Introduction

About the 1980s

Critical Perspectives

The 80s Scene

As we formulate the art history of the late twentieth century, the 1980s are clearly a crucial turning point. Neo-Expressionism, New Image painting, the East Village scene, graffiti art, and neo-conceptualism were a few of the movements that reached zeniths of varying heights and vulnerability during the era. It was a period of boom and bust; twenty-six-year-old painters became glamorous superstars who couldn't make work fast enough for their corporate buyers. In a decade of Reagonomics-driven conspicuous consumption, the art world participated fully, promoting inflated prices and shooting star careers. Many of the artists who came to prominence in that era remain major figures in contemporary art.

The collection of the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University includes many artists who emerged during the era—such as Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Charles Clough, and Cindy Sherman—as well as older artists who had developed signature styles prior to the era, such as Arnold Mesches, Joan Mitchell, and Susan Rothenberg. Working in a wide range of media and styles, artists like Sherman, Robert Longo, David Salle, and Basquiat take contemporary culture—particularly mass media culture—as their subject matter. Although many observers hailed the movements of the 80s as a "return to painting," what matters about the most important art of this era is not physical media or technique, but an astute consciousness of art's role as a interpreter, reflector, and transformer of cultural information and the artists' rueful awareness of their own role as fodder for the mass culture mill.

As painter Charles Clough has said, "you sniff it out, you find, it, you eat it, and you are it." Co-founder (with Sherman, Longo, Michael Zwack, Diane Bertolo and Nancy Dwyer) of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, a trend-setting venue of the early 80s scene, Clough considers himself and his compatriots to be informed by the triple threat of television, popular cinema, and advertising. Rather than be completely seduced by the American dream, late capitalism style, Clough and others decided to hold a sassy mirror up to its face. In Clough's early 80s photocollages, the painter transforms glossy advertisements and art reproductions into creations both robotic and organic, combining the visceral act of fingerpainting with the cool distance of photography.

The act of appropriation is a strategy that has asserted itself throughout art history—even the academists of the eighteenth century deliberately "appropriated" certain figures and poses from former masters in order to do their own variations—but it became a common feature of postmodern practice. There are almost as many different variations of appropriation as there are artists who appropriate: Arnold Mesches paints from Polaroids, newspaper photographs, found objects, art history texts, and many other sources; Cindy Sherman appropriates poses and mise en scene from various film and video sources, skewing them so the theatrical images seem only vaguely familiar to us, and Barbara Kruger transfers images directly from their mass media sources, adding her own cryptic text.

The use of photography as a tool to reach a specific conceptual goal rather than a refined art form to be set apart from painting reached critical mass in the 80s, and is obvious in the work of Cindy Sherman, Charles Clough, Jim Pomeroy, Barbara Kruger, and many other artists of the era. In sculpture, works by Steve Currie, Tom Butter, Houston Conwill, and others reflect an eclectic attitude towards materials, an uninhibited ability to mix representational and abstract styles, and a desire to reflect the pop culture landscape.

In 80s painting, many artists—like Mesches—seemed to operate under the assumption that painting for its own sake was secondary to strengthening painting's relevance in a changing and contracting world. Fragmented elements of past styles are deliberately put into play in the works of Basquiat, David Salle, and Tim Rollins & KOS. These canny takes on painterly practice are closer to dialogues than statements. An open-minded search for painting's place in the electronic age replaced the previous modernist emphasis on the pure refinement of form and composition. Although most observers point to Basquiat's quotations from Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet, his use of text elements, "hobo" signals, and comic book heroes in conjunction with the quotations create a new paradigm in commentary on both form and culture.

Sometimes witty, sometimes dramatic, the artists of this era are keenly aware of past traditions and present pop culture. They have found idioms for expression that are at times jarringly confrontational, at other times more acquiescent to what we commonly think of as "art." Sadly some artists, including Haring and Basquiat, died far too early for the full power of their exuberant talents to be fully realized. To some, their deaths became a symbol for the frenzied pace of the era; to others, the work they left behind was proof enough of the era's substantial contribution to the progress of contemporary art into the twenty-first century.