1968 coalition politics pushed artists toward conceptual, installation, and performance art

Evidence

At the same time, mainstream artists in Europe and in the United States speculate about the political scene and the ideological context in which their work was produced. The problematics specific to the creation and reception of the work, and the relationship between art and politics, fit primarily in the artistic field. On the other hand, African- American artists, largely absent from the cultural events of this period, operate primarily in a pictorial and sculptural process without confronting the forms created with a political attitude. There was, however, a common ground of protest, in 1968, with the creation of artistic and political coalitions, which stemmed from various groups - the pacifist militant artists, black artists, women artists (the AWC: Artworkers Coalition, and the BECC: Black Emergency Cultural Coalition). It was a time when many political and social events were discussed on national and international levels - the Vietnam war, the racial and sexual minorities’ claims of the Civil Rights Movement and the feminist movement, the students’ riots on campuses, the Latin American crisis. Their influence on contemporary artists is important. Many among them, in association with the protest movements, significantly transformed their creative process, striving for artistic practices such as conceptual art, installation art, or performance art (where the body becomes artistic material). This approach underlines the critical function of an art that protests more specifically against cultural institutions to take advantage of the rights of an often discredited artistic status. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2909

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on moral panics and political movements as drivers of cultural transformation — the 1968 coalitions as art-political infrastructure.