The Only Exit Is The One You Can't See With Your Eyes

SERIES OF DREAMS - BOB DYLAN

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TATE.ORG.UK​

Hold Still Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern

Liz Jobey

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Photography was adopted by artists particularly in that fertile period of the 1960s and early 1970s when the traditional genres of painting and sculpture were under attack. Art was splintering into new forms that included performance, dance, video, installation, happenings, body art, land art and photography, and artists needed a record. Pop had dispensed with the single image as artists reacted against the claims of uniqueness and value made by easel painting. Consumerism, advertising, celebrity and irony were the subjects to explore; appropriation and multiples the emerging forms. For post-minimal and conceptual artists interested in serial imagery, the document and the record, the camera was the perfect tool. The ‘unskilled’ photograph, as Lawrence Alloway called it in his introduction to his self-described ‘exhibition/ catalogue’ Artists and Photographs 1970, only underscored the belief that the idea was more important than the image. At the same time art was becoming political, exploring identity, gender, media manipulation and issues of social and economic class. For artists, the camera came into its own as an instrument that could document and make widely available pictures of events and artworks that were never intended to hang on a museum wall.

This shift had been predicted by Allan Kaprow – often credited as the instigator of the ‘happening’ (though Klein might take issue with that) – in his essay The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, published in 1958, two years after Pollock’s death. At this point, Kaprow wrote

Artists must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street… we should utilise the specific substances of sound, movements, people, odours, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists… Young artists of today need no longer say, “I am a painter” or “a poet” or “a dancer”. They are simply artists. All of life will be open to them’

For those working in New York in the late 1960s, one of the crucial factors in their development was geographic. As the industrial areas of Lower Manhattan were listed for demolition, artists rented cheap loft space that doubled as studios to present their work. The derelict streets, river piers and rooftops became the spaces where art was acted out and photographed. This coincided exactly with the period in which Shunk-Kender were at their most active.

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