New York native Stanley Stellar, the first artist featured in the Artifacts film series, contributed a colour Xerox of his photograph Men Standing on the Street with me on Sunday, Jin Front of the Cock Ring Disco, NYC to the project. We realised that this disparate group of art objects collected in Artifacts would look different at a future time.” Art had moved out of the white galleries into a broader world. Laurie Anderson was doing performance art, Luncinda Childs was a dancer, and Fab 5 Freddy painted Warhol soup cans on the side of a subway car. There was a broad array of people operating under the very loose umbrella of art. “At the end of the 70s, what seemed to characterise the era was a radically inclusive spirit.
“At the time, there was no prevailing school that dominated the New York art scene,” Watson says.
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To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Artifacts at the End of a Decade, Watson has teamed up with British/Belgian filmmaker William Markarian-Martin to produce a film series spotlighting the artists who contributed to the project, as well as an exhibition opening September 25 at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “At the end of the 70s, what seemed to characterise the era was a radically inclusive spirit” – Steven Watson It was very inclusive and open, in terms of both form and content.” There was a greater awareness of sexual and gender identity in the artists’ work. “We now see the ways in which identity and cultural politics were shaping the landscape of art. “ Artifacts was conceived as a time capsule,” says Watson.
Crumb, Stanley Stellar, and Lucinda Childs – of which just 100 copies were printed and can now be find in collections like the Museum of Modern Art. Recognising the end of an era has come, in 1981 cultural historian Steven Watson and artist Carol Huebner Venezia organised Artifacts at the End of a Decade, a limited edition artist book featuring the work of 44 artists including Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, Sol Lewitt, Fab Five Freddy, R. Art collectives like Colab took over abandoned buildings and turned them into galleries, while artists could create whatever they desired without having to worry about forging a career in order to make rent.īut by the time the 1980s rolled around and Ronald Reagan was elected President, the seeds of neoliberalism began to take root, creating seismic shifts in art, real estate, and policing – the likes of which had transformed the world as we know it. Hip hop, punk, and disco filled the parks and the clubs, while graffiti writers, working under the cover of night, transformed whole cars into rolling masterpieces. From the ashes, a phoenix rose – introducing the world to new styles and sounds. Teetering along the brink of bankruptcy, New York became the Mecca for art, culture, and creativity. Landlords hired arsonists to set fire to their buildings in order to collect insurance payouts, while the middle class hightailed it to the suburbs in a mass migration known as “white flight”. After the Nixon White House implemented a policy of “benign neglect”, systemically denying services to Black and Latino communities nationwide, New York’s infrastructure began to collapse. Although the contemporary art world largely excluded photography at this time, many artists could still afford to live and work in New York without undue financial stress.