The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge

288 Pages·2023·26.484 MB·English

by  Thomas Crow

The Artist in the Counterculture

The Artist in the Counterculture

Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley
and Other Tales from the Edge
thomas crow
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2023 by Thomas Crow
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Jacket front Jean Conner, The Temptation of Saint Wallace (detail), 1963, collage, 50.8 × 38.1 cm,
Collection San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase
Jacket back Bruce Conner, hand-painted lightshow transparency, c. 1967, 5 × 5 cm,
courtesy Conner Family Trust
Page ii Bonnie Ora Sherk, Sitting Still (Golden Gate Bridge), 1971
Pages vi–vii “Artists Against Escalation” protest at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 16 May 1965,
photograph by Charles Brittin, Charles Brittin Collection, Getty Research Library, Los Angeles
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Crow, Thomas E., 1948– author.
Title: The artist in the counterculture : Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and
other tales from the edge / Thomas Crow.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2023] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022002244 (print) | LCCN 2022002245 (ebook) | ISBN
9780691236162 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780691236261 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art and society—California—History—20th century. |
Counterculture—California.
Classification: LCC N72.S6 C76 2023 (print) | LCC N72.S6 (ebook) | DDC
701/.03—dc23/eng/20220709
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002244
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002245
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Designed by Gillian Malpass
This book has been composed in Adelle and Adelle Sans
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in Italy
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
contents
Prologue Neuroplasticity 1
One Peyote Frontier 13
Two Movies and Mexico 35
Three Boston and the Leary Lure 49
Four Psychedelphic Oracle 69
Five Living up to Their Reputations 85
Six Bearing Witness to War 97
Seven From War Abroad to Oppression at Home 113
Eight Toward 1970: “The Ever-Deepening Spiral of Politics” 135
Nine The Art of Disappearance 149
Ten Noir Vortex 171
Eleven Secret Ceremonies 201
Twelve Last Artist of the Counterculture 225
Notes 250
Acknowledgments 266
Index 268
Illustration and Copyright Credits 278

1 Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form
(Kunsthalle Bern, 1969), installation photograph,
Harald Szeemann Papers. Photographs. Series IV.A. Projects,
Getty Research Library, Los Angeles
prologue
neuroplasticity
In the history of adventurously experimental art, the year 1969 is arguably
marked by one event above all others. That year, the young curator Harald Szeemann, newly
entrusted with the civic exhibition space in the city of Bern, sought to assemble evidence
for a wave in art that he perceived but had escaped general recognition. To that end, he
assembled works of sculpture by no less than sixty-nine artists from across Europe and both
coasts of the United States.1 His inclusiveness extended to inviting a significant share of the
participants to gather in the staid Swiss locale in order to install work on site and engage in
protracted discussion, as far as the polyglot crew could manage, in a colloquy over the funda-
mental character and function of art.
The invited artists ranged from Joseph Beuys, the established master of the Düsseldorf
Academy and advocate for art’s transformation into “social sculpture,” to the largely untried
Keith Sonnier, raised in the Cajun backwoods of Louisiana, who was inspired to try out neon
light as a medium for the first time and so discovered his career-long signature material.
Other participants, like the Californian Bruce Nauman and the Italian Mario Merz, had gotten
to tubular illumination before him, which proved one of a number of rhymes and resonances
that knit the show into a unified visual statement, one that amply confirmed Szeemann’s
intuition that some coherent tendency existed. Apart from scattered neon highlights and some
shards of reflective glass, however, the overall look tended to a drab gray, ochre, and brown
palette, the material textures rough and unrefined, their disposition sprawling and uncon-
strained by any expected definition of formal integrity (fig. 1).
Their curator attempted rationalizing the ensemble with this run-on list of attributes: “the
obvious opposition to form; the high degree of personal and emotional engagement; the pro-
nouncement that certain objects are art, although they have not previously been identified as
such; the shift of interest away from the result towards the artistic process; the use of mun-
dane materials; the interaction of work and material; Mother Earth as medium, workplace,
the desert as concept.”2 Albeit disjointed, this list can stand for what has become the consensus
view of this moment of “process” or “anti-form” in western art, down to the contemporaneous
excursions into large-scale land art by Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Smith-
son, who were all three represented in the show by cognate, gallery-scaled contributions.
2 Cover of the exhibtion catalogue for
Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head:
When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969),
collection of the author
Indeed, Szeemann’s exhibition has retained landmark status for what seems to have been an
uncannily moment-defining prescience.
The only element that has failed to survive in received wisdom is the actual main title of the
whole exercise: Live in Your Head. Those four words had been proffered by the young, long-
haired Sonnier, to be happily adopted by Szeemann, who bannered them on the cover and
title page of the catalogue (fig. 2). But in historical recollection, it is the latter’s subtitle,
When Attitudes Become Form, that is invariably cited, sometimes along with the sub-
subtitle, Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information. Reasons suggest themselves as to
why Sonnier’s pithy exhortation has effectively been erased in some collective act of willful
2 the artist in the counterculture