Shifting Ground: Street Art of the 1960s and '70s by Frazer Ward discusses the status of the streets role in art, but also how the street represented a public space for protest culture and counterculture. Ward explains that the '60s and '70s was a time when the street became a place of performance for artists who explored the anti-normative behavior within the public space. Artists that Ward starts off by using decollage artists jacques de la Villegle and Raymond Hains to as evidence of the street as art.
In 122 rue temple Villegle and Hains took street posters from the address 122 rue du temple which then became the title of the piece, and tore it down in pieces and reassembled it on canvas. Artist Claes Oldenburgs The Street is discussed in how it deals with the urban renewal projects of Greenwich Village by using banal and discarded materials to create
elaborate sculptures. In Fluxus artist George Maclunas's performance piece Street Cleaning Event Ward writes about how the space that the piece is being performed changes the meaning of the piece radically. When the piece was performed in Tokyo it was meant to reference the
Japanese government's emphasis on cleaning the city for the Olympics that were coming to the city, bringing in to question the governments priorities. But when the piece was performed in Brooklyn, "it becomes a humorous and absurdist encounter between the daily activity of
cleaning and the endless context of the street." writes Ward.
George Maciunas, documentation of Hi Red Center
performing Street Cleaning Event at Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn, 1966.
Ward writes about artists such as Valie Export and Yoko Ono who created art that brought
into question the female in the street, whether it be about the objectification of the female body
or the supposed danger the street environment purposes for women. In Export's piece
Touch Cinema she goes out into the street with a "cinema" strapped to her torso, with curtains.
She then with the help of a male friend encourages men to reach in and feel her breasts for real.
Yoko Ono's film Rape shows not only how the street can be threatening, but also how the
camera itself is a threatening device to the young woman that is being stalked or "raped"
by it.
For the artist Vito Acconci's Following Piece he followed a person at random out on the
streets daily, where ever that person may go for however long it takes for the person to enter a
space such as a home or business. Acconci let go of control as to where the street would take
him, he hands that control over to the person that he was following.
Vito Acconci Following Piece, 1969
In Lytle Shaw's The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City she begins by telling the reader what Henry James thought of New York City after a twenty-one year absences from the city. James sees the city as lacking an permanence and Shaw describes what James feels of New York City's ability to destroy the old and put up the new as, "a sequence of abrupt melting's and just-as-sudden solidifications." James felt that the tall skyscrapers that began to dwarf the small structures within the city only allowed him to imagine the
monstrosity that would follow in its place.
Artists that Shaw writes about who were making art about the demolition of buildings in New York City, whether it be the literal destruction of them with the film Pendulum or photographers such as Danny Lyons who photographs showed the changing views of New York City, were all about a city go through a massive change.
Danny Lyon, Brick Crew on West Side
In Charles Simmons work Shaw sees it as inviting both exploration and removal, it shows actual ruins with the tiny dwelling that he constructs amongst crumbling buildings. In the film Dwellings Winter (1974) made by Rudy Burckhardt, documenting Simonds constructing his dwellings, Shaw sees it as showing how Simonds manages the ruins spatially, with his finished art work that is contained in the ruins that is the neighborhood itself. Through out the film Simonds continues working on his dwellings amongst the chaos of the city that surrounds his work, from a car burning and the fire department coming to put it out, to music playing, children running around, and construction noises. None of this seems to distract him from continuing to constructing his dwellings within the space destroyed buildings.
In all the readings this week the street not only becomes a space to document, but also a space to create art in. The street becomes a canvas for many of these artists, Simonds does this by utilizing the buildings that are crumbling and creating a new dwelling within it. While others like Acconci and Export place themselves physically in the street and interact with it as a performance. These artists all begin to question what the street is, especially whether that space is public or private.
