Università Roma Tre

The Seventies compose a panorama of great richness and complexity in which artistic experiences appear to have a problematic and expressive force that makes them resolutely relevant. The artists' activity was very frank in the face of the social and political contradictions of the time, investigating the mechanisms of mass consensus or personal identity in its sexual and relational articulations, or even the use of space and natural resources, the organization of political and economic life, violence, war, all themes that keep visibly intact, and indeed have increased their problematic and conflictual charge in our globalized world.

The common element of all the artistic experiences of the decade is undoubtedly the awareness that art is a code, a collective construction, that its realizations, the spaces it occupies (the "white cube"), the judgments and reactions it provokes in the public, have certain possibilities and belong to a fully historical and cultural order. The art of this period tries to "escape" from its specialized field, to abandon traditional techniques, to invest the real space, both that of the city and the natural one, to deconstruct the mechanisms of social and political consensus, to question the conscious and unconscious mechanisms that contribute to form the personality and identity.

All this concerns both artists directly involved in the conceptual current (which preferably uses verbal language as a means of expression), such as Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner, but also those, such as Bruce Nauman, Daniel Buren, Dennis Oppenheim, Douglas Huebler and Franco Vaccari, use other media, and finally touch what has been defined as the "expanded field" of art, that is, the set of experiences that acts outside the limits of the gallery and museum and the same tradition of "anthropocentric", in particular of sculpture. Emblematic figures of this trend are Joseph Beuys, Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, authors of some of the most memorable works of those years, with their characteristic mixture of poetic visionaryness and philosophical reflexive, or even Hans Haacke, with his "investigations" of an explicitly political slant, and Christo, with his (anti)monumental interventions. In Italy, artists close to Arte Povera, such as Merz, Kounellis, Penone, Fabro and Boetti, reflect on time, cosmic and psychic energy in original forms and materials; others, such as Fabio Mauri, investigate historical memory and the political dimension; others, such as Gino De Dominicis and Vettor Pisani, explore allegory and tableau vivant.

In the 1970s, the body was the other epicentre of artistic research, thanks to the work of performers who staged, like Marina Abramović and Ulay, their psychological and erotic interaction, or the dangerous condition in force in a social space dominated by violence, as in the case of Californian Chris Burden, or who linked themselves to the positions of the feminist liberation movement, questioning, as in the cases of Gina Pane, Valie Export, Ketty La Rocca and Hannah Wilke, the stereotypes of female identity. All these examples in which the restlessness, mobility and unconventional inventiveness that make up the unmistakable figure of an extraordinarily vital decade are fully manifested.

Hal Foster et al., Art since 1900, Thames & Hudson (1945-1980)
annisettanta, Skira, Milano 2007 [PDF]
Anne Rorimer, New art in the 60 and 70s, Thames and Hudson 2001, pp. 194-274: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zivvzz76w32cu75/New%20Art%20in%20the%2060%27s%20and%2070%27s.pdf?dl=0