Eco Art: Counter Culture 1970s / Culture 2010s
In the decades following World War II and the Korean War, European and American cultures split into two contrasting camps: culture and counter culture.
Culture was represented by growth in the industrial sector. It produced unprecedented affluence that was fueled by new technologies, the spurt of investment, and the spread of multinational corporations. The middle class rushed to consume a wonderland of commodities that flooded the marketplace..
Counter culture was unified by its opposition to the stultifying conformity and spiritual vacuity of mainstream culture. Otherwise it was a mélange of specialized oppositions to diverse concentrations of authority. White society was attacked by the civil rights movement; commercialism by a new spirituality; universities by student protestors; rationality by psychedelic drugs; patriarchal power by the women’s movement; and sexual restraint by the availability of birth control pills. Decades of oppression against gay men and women erupted in a pitched battle in New York, when the police tried to close the Stonewall, a gay bar in the West Village and a politicised gay rights movement exploded.
These cultural underpinnings were reinforced during the 1970s by concurrent ‘vanguard’ art movements.
– Those that clustered around the values of mainstream culture were Pop art, Land art, Minimal art, and Conceptual art. Their radicalism did not dispute the ethics of capitalism, or the industrial strategies of production, or the environmental toll of these 20th century ‘advances’.
– Those that clustered around the values of the counterculture were Happenings, Fluxus, and Eco art. Most of the renowned practitioners of these movements earned their acclaim by rejectomg the images, the methodologies, and the values associated with commerce, materialism, automation, and mass media.