Mapping the 60s Art Histories from the mumok Collections

The 1960s were a watershed era shaped by radical social, political, aesthetic, and intellectual upheavals: the civil rights movement and student revolts, anti-colonial liberation struggles and protests against the Vietnam War, emancipation and the global triumph of pop culture and consumer society, rapid technological and media progress. The enduring, growing impact of transformations during that decade are still felt today. At times, the demands and strategies adopted in contemporary anti-racist and feminist struggles, such as Black Lives Matter or #metoo, directly reference those earlier emancipatory movements. Many of the current discussions and debates about war, mediatization, technology, consumerism, and capitalism likewise have their roots in the 1960s.

From the perspective of art history, it is virtually impossible to overstate the significance of the 1960s. In Western countries in particular, Pop Art addressed the consequences of a society increasingly focused on consumption and mediated by the mass media. Fluxus, Happenings and Nouveau Réalisme bid farewell to the conventional art object and postulated a new relationship to reality; in performance works, the body took center-stage, while process-based and material-driven practices finally left the conventional concept of art far behind, giving precedence instead to procedures, instructions, and actions. Against the backdrop of the enormous political and social sea-changes of this decade, systemic questions were also raised in the visual arts, established mechanisms and power structures were criticized, and there were resounding calls for a new beginning.

The 1960s are also central to mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, albeit for entirely different reasons. The museum was opened in 1962 as the Museum of the Twentieth Century – and at the time was the only art museum in Austria dedicated exclusively to contemporary art. The acquisitions from this period form the basis of the mumok collection. However, the Peter and Irene Ludwig Collection and the Wolfgang Hahn Collection, which significantly extended the museum’s inventory in 1979, also give pride of place to artistic trends of the 1960s.

As a presentation of the collection, Mapping the 60s concentrates on the various new beginnings and upheavals that shaped this period, tracking down their traces within mumok’s holdings. In the spirit of the mapping cited in the title, i.e. cartography and surveying, the exhibits on display are contextualized within the setting in which they came into being. Key exhibitions and events of the 1960s are referenced, while in a further strand exemplary publications from this period turn the spotlight on significant discursive connections. This makes it possible to hone in on various aspects of that era as if setting them under a magnifying glass. Historical nodes of overlapping and intersecting socio-political concerns, aesthetic currents, and differing approaches are rendered visible – existing simultaneously, entering into exchanges yet also in opposition one to another.

After years in which abstraction held sway, in the late 1950s artists turned their attention back to representational art, in the process encountering a contemporary reality in Western countries that was defined by an economic upturn, burgeoning consumerism, and all-encompassing mass media. In the context of Pop Art, images were now thematized as media-mediated material that circulated in newspapers, magazines and, above all, on television.

Whereas Pop Art initially engaged with the sleek surfaces of the brave new world of commodities, advertising, and the associated structures of desire, during the 1960s it turned its gaze on the cracks in the façade of prosperity, fault lines within society, and the dark flipside of progress – sensationalism, violence, racism. However, Pop Art did not address these issues with a stance of outright opposition, instead always remaining aware that it formed part of precisely the media-oriented, economic, and social dispositive that it reflected.

In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol turned his attention to violence and death in US society in what was known as his Disaster series. He relied on press photos – in Orange Car Crash (1963), which is shown here, an image of a car accident – and thus focused in particular on how media representations of cruel and violent events. The accident remains catastrophic, yet occurs on the same media level as the glittering depictions of stars and celebrities that Warhol in parallel found so fascinating. Death and violence are rendered visible as fundamental components of a society fixated on consumerism, the media, and progress.

Against the backdrop of the increasingly bitterly contested Vietnam War, a sculpture like Douane Hanson’s Football Vignette from 1969 does not address the presence of physical violence and brutality in US society directly but instead encodes it, in the form of three figures playing American football, frozen in motion in this depiction of a quintessentially American sport. Finally, Robert Indiana’s Love Rising / Black and White Love (For Martin Luther King) from 1968 is a statement against incessant racism and picks up on one of the critical defining events of US history in the 1960s: the assassination of Black civil rights activist Martin Luther King.

Criticism of Pop Art, which was also accused at the time of being pro-consumerism and uncritical, does not do justice to the complex relationship between image, reality, and politics, as becomes particularly apparent in art such as the work by Corita Kent that has only recently entered the mumok collection. Kent, who was a Catholic nun in California for many years in the Order of the “Immaculate Heart of Mary,” understood the accessible language of Pop Art and the relatively easy-to-use screen printing techniques inter alia as a means of conveying political messages to the people. Kent’s often colorful works, which rely on typographic elements and texts, quote Martin Luther King or Albert Camus; in the fraught political climate of the US in the 1960s, their advocacy of collective values like responsibility, devotion and charity represents an astonishing encounter between Catholic social philosophy and the rhetoric of a hippie movement that critiqued the ethos of individual achievement and the Vietnam War.

A different relationship between art, politics and reality is rendered visible in the following room, where works by Lee Lozano are displayed alongside a work by Jo Baer. Lozano played a part in what was known as the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC); Baer was also involved in debates in circles around the AWC. In the late 1960s, the AWC demanded reforms from art institutions in New York, also advocating for greater attention to be paid to Black artists and women in the art world. Lozano, initially a painter, created a series of what she called Language Pieces with written instructions and guidelines towards the end of the 1960s. A work like General Strike Piece focuses on her role as an artist within the art world, although she increasingly turned her back on that context.