The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 70s (original) (raw)
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Wonder Woman. The television series ran from 1975 to 1979. As children we watched, amazed by her magic belt, her nonviolent golden Lasso of Truth, her bullet-deflecting bracelets, and, of course, her killer (though not deadly) tiara. In our girlhood memories, she stood for all of us: Wonder Woman the Chicana, Wonder Woman the South American Amazon. For us, she was the outsider woman hero with whom we could identify. And then came the cyborg, the Bionic Woman, whose television series ran from 1976 to 1978. On the big screen, too, there was Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones, and a host of super women who would feed our imaginations and make us believe we were, indeed, "Free to Be. " These popular versions of empowered women reflected the revolutionary potential of the 1970s. Following the various strands of activisms around civil and human rights in the previous decades, women activists-second wave feminists-worked to shape new paradigms for thinking about gender, sexism, racism, sexuality, reproductive rights, religion, labor, colonialism, technology, art, music, and the environment. They transformed accepted notions of female power regarding their bodies, their pleasure, and their work. And they launched a host of interventions and institutions that will continue to haunt and inspire for generations to come. The Feminist Press itself began in 1970. Its journal, WSQ (originally published as Women's Studies Newsletter), first appeared in 1972. The same year, Ms. magazine launched its inaugural issue, which featured the headline "Wonder Woman for President" (fig. 1). The accompanying image de
Here, Here or There: On the Whereabouts of Art in the 1970s
Pacific Standard Time (Getty Research Institute), 2011
A two-page meditation by painter Walter Gabrielson on the "aesthetics of flying over Los Angeles" opens the inaugural issue of Journal, published by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) in 1974 ( ). 1 Gabrielson's essay might seem an odd way to launch a publication that would become a crucial voice for art history and criticism in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, but it perfectly captured the far-flung nature of art in L.A., a city marked by sprawling geography and diverse communities. LAICA was both an exhibition space and a publishing initiative founded by artists as "a program that involves all segments of the arts community in its operation, and fosters a new atmosphere of communication and cooperation." 2 That mandate would require the perspective afforded by Gabrielson's bird's-eye view.
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‘The 1970s and the Culture of Culture’
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus, 2005
In the post-war world, it is the late sixties and seventies which gives birth to much of what we recognise as contemporary culture: a commodified counter-culture; identity politics; the celebration of popular culture and its recycling of materials; suspicion of authority and political process. The turbulent decade of the seventies is marked by a release and dissemination of energies which have their origins in the political rebellions of the sixties, and by a move towards culture itself as the ground of debate and resistance. This was a move reinforced theoretically by the 'New Left' with its emphasis on culture, increasingly broadly defined, as a site of contestation, and a shift towards notions of hegemony and false consciousness derived from Gramsci and Althusser, rather than the 'Old Left' emphasis on class, labour and dialectics. The period also sees the rise of the discourse of postmodernism itself as an analytic framework for contemporary historical fault-lines.
Time is an ocean: the past and future of the Sixties
The Sixties, 2008
Nostalgia, in its most primitive form, entails the indiscriminate love of a particular past because it is one's own. This journal springs from a more discerning kind of affection for a past that is not properly our own but with which we nonetheless feel a powerful, if complicated, affinity. Ourselves born between 1964 and 1970, we were too young to have been fully in the thrall of the Sixties, but just old enough to know that we mostly missed something big. Burdened with the sense of having arrived late, we spent much of our early lives nourishing ourselves in the era's afterglow and trying to affirm, in ways political and personal, what we saw as its best values and impulses. Our professional lives as scholars and teachers have been substantially devoted to developing a greater understanding of a time that continues to intrigue, inspire, confound, amuse, tempt, repel, and capture us. Reaching out to generations both younger and older, and making common cause with others who feel similarly called, we offer these pages as a space to explore further-and in a small sense create-the meaning of the Sixties. What was this "something" in the way history moved that has proved so compelling? If, as we believe, societies are greatly more interesting in times of ferment and crisis than in periods of stasis and consensus, then the Sixties lay a special claim to fascination. With little coordination but a striking commonality of purpose, so many people in so many settings devoted themselves so ardently to the work of transformation. This passion for change ranged widely, affecting governance, legal and political rights, and the distribution of wealth and power among and within regions, nations, races, ethnicities, and classes. Yet it extended also to more intimate and abstract realms, calling into question the meaning and identity of the family, education, sex and sexuality, adolescence and adulthood, work, pleasure, art, nature, divinity, the psyche, and the cognitive and sensory frames by which we apprehend "reality." As the sum of all this, for a vertiginous spell nothing seemed settled or sacred, everything seemed up for grabs, giving the era the quality of a giant experiment in the mutability of the human condition-an epic contest, to borrow Robert Darnton's characterization of the French Revolution, of "possibili[ty] against the givenness of things." 1 This sense of tribulation, finally, was global in scope, signaling a new phase of societal interdependence. All this energy-by parts dignified, militant, utopian, and delusional-was of great consequence, providing a second impetus to inquiry. Indeed, no recent decade has been so powerfully transformative in much of the world as have the Sixties. The era's social movements-from civil rights, to feminism, student and youth protest, environmentalism, and nascent conservatismdramatically changed the political culture in the developed West and beyond. Decolonization struggles, cresting in the 1960s, emancipated whole peoples and altered the balance of global power. In communist Europe, incipient democracy movements set the stage for full-scale revolutions that ended the Cold War. The quintessentially "international" year, 1968, established the Sixties as the threshold to a contemporary experience of globalization. The broadly cultural domain witnessed the massive relaxation of social mores, irrevocably altering sense and sensibilities, the basic texture of prosaic existence. And, in one of the less acknowledged but most profound qualities of the period, a new commercial, technological, and media apparatus emerged,
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The Joint Show: High Art in the Summer of Love, 2018
The Joint Show was the first significant exhibition of posters and counterculture art in a reputable art gallery. Held July-September 1967 at the Walter Moore Gallery in San Francisco, it showcased artwork by Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, and Victor Moscoso. Examining the conception, preparation, contents, opening, and press coverage, this article pieces together the details of this significant, but unexplored exhibition. Its role as manifesto of counterculture art and the psychedelic poster movement is argued and its legacy is explored, particularly the formulation of a cannon of Big Five poster artists.
Not Just Pictures: Reassessing critical models for 1980s photography
Beyond the Pictures Generation: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography, Special Journal Issue of photographies, 10.3 (London, U.K.: Taylor and Francis), 2017
Heather Diack and Erina Duganne, “Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography,” Beyond the Pictures Generation: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography, Special Journal Issue of photographies, 10.3 (London, U.K.: Taylor and Francis, Autumn 2017) 235-243.