“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” — Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967We're in the midst of another 1960s moment. As the United States heads toward a presidential election in which the Republican candidate is incumbent and conservative policies are everywhere ascendant, the cultural expression of liberal politics seems more focused on the heyday of three decades ago than on current problems. Think of Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary The Weather Underground, the Strokes, White Stripes, and Bruce Mau's Institute Without Boundaries; Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, Bernando Bertolucci's The Dreamers, and Susan Choi's novel American Woman. In the visual arts, the trend is equally pronounced. Consider the ever-growing section of your bookshelf dedicated to Robert Smithson; the 2004 Whitney Biennial and “Utopia Station” at last year's Venice Biennale; Pamela M. Lee's Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s; the critical reevaluation of older artists like Jœlius Koller; and the current practices of Andrea Bowers, Sam Durant, assume vivid astro focus, Carol Bove, Felix Gmelin, and many others. Whether the historical torch they carry is utopian, psychedelic, countercultural, tied to social protest, or blends all these things together, the number of artists addressing this phase of our history is approaching something like critical mass. What makes the 60s ripe for such intense cultural examination now? Whitney Biennial curator Debra Singer described the current spate of artistic activity as nostalgic, and attributed it to the similarities between then and now, with tumultuous political, social, and cultural events of the previous era (along with its visual lexicon) functioning as sites for the displacement of “contemporary problems, anxieties, and hopes.”
But this time there's more to it: the artists (and art historians) now coming to prominence belong to the first generation that experienced the events of “The Sixties”—a period that can roughly be defined as the decade stretching for five years in either direction from the watershed events of 1968—second hand. They were too young be directly involved but not so young that they didn't understand what was happening. Dimly aware of what their parents were doing at the protests, they absorbed events unfolding live on TV, and this once-removed point of view perhaps accounts for the fact that many of the artworks use appropriation as a basic strategy. Their recuperative gestures are an attempt to bring forward fragments of the milieu—the last golden age of protest for social change—in which they were raised. The current turn toward the 1960s can be viewed as an attempt to revitalize a liberal tradition in decades-long decline.
Adam Gopnik, reviewing several new histories of World War I in a recent New Yorker article, observed that it is only now—ninety years later—that a definitive understanding of the war is emerging. It has taken almost a century for history to become History. The events of the past thirty to forty years, then, must still be subject to revision, to expansions and contractions of meaning and relevance. Because few people now living were active participants in the Great War, it has calcified in our cultural consciousness; the smaller wars of the 1960s—social battles over racial, sexual, and gender equality, among other causes—are embodied, literally, in still-living participants. Avant-gardes and countercultural movements are necessarily short-lived, as their complete success also marks their demise, but we never closed the case on the 1960s countercultural project. The writing, music, filmmaking, art historical scholarship, and art practices now exploring that moment can therefore also be seen as test balloons sent out into the cultural atmosphere to be corroborated or shot down: These are the first steps toward a History of the era.
Recent artworks by Carol Bove (born 1971) and Andrea Bowers (born 1965) offer a core sample of this wider practice. Bove's signature sculptures are meticulously arranged accumulations of books, magazines, furniture, and other objects one might find in the home of any socially conscious, left-leaning individual living at the tail end of the 60s (or, in Bove's case, a Berkeley, California, household in the early 1970s). They present a highly selective (and therefore personal) engagement with the material culture of the era. The titles of her works, most often derived from the title of a publication included in the sculpture, read like signposts in the field of key concerns of the time: How People Get Power, Adventures in Poetry, The Look of Thought; The Ways of Love, Touching, Tomorrow Never Knows, Black Rage, When Attitudes Become Form. Bove freely mixes the overtly political with the dreamily spiritual, and much of her work engages issues of “consciousness raising.” Whether spiritual or psychotropic, it is an apt metaphor for what we ideally take away from an encounter with a work of art. But Bove's intent is disguised by oblique explanations of her ambitions. She says: “I want to make a lot of space in my work [for others]”; “I think about encoding objects with information and then organizing the information into patterns.” The arrangements are made with an eye toward the aesthetic; the content, as it were, is rooted in our ability to navigate the associative links implied by her groupings.
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