The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968-1981
Conceptual Art, Earth Works, Video and Installation
Dec 2, 2008
Poet and critic Corinne Robins wrote The Pluralist Era (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1984 ISBN 0-06-430137-0) from the perspective of a recent participant in the 1970s New York art world. Without the distance of time, her connection to the early post-modern era was still very real. Despite this familiarity, Robins didn't neglect to thoroughly research her book's subject matter – each chapter includes endnotes, with anywhere from fifty to ninety-plus citations.
SoHo and the Seventies
Although the book can be read out of consecutive order – the chapters are not chronological – the first chapter does serve as a brief introduction. Modernism, with its celebration of the heroic individual, was replaced by a multitude of new art forms and strategies. Henceforth, motivations for making work varied widely and were sometimes political in nature. The locus of this activity was SoHo, in lower Manhattan.
Earth Sculptures, Site Works...
Ironically, some of the most distinctive work being made in the '70s could not be made or shown in New York, but demanded the wide open spaces of the Southwest, or even bodies of water like Australia's Little Bay. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty from 1970 is emblematic of this activity: it used the material that existed at the site, i.e. dirt, sand, and rocks. The artwork is a subtraction, a carving, a rearranging, rather than placing an object into or onto the space.
... and Installations
Many of the installations of the '70s were also concerned with changing the look and feel of interior spaces, rather than simply placing or putting an artwork into a room. Unlike earth works, installations could exist within the confines of a gallery space. One exemplary early piece discussed in The Pluralist Era, Walter De Maria's The New York Earth Room, found a permanent home on Wooster Street in 1980, where it can still be visited today.
Art and Politics
The chapter on political art is chiefly concerned with the emergence of Black and female artists. Some of the artists covered make work that is feminist, or that addresses issues of race, and some of them don't. Others view civil rights and the women's movement as part of a larger critique of abuses of power. Nancy Spero, for instance, is an early feminist artist whose work is also very political, and her anti-war activism has influenced her output.
Photography
The last chapter of The Pluralist Era includes a long consideration of serial narrative photography, a somewhat surprising choice. Included here are Duane Michals, Eve Sonneman, and Lucas Samaras. Sonneman's diptychs, poetic abstractions of time passing in urban life, were published as a book, Real Time, in 1976. Robert Mapplethorpe, whose ultra-formalism has often been eclipsed by the provocative content of his imagery, is also given consideration.
Video and Performance
Combining music, video, performance, and sculpture, Nam June Paik created conceptual work that remains exciting and engaging decades later. He dominates Robins's video discussion, but no images of his work are included. William Wegman's Elephant is here, though – an embarrassing end to a serious book. The picture is followed by a few pages on Joseph Beuys, which only adds to the confusion: he wasn't an American artist, nor did he ever work in the States.
When Corinne Robins wrote The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968-1981, she sought to illustrate the explosion in artistic practices which took place as modernism came to an end. She succeeded in doing so: earth works, installation, video, performance, political art are all covered, as well as abstraction, photorealism, and decorative painting. Apparently plurality is best documented not long after it all happened.
Robins, Corinne. The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968-1981. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1984. ISBN 0-06-430137-0
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