West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977
Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner
Abstract
In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American West—from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest—broke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new, hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement. Often created through radically collaborative artistic practices, such works as Paolo Soleri’s earth homes, the hand-built architecture of the Drop City and Libre communes, Yolanda López’s political posters, the multisensory movement workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, a ... More
In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American West—from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest—broke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new, hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement. Often created through radically collaborative artistic practices, such works as Paolo Soleri’s earth homes, the hand-built architecture of the Drop City and Libre communes, Yolanda López’s political posters, the multisensory movement workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, and the immersive light shows and video-based work by the Ant Farm and Optic Nerve collectives were intended to generate new life patterns that pointed toward social and political emancipation. This book elaborates the historical and artistic significance of these counterculture projects within the broader narrative of postwar American art, which skews heavily toward New York’s avant-garde art scene. This west of center countercultural movement has typically been associated with psychedelic art, but the contributors to this book understand this as only one dimension of the larger, artistically oriented, socially based phenomenon. At the same time, chapters here reveal the disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical biases and assumptions that have led to the dismissal of countercultural practices in the history of art and visual culture, and they detail how this form of cultural and political activity found its place in the West.
Keywords:
American West,
Paolo Soleri,
Drop City,
Libre communes,
Yolanda López,
Anna Halprin,
Lawrence Halprin,
Ant Farm,
Optic Nerve,
countercultural movement
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816677252 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816677252.001.0001 |
