS. He offers physics theory and thought to visual and conceptual art, giving words and shape to what Gustav was doing with acid on nylon. He asked artists to remember that we are made up of atoms; audiences to consider the perspectives of science, art and sociology as connected and parallel; and scientists to acknowledge artists as representatives of the forces of science and nature. Or something like that.
His theory of flat time makes me wish I had paid more attention to my year 10 lab teacher with the tight jeans and the B.O. It is one explanation as to what was happening in art in the 60s , which I can attempt to boil down some of in an extremely simplistic manner: that art is the non-linguistic embodiment of philosophy- philosophy comes from somewhere, from books but also environment, events, atomic mutations, land reformation etc. Around the 50s and 60s, long traditions of widely understood representations of ideas in art from realism to abstraction, graduated into blank canvas, the "exhibition of minimalism, where the last minimalist statement where a zero-action canvas presented as a work."
This too was philosophy, but Latham sees it as indicative of more than art and fashion, but of fluctuations of time and consciousness that can be further understood with the assistance of physics theory and understandings. The blank canvas, the obliteration of forms- did this mean we'd come back to square one? When he gets in to this speak, I'm lost…
" If we call the universe we’re in U Now, it could be traced back through a U - 1U - 2. And when we get down to a U1, proto-universe of one extended state from a non-extended state. What is of extreme interest is that if one starts from a universe with one extended state, that has to go back instantly to a non-extended state. What you have is what is virtually a co-present, non-extended plus impulse-informed non-extended state and the expression of the extension."
But I'm going to pull out some Idiot's Guide to Physics soon and give it a good hard go.
