An introduction to the modern movements that changed art forever 

By Will Lofsky

The 1960s

From the counter-culture rebellion and rise of rock n’ roll to the domination of the Vietnam War, and assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and John F. Kennedy, the 1960s was one of the most culturally significant periods in the 20th century.

Pop art was born out of rebellion against the drama of abstract expressionism. High art was pushed for low-brow art and artist’s identities were thrown away to be replaced by famous images from pop culture. 

The 60s saw the mass development of technology and consumerism notably expressed in notorious pieces such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans released in 1962 and his comic-book style screen-printed Marilyn Monroe work released in 1967. 

This was also the birth of minimalism, which began when artists used mass-produced materials such as steel, neon and bricks to make installations and sculptures using as few materials as possible. Minimalism’s radical use of space created an entirely new avenue to explore in the art world. 

American sculptor and visual artist Tony Smith’s Die sculpture, a brooding, ominous 500-pound cube designed proportionally to the human body, was made of hot-rolled steel that was shown in the Whitney Museum of Art in New York in 1962. 

Agnes Martin, an iconic Canadian minimalist artist from Macklin, Sask., painted until four months before her death at age 92. Her work, The Tree, a six-foot square canvas with faded grey and white horizontal bars created with oil and pencil is a testament to the beauty of deliberate imperfection as the drawn lines are off kilter. 

The 1970s

The 1970s art scene was deeply affected by the fallout of the hippie movement, and male artists were now no longer the dominant creators. Influenced by photorealism and 60s pop art, the pictures generation was born, along with land, performance and feminist art. 

As land was evolving from a source of materials to a canvas itself, impressionism painters moved from their easels to the great outdoors. Robert Smithson’s stonework Spiral Jetty built in a Utah salt lake and created using “over six thousand tons of black basalt, rocks and earth from the site” challenged the conventions of art and its relationship with exhibitions and marketing. 

Paul Wong, an artist from Prince Rupert, B.C., has experimented with performance art his entire career. His first piece, the 32-minute long video, EARTHWORKS IN HARMONY, was shown at the Burnaby Art Gallery in 1974. 

Wong’s first film shot in colour, 60 UNIT; BRUISE, released in 1976, shows Wong’s friend Kenneth Fletcher withdrawing blood from his own arm then shooting it into Wong’s shoulder to create a bruise. Although the piece was created to symbolize their friendship, in retrospect it speaks volumes about the AIDS crisis in the the 1980s, nostalgic innocence and the dangers of drug use. 

In this era, feminist art also stepped boldly forward, amidst queer and civil rights actions, anti-war demonstrations and the beginning of the Women’s Liberation Movement along the West Coast of California. 

Judy Chicago, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman opened the doors for female creatives to enter male-dominated circles. Chicago’s iconic installation, The Dinner Party, is made up of a gigantic banquet table with 39 place settings, each honouring a historically important woman. With this, another 999 women are commemorated with gold inscriptions on the white tiles below the triangular table. 

The 1980s

Jean-Michel Basquiat, a famous American artist who broke out in the 80s, grew up in the New York punk scene and evolved from having his graffiti art spread along the walls of Manhattan to his neo-expressionist paintings being exhibited in museums and galleries around the world.

To this day Basquiat’s pieces are still sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. In May 2017 a Japanese billionaire purchased Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled painting at a Sotheby’s auction for $110.5 million. 

Throughout Basquiat’s career, he became friends with his favourite artist, Andy Warhol, and lived lavishly spending thousands of dollars on Armani suits and staying in the finest hotels in the United States. 

Photo: The Andy Warhol Museum (thewarholmuseum) on Instagram

While Basquiat was very successful, he had a serious drug problem, which got dramatically worse after Warhol passed away despite a falling out that occurred between them. Basquiat passed away on Aug. 12, 1988, from an accidental overdose at the age of 27. At the time he had completely isolated himself from his family and friends and was using 100 bags of heroin a day.

Basquiat’s pieces Untitled (Boxer), Hollywood Africans, Horn Players and many more have forever changed art and strongly influenced hip hop and the work of some of hip hop’s finest videographers and artists, Dexter Navy and Lonewolf. 

The 1990s

The 1990s saw a new era begin as The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the American Cold War with Russia officially ended in 1991. Bill Clinton, the first baby boomer to run the White House, was the president for most of the decade before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and he was impeached. 

The 90s was one of the most influential decades in music due to notorious groups such as Nirvana, N.W.A, Public Enemy, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day, who broke barriers in the industry. 

Though, while the 90s changed music forever, tragedy was also very much interwoven with the decade, as Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, and rap’s biggest stars, Biggie Smalls, Tupac, and Big L were all shot between 1996 and 1999. 

Cartoons and late-night talk shows in the 90s became incredibly popular, and boosted multiculturalism in the digital with the launch of the World Wide Web, cable TV and cell phones. 

