1968 in Art and Culture

Breaking through boundaries is part of the logic of avant-garde movements in modern art. In the course of the 20. century the boundaries of that which constitutes a picture or a sculpture were gradually shifted until they reached the point where the institutional conditions and prerequisites of art itself were called into question.

In the 1960s art was literally set in motion. Beyond the rigid categories of painting and sculpture, there emerged with the so-called action arts hybrid forms that emphasised the openness and the processuality, the contingency and the continuity – thus aiming, not least, to breathe new life into a Modernity paralysed by conventions. In retrospect the currents then emerging such as Fluxus, Happenings, Concept Art or Performance appear as symptoms of a change in which new possibilities of art were tried and tested. The trend veered away from the completed work towards the “open work of art” (Umberto Eco), from the static object to the dynamic process, from the contemplative reception to the active participation of the beholder. The term “inter-media” characterises the intersecting aspect with regard to media and genre of these activities. And indeed, interest was focused on the “in-between”, on the creative exploration of empty spaces, of the still uncharted territory between aesthetic norms and presentation conventions – and, not least, also on the resultant new forms of reception.

Art=Life

Much of that which set the art of the Federal Republic of Germany in motion back then occurred within the framework of Fluxus, a movement which, inspired by the ideas of the composer John Cage, propagated the removal of barriers and the dissolution of the individual art genres under the primacy of music. George Maciunas, a Lithuanian immigrant to the USA and head of the Fluxus group, came to Germany in 1961 as a civilian employee of the US Air Force. Here he got to know Emmett Williams, who was working for a military newspaper in Darmstadt. Together with Nam June Paik and Karlheinz Stockhausen, both of whom were then beginning to experiment with new possibilities in music in the studio for electronic music of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, and with Wolf Vostell, the first so-called “action music” evenings took place. These were a mixture of performance inserts, Dadaist provocations and deployment of instruments. As an explicitly temporal medium, music fulfilled precisely the criteria of the avant-garde agenda: processuality, immateriality, dynamic and change. From the experiments at WDR and the activities of the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal there emerged the Fluxus festivals, which began in 1962 in Wiesbaden and then continued in Copenhagen, Paris, Düsseldorf and Amsterdam. The performances of the Fluxus artists were called "concerts" even if they had little in common with music in the conventional sense. Among the artists who were greatly influenced by the new ideas was Joseph Beuys. His vision of a unity between the artist and society can be traced back to the Fluxus concerts and finds self-explanatory expression in the formula art=life life=art.

That the equation of art and life was not merely an empty formula for an avant-garde movement that was otherwise compatible with the art business but had very real political implications, can be seen not least in the renaming of the Deutsche Studentenpartei into FLUXUS ZONE WEST in the year 1968. As Professor at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf Beuys had founded the party in the previous year as a reaction to the death of the student Benno Ohnesorg, who had been shot dead during a protest demonstration against the visit of the Shah in Berlin in 1967.

Interaction and Participation

While Fluxus focussed primarily on group activities, the “happening” defined itself explicitly through the participation of the audience. The spectator became a participant. This was often not possible without a great deal of noise and hullabaloo since the spectator first had to be lured out of his passivity. Within the framework of the seven-hour happening in the German city of Ulm In Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum (1964) Wolf Vostell, Fluxus artist and one of the founders of the happening, had a willing audience driven by bus to various places where the individual persons were confronted by activity instructions and integrated in predetermined courses of action. Stopovers included a car-washing service, a public swimming pool, an arable field – and a military airport defined as a concert hall. Shock – since Dada and Surrealism an established means of disrupting bourgeois complacency – became the strategy of a liberation from traditional patterns of perception and aesthetic parameters of taste. Wolf Vostell saw these actions as “experiments on life” which tested a changed view of everyday life, and with topics such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the building of the Berlin Wall revealed the dark sides of the prospering German post-war society.

Macho Gestures

Nevertheless: the avant-garde of that era was by no means as revolutionary as it claimed. The abolition of the artist-subject was no more achieved than was the renunciation of art as a marketable unicum. In fact various forms of chauvinism and authoritarian gestures thrived and prospered in these very groups. This can be seen quite clearly, for example, in the negligible number of women in the circles of Fluxus and “happenings”. To be precise, there were only two female artists – Alison Knowles and Yoko Ono. On the other hand, however, there were any number of naked female bodies that were constantly used as optical stimuli within the framework of concerts and actions, and in combination with the conventionally clothed male artists manifested the continuation of a truly classic interaction model: that of the artist and his muse.