How California's counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s profoundly
shaped--and was shaped by--West Coast artists
The 1960s exert a special fascination in modern art. But most accounts
miss the defining impact of the period's youth culture, largely
incubated in California, on artists who came of age in that decade. As
their prime exemplar, Bruce Conner, reminisced, "I did everything that
everybody did in 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury. . . . I would take peyote
and walk out in the streets." And he vividly channeled those experiences
into his art, while making his mark on every facet of the psychedelic
movement--from the mountains of Mexico with Timothy Leary to the rock
ballrooms of San Francisco to the gilded excesses of the New Hollywood.
In The Artist in the Counterculture, Thomas Crow tells the story of
California art from the 1960s to the 1980s--some of the strongest being
made anywhere at the time--and why it cannot be understood apart from
the new possibilities of thinking and feeling unleashed by the rebels of
the counterculture.
Crow reevaluates Conner and other key figures--from Catholic activist
Corita Kent to Black Panther Emory Douglas to ecological witness Bonnie
Ora Sherk--as part of a generational cohort galvanized by resistance to
war, racial oppression, and environmental degradation. Younger
practitioners of performance and installation carried the mindset of
rebellion into the 1970s and 1980s, as previously excluded artists of
color moved to the forefront in Los Angeles. Mike Kelley, their
contemporary, remained unwaveringly true to the late countercultural
flowering he had witnessed at the dawn of his career.
The result is a major new account of the counterculture's enduring
influence on modern art.
