After May: Paula Cooper's Inaugural Show, 1968

During the auction house bidding already begun over at Artworld Salon, we have to fess up to an artworld driven as much by history and the engaged dialogue of criticism as by the numbers game. That this awareness hits us in May 2008, the 40th year anniversary of May 1968, is the sad fact of our war and disaster-ridden time. Reading Arthur Danto’s take on the student take-over of Columbia doesn’t assuage the mood. He writes, “I have a kind of theory that when great social changes are about to take place, something happens in the arts first - think of Romanticism and the French Revolution...” and that “Columbia students back then had little interest in advanced art as such.”*

In France they already thought they knew this about America. The 1966 student manifesto “On the Poverty of Student Life” explains that Americans did not have a theory and as a result their actions ‘were spontaneous mass movements which collapsed because they proved incapable of grasping more than the incidental aspects of alienation,”and that American students would never come to understand that everyday life is controlled by the “psycho-humanist police force.”** Because the events of May were so huge in Paris, and artists so involved, artists there were faced with how to continue to practice on the heels of May - one example is that the Comite du Salon de la Jeune Peinture committed itself to the Communist Party, desiring to continue the project of the Atelier Populiare to change the structure of the artist’s relation to capital.

In the New York October of 1968, Paula Cooper’s inaugural gallery show was the “Exhibition to Benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.” Along with Lucy Lippard and Ron Wolin the exhibition was primarily curated by Robert Huot, whose work was at that time traveling in “The Art of the Real,” MoMA’s USIA-funded show, just closed in September and about to open in Paris. Lucy Lippard described the Paula Cooper show as “a kind of protest show against the potpourri peace shows with all those burned doll’s heads,” and the first benefit exhibition of non-objective art.*** The statement of the exhibition was that:

“These fourteen non-objective artists are against the war in Vietnam. They are supporting this commitment by contributing major examples of their current work. The artists and the particular pieces were selected to represent a particular aesthetic attitude in the conviction that a cohesive group of important works makes the most forceful statement for peace.”

In appealing to an aesthetic attitude the artists were likely thinking of the recent exhibition curated by Barbara Rose, “Towards a New Aesthetic”, held at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967. Arguing that there is nothing to constitute a style or a school in the history of American art, Rose believed that the literalism Michael Fried condemned in “Art and Objecthood” was in fact a powerful moment in contemporary art and the measure of its success. E.C. Goossen’s “The Art of the Real,” soon followed, and there was overlap between artists in each, artists who were quite willing to adopt the rhetoric of “the real” as an expression of a specifically American “aesthetic attitude.”

However, the exhibition statement prompted critic Gregory Battcock to write that while he very much liked the exhibition, in these terms it might as well be a wine tasting or a fashion show, and that “We are, as usual, being sold a package. The Modern philosophy of Madison Avenue and the packaging technologist has become everyday fact.”****And Leo Steinberg was critical of the rhetoric of the real as well, in his lecture “Other Criteria,” read at MoMA only months before the opening of The Art of the Real, stating that contemporary art has become the technological research in which the art object ‘”is declared at last to be a real thing, possessed of more “reality” than mere art ever had.”*****

The language that surrounds this show - the curator’s desires to articulate what is art historically of note for their time, and the condemnation of these attempts as mere packaging for a growing market impressed by clean and technical professionalism, belong to it equally and are by now familiar. Responding in a quite physical way to the photo of Bill Bollinger’s floor-to-ceiling tension cable as sculpture, and to the art historical fact that it was in this show that Sol Lewitt made his very first wall drawings, I find this divide to be a curious moment in the history of American art, a moment in which to have an aesthetic attitude was at the same time to get real.

As a “cohesive group of important works,” standing together to fund student opposition to war, does such an attitude count for something more than what any of these works might bring in todays auctions?

The artists: Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Robert Barry, Bill Bollinger, Dan Flavin, Robert Huot, Will Insley, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, Doug Ohlson, Robert Ryman.

By Catherine Spaeth


*Arthur C. Danto, “Before the Revolution,” in Artforum, May 2008, p. 100.
**Members of the Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg, “On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in it’s Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for its Remedy,” in Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968, texts collected by Dark Star, London, :A/K Press, c. 2001, p. 26.
***As quoted by Grace Glueck, Artnotes, Sunday October 27th, 1968.
****Gregory Battcock, “Reviewing the Above Statement,” in New York Free Press Critique, 31, October 1968.
Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other criteria, NY: Oxford University press, c. 1972, p. 1963.

Image Credits: Installation views from "Exhibition to Benefit Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam," October 1968. Installation 1, Will Insley, Jo Baer; Installation 2, Carl Andre, Doug Ohlson; Installation 3, Robert Huot, Dan Flavin; Installation 4, Robert Mangold, Bill Bollinger, and Donald Judd. All images courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery.