more prolegomena: early 1963

[alice wellintown]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1952 Composer John Cage (1912–1992) creates his first performance
works in collaboration with dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham
(born 1919) at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Cage's ideas
about chance as a fundamental element of the artmaking process, along
with Duchamp's notion of the found object or readymade, will strongly
influence artists coming to maturity in the 1950s, including Robert
Rauschenberg (born 1925) and Jasper Johns (born 1930), who will make
his first flag painting in 1954.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1953 Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1961), Supreme Commander of
the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II, is
elected president of the U.S. and will serve until 1961.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1954 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that racial segregation is in
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This begins
a long struggle for Civil Rights for African Americans and other
minority groups in the U.S. that continues into the 1960s. The
movement's landmark events of the 1950s include the bus boycott
against racial segregation in Selma, Alabama (1955), and the school
desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas (1957).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1954 R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) exhibits a cardboard model of
his geodesic dome, a proposed solution to the need for quickly and
easily produced dwellings, at the Milan Triennale, which includes
architectural and urban projects.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1955 Simon Rodia (1879–1965) completes work on the Watts Towers in Los
Angeles, begun in 1921. Without formal architectural or engineering
training, Rodia built two towers more than 100 feet tall with steel
rods and hoops, and covered with a mosaic of found materials.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1956 Elvis Presley (1935–1977) releases his first number-one hit, the
song "Heartbreak Hotel." Many other hit songs will follow and Presley
will become known as the "King of Rock and Roll."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1957 Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) publishes On the Road, which makes him a
cult hero of the Beat movement.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1957 Tatyana Grosman (1904–1982) establishes Universal Limited Art
Editions (ULAE), a printmaking workshop, in West Islip, New York. ULAE
sets the standards for a postwar printmaking renaissance in the United
States.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1957 Leonard Bernstein's (1918–1990) musical West Side Story premieres
on Broadway. It is a popular retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story
in the guise of contemporary New York gang culture.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1958 The U.S. establishes the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), which leads to astronaut Alan Shepard's
(1923–1998) first manned American space flight in 1961.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1958 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
(1867–1959), opens in New York. Wright had begun working on the
commission for a building to house the Guggenheim's collection of
modernist art in 1943. The museum represents a sculpturally and
spatially rich use of concrete.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1959 The first public "happening" is produced by Allan Kaprow (born
1927) at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg are among the performers. Influenced by Jackson Pollock's
process of action painting, the teachings of John Cage on chance and
indeterminacy in art, and ultimately Dadaism, Kaprow defines a
happening as a choreographed event that facilitates spontaneous
interactions between objects—which include performers—and visitors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1960 John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) is elected president of the United
States, the first Catholic to hold the office. He serves until his
assassination in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald (1939–1963) in
1963. Kennedy's presidency is known as the "Camelot" era.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1960 The Minimalist movement begins and maintains an important place
in the art world for about a decade. Practitioners include Carl Andre
(born 1935), Robert Morris (born 1931), Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Brice
Marden (born 1938), Robert Ryman (born 1930), and others.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1961 Joseph Heller (1923–1999) publishes Catch-22, the author's first
novel set against the background of his experience in World War II as
a bombardier. The title becomes a catch-phrase to describe inescapable
situations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1961 The phrase "concept art" is first used by Henry Flynt (born
1940). It comes to have a more general application to the work of
artists Sol LeWitt (born 1928), Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), and others.
During the following decade, Conceptual and performance art
demonstrate the possibilities of making art without producing saleable
objects.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1962 The TWA terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), is
constructed at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The building's
poetic evocation of flight in its curving forms signals a turn away
from the austerity of mid-century high modernism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1962 Andy Warhol (1928–1987) paints Campbell's Soup Cans, a key work
of the Pop Art movement. Warhol and other artists associated with the
movement, including Claes Oldenburg (born 1929) and Roy Lichtenstein
(1923–1997), satirize Americans' voracious consumption of manufactured
products in the postwar period.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1962 Yale University's Art and Architecture Building, designed by Paul
Rudolph (1918–1997), opens. It is an important monument of New
Brutalism, a style that—in contrast to the trim and sleek aesthetic of
1920s modernism—emphasizes the tactility and roughness of its
materials, often poured-in-place concrete.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1963 Bob Dylan (born 1941) records "Blowin' in the Wind." The song
becomes an anthem of the antiwar movement in the late 1960s and early
'70s.