The Turning Point:
Art and Politics in Nineteen Sixty-eight
20th Anniversary

November 10, 1988-January 14, 1989

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1968 was an extraordinary year both in political history and in the history of art. In a decade of radical change, '68 perhaps more than any other year, was one of upheaval, transformation, the breaking of boundaries. Politically, a series of violent events shook the nation: the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy; the bloody demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago; student riots and the takeover of the campus at Columbia. 1968 was a turning point. In the course of the year, the national mood shifted from relative confidence and optimism to dismay at the intractability of social problems and the war, at the violence of both the right and the left, and at the manifest rents in the social fabric.

The art world shared the experience of the country as a whole. In the course of the year, numerous artists became political activists, not only on the national level, but within the art world itself. In formal terms, too, much of the art first made or shown in 1968 seems to reveal a transformation as profound as that in the political climate. Gallery exhibitions and theoretical writings defined radical new aesthetic initiatives. Conceptual art challenged the premises of modernism, attempting a far-reaching redefinition of the nature of art. The appearance of new media, new modes of organization, and a generation of young, iconoclastic artists suggested the emergence of a new sensibility.

According to Craig Owens, one of the most cogent theoreticians of postmodernism, "Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization . . . characterized much of the art of the present and distinguished it from its predecessors" (October, Spring 1980). These strategies also characterized much of the new art of 1968. The disappearance of distinction between painting and sculpture; the use of unconventional industrial and natural materials; the use of real objects or photographic images in place of illusionistic representation; combinations of word and image; site-specific art; emphasis on the artist's process and the relationship of the observer to the work in real space; the use of appropriated images and period style-al I these characteristics of the art of 1968 are now current practice in 1988.

We are most grateful to the artists, galleries, museums and collectors who loaned works which have enabled us to recapture the spirit of the 1968 art scene. Benny Andrews, Mel Bochner, Rafael Ferrer, Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner were particularly generous in sharing their recollections. Corinne Robins, Robert Rosenblum, and Irving Sandler also provided invaluable advice. Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, and Dennis Oppenheim generously supplied us with documentation of seminal site-specific works, and Richard Artschwager with information needed to reconstruct some of his early objects. We wish to thank Professor Irwin Unger of New York University for his perceptive historical analysis of the political events in 1968, which forms an important part of this catalogue.

This exhibition could not have been organized without the assistance of Susan Hoeltzel, Molly Sullivan and Sally Webster of the Lehman College Art Gallery, Roger Welch, whose selection of videotapes contributed greatly to the project, and above all, our splendid Intern, Virginia Cupiola, whose persistent research and exceptional administrative abilities were absolutely essential to the organization of the show.

Nor would the project have been possible without the support of The Progressive Companies, of Cleveland, Ohio, The Cleveland Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, The Ohio Arts Council, as well as of the Herbert and Edith Lehman Foundation, and Friends of the Lehman College Art Gallery.
We would also like to thank Michael Sundell and especially Anselm Talalay for their vital contributions to the creation of this catalogue.

The exhibition "The Turning Point: Art and Politics in 1968" celebrates the founding, twenty years ago, of the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art by the two of us with the encouragement and support of Agnes Gund. It likewise marks the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of Lehman College of The City of New York. In fact it was the coincidence of these two anniversaries that planted the original seed for the project. The exhibition opens in Cleveland on September 9 1988 and moves to the Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York, on November 10th. The Cleveland showing coincides with the Center's Fall Lecture Series which will address this year similar issues as the exhibition. The distinguished speakers are Seymour Hersh, Adrian Piper, Robert Rosenblum, and Leo Castelli.

Nina Castelli Sundell, Director, Lehman College Art Gallery


Marjorie Talalay, Director, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art

Works in the Exhibition