The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent

This book describes in detail the many varied paths that visual artists explored during the 60's, a time of great political, cultural, and artistic ferment. The subtitle of the book, "American and European Art in the Era of Dissent," reflects Crow's observation that the experimental art of the period reflected 60's political dissent. He notes that 60's art, setting itself up as an alternative to an existing "genteel, snobbish, and unadventurous art culture," deliberately mocks mainstream values, and tends to be inaccessible to ordinary viewers. His book attempts to give a useful explanation of what that art was all about. In order to place the period in its historical context, the book starts with mid-50's work of Jasper Johns, and of California artists whose innovative work had repercussions across the country and eventually in Europe. Crow shows how in the course of the 15 years that the book covers the normal values of fine art were rejected, how divisions between painting, sculpture, and design were breached, and how unconventional departures from artistic norms were exalted. The book details the role of theory during the period, as well as its relationship to the roiling politics of the time. The currents, cross-currents, whirlpools, and eddies of trends such as abstract expressionism, pop art, performance art, happenings, land art, and body art are detailed, as are their representative practitioners and theorists. The book includes good, clear illustrations throughout, and adds a useful year-by-year chart of political, cultural, and artistic events of the period. While the writing is generally straightforward, and non-judgmental, it sometimes becomes turgid. (For example, "in an art without significant internal relationships, it was necessary to dominate a context of sufficient order and clarity to make a light-fixture or a stack of bricks register as an art event.") Robert Hughes wrote in The Shock of the New that "the elite corps of criticism struggled in the sixties to codify its high-art credential and endow it with a problematic or critical content that it did not possess." For devotees of contemporary art with an interest in the 60's, the book gives a thorough review of the struggles of that period. Readers with a more general interest in art, however, while finding the book informative and interesting, may also learn more than they want to know about many artists and theories that are ultimately of minor interest.