Summer 2018 MMoCA newsletter

EXHIBITIONS
FAR OUT: ART FROM THE 1960s
Main galleries • On view through Sep 2, 2018
MMoCA Opening Friday, June 1 • 6–9 PM
The Sixties was a decade of radical experimentation that witnessed an incredible cultural and artistic revolution. The
consumer-fueled optimism of the beginning of the decade was quickly dissolved by the Vietnam War, world-wide
protests, and nightmarish assassinations—all televised into living rooms across the globe. The world was watching
and it wasn’t long before a counterculture formed that rejected the conservativism of the previous generation. Far
Out explores works from MMoCA’s permanent collection—by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Miriam Schapiro,
Andy Warhol, Victor Vasarely, and the Chicago Imagists—created during the decade that popularized such art
historical movements as Pop, Op, Minimalism, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art.
While the turmoil of the decade influenced artists to create politicized works, they were also rejecting art historical
precedents and developing a counterculture of their own. Seeking to expunge the emotive and gestural brushstrokes
that dominated the “artist as hero” mentality of Abstract Expressionism, artists were choosing to forgo an
autobiographical narrative in favor of more formal and conceptual explorations.
Building upon the readymade object introduced by Marcel Duchamp—the idea that the artist defines what is art,
and even a urinal could be submitted for exhibition—British artists like Allen Jones began incorporating commercial
imagery from American advertising. Jones used images from the seedy backpages of mail order catalogs to blur
the line between fine art and commercial art. Not long after, American artists like Andy Warhol were screenprinting
replicas of Brillo boxes. Warhol noted, “Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could
recognize in a split second…all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice.”
Optical art also gained popularity in the Sixties. Op artist Victor Vasarely wanted his geometric abstractions to
be seen as democratized imgaes for the unbiased filter of the human eye—everyone had the potential to see the
illusion regardless of their social standing. Soon Op art began to appear on everything from furniture to clothing
and was quickly associated with the new mod style of the Sixties.
The prodigious artistic production of the ‘60s, with its varied but often complementary ideologies, challenges
any generalization that can be made about the decade as a whole. What remains, however, is the extraordinary
innovation and social awareness imbued in these works of art that paved the way for contemporary artists of today.
Far Out features a 1960s living room furnished by Rewind Decor of Madison and is part of the larger celebration
of the Sixties organized by The Madison Reunion taking place in June 2018; find out more at madisonreunion.com.
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Generous funding for Far Out has been provided by MillerCoors; The DeAtley Family Foundation; National
Guardian Life Insurance Company; Gina and Michael Carter; The Terry Family Foundation; Chuck Bauer and
Chuck Beckwith; the Frank family - Larry, Marla, Fred and Holly; Diane Seder and Bruce Rosen; Deirdre Garton;
Rewind Decor; a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National
Endowment for the Arts; and MMoCA Volunteers.