NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom
NO!art was raw, aggressive, even “ugly”; by contrast Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1974, were “housetrained kittens.” Haunted by the Holocaust in the past and fear of the bomb in the present, these artists sought to jar viewers out of complacency. Only one of the three founders is alive today. Boris Lurie was exhibiting in co-op galleries on East Tenth Street, he told me, when artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher approached him because they liked his work. The trio (all of them Jewish) began exhibiting together along with other artists, taking their name from a caricature of their work that appeared in ARTnews.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Many 20th-century movements broke with convention, but the NO! artists went further than most. Unlike abstract expressionism (which they admired) and pop art (which they did not), their work was not easily assimilated. Most of the 55 pieces on view at the Block Museum would be unimaginable even today in a corporate