Imagery in the art of the 60's: a survey and exhibition

The purpose of the project was to show how contemporary artists, and their working environment, have influenced the values of the 1960's. Today's artists seem to have developed a form of imagery that is termed "The New Reality" of life. The contemporary Pop and Punk artists have regained an interest in literal forms . . . not for traditional realistic purposes hut simply as viable material. This interest manifests itself both in the sensuous qualities of certain materials like rubber and fur; uses for their own sakes, and in grand, imposing scale . . . The Dadaists, especially Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger, were the predecessors of this contemporary attitude. Leger came to the United States, saw the technological objects that were produced and studied their aesthetic value. Duchamp advocated the ready-made as an art object. Dada's real contribution . . . , indirectly to Pop, was that it opened wide the doors unlocked by Cubism. These doors led to an 'anything goes' freedom of materials and subject matter. It is hypothesised that one of the sources for contemporary imagery has been the communications media of today. In the past the artist and society were mainly influenced by philosophies and literary materials of many regional areas. Today, because of the mass media of television, movies, Telstar,etc., a new source of imagery may have become an equally strong visual stimulus. Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness (all-at-once-ness). Time has ceased, space has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us. The assumption concerning the effect of mass media has been explored with reference to a survey as described in that section of this paper dealing with the research design. The art forms produced for the project will provide visual examples of related phenomena and attempt to extend them to a logical conclusion in terms of their visual nature.