Art in the 90s responded to the new dawn of the digital age, with concepts of identity and personal, lived experiences being tied all together. Some of the most popular categories of art in the 90s consisted of identity politics, new media and relational aesthetics. 

In 1993, the Whitney Museum of American Art received harsh criticism by majority caucasian conservatives, for what they believed to be condescending and political. Daniel Joseph Martinez, a Los Angeles-based artist designed badges for the museum in 1993 that read, “I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting to Be White.” 

Another artist featured at the Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1993 was Glenn Ligon, who expressed oppression with black text on a white backdrop on, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background).

Relational Aesthetics was a term created by Nicolas Bourriaud, a French curator that defined the term as “essential to art from this moment.” Vanessa Beecroft’s nude and scantily clad performance art, particularly her 1999 VB35 showcased the clash of bodies and politics in museums. 

Pierre Huyghe, a French artist, became notorious for his 1999 piece (although it debuted in April 2000), The Third Memory, in which he re-created the set from the 1975 fictional movie about a failed 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery, Dog Day Afternoon. Huyghe created a hybrid between documentation and history with footage from the film, shots from news broadcasts and a real interview with John Wojtowicz, the bank robber that inspired the movie. 

As technology continued to advance in the 90s, new media gave artists more freedom than ever. Los Angeles artist Doug Aitken became one of the most creative pioneers of immersive video installations. His multi-panel video work, Diamond Sea, was showcased in 1997 at the Whitney Biennial, and his 1999 multiple-room Electric Earth which won the Internal Prize at the Venice Biennale.

The 21st century

Art in the 21st century is seemingly impossible to characterize. Though several movements such as computer art, visual culture and neo-dadaism — a term for the satiric multimedia take on day-to-day-life — and absurdist art have seemed to dominate the past two decades so far.

Graphic artists in the 21st century continue to push the boundaries of art for TV, movies, commercial work, album art packages and more. Mihailo Andic, a graphic artist based in Oakville, ON., has worked with Lil Yachty, Drake, 88 Glam, PARTYNEXTDOOR, 6LACK, and more. 

While Andic has been Lil Yachty’s creative director since his first mixtape Lil Boat, one of his most impressive pieces to date is the cover of Quality Control’s second album, Control the Streets Vol. 2. From Andic’s meticulous text design to his use of symmetry and hyperrealism for this overhead view of an airport, his attention to detail shines through and through.

Photo: Mihailo Andic (mihailoandic) on Instagram

The visual culture movement has evolved primarily out of new media, performance art, installations and relational aesthetics. Although it remains limitless, scholars of visual culture tend to analyze pieces and look for religious, political, feminist, scientific and ideological symbolism as this work is expressed through an endless stream of mediums. 

Indigenous storytelling in virtual reality has achieved popularity in Canada thanks to Nyla Innuksuk, an Inuit director, producer, writer and VR-content creator. Innuksuk’s film, Breaths, an intimate documentary on Susan Aglukark, an Inuk singer-songwriter, explores Agulkark’s powerful account of post-colonialism and the events that shaped her sound. 

Innuksuk’s very personal, face-to-face approach to studio shooting in a black room makes the viewer feel more connected to Aglukark, before being thrust into the open snowy tundra of the North. 

Ryan McGinley is a 42-year-old photographer from New Jersey that rose to fame quickly because of his ability to capture intimate moments that seem to be completely free of all the daily stresses of reality. His 2007 shot, Ann (Slingshot), is one of the defining photos of McGinley’s career along with countless other breathtaking images shown at his events in Soho, Denver, Tokyo, London and more. 

Dadaism, also known as anti-art, was started after WWI by artists that were desperate to make light against the evils of the world and today that fight still goes on with millennials in multiple mediums. 

Absurdist humour has evolved into the age of social media through the spread of memes, vines, self-deprecating websites, bizarre videos and satiric Twitter communities. 

Bill Wurtz, a famous neo-dadaist Internet personality’s Still a Piece of Garbage viral YouTube video, created in 2015, still resonates with users that enjoy self-deprecating humour. Wurtz’s combination of fast-moving colourful and semi-distorted graphics to look intentionally amateur with a catchy melody for the five second video has strongly influenced Tik Tok culture’s recipe for a viral video. 

While many art critics reject neo-dadaism as nonsense, the Internet has allowed anyone to create their own satiric work online across a variety of platforms to share, and there is beauty in absurdist humour’s ability to bring some joy to a chaotic world. 

As technology continues to advance and change, art will inevitably reflect the changes through installations, new media, neo-dadaism and the blend of all its predecessors in the coming decades. 

In the oversaturated Instagram era, artists have more competition than ever before to get noticed, but perhaps that challenge is a blessing for the boundaries of multimedia to be pushed further than ever before.