Total Art [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE Towards a Total Art A flower-headed woman feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square in 1936 A concert of factory hooters in Russia in 1922 Yves Klein throwing gold-dust given him for a piece ofthe Void' into the Seine Allan Kaprow's melting palaces of ice-blocks m city streets Christo packaging a section of the Australian coastline Claes Oldenburg proposing to cover Manhattan with a giant ironing- board An enormous jetty spiralling into a lake, the water inside stained red with algae Black Mask renaming Wall Street 'War Street' These are some of the most important images in twentieth-century art. They are also among the least well known. The common quality all these activities share is their awkwardness, their inability to fit into a preconceived artistic framework. Not only are they as important, in my view, as any 'conventional' painting or sculpture; they also spring from a well-defmed tradition. Before trying to give some idea of the vast range of activities taking place today in the field of environmental art, it will be necessary first to look at some of the more important elements of this tradition. The divorce between 'fine' and 'folk' art, and also between handmade object and physical ritual, is of course a recent one in historical terms. The isolated, individual artist, the unique, irreplaceable object, have been a part ofthe human consciousness for about two thousand years: for how much longer has art as magic, as ritual, as disposable object, as body-adornment, been part of our heritage ? In a fascinating book about the tribes of the Mount Hagen area of New Guinea,^ Andrew and Marilyn Strathern describe an art that exists only in terms of bodily adornment; these tribes practise no pottery, no carving, no decoration of homes or burial-grounds; and yet there are very precise, defined rules, traditions, prohibitions governing their art. Each colour, each form, each object used, has a definite significance. Red can mean success in war, black aggression. A chevron has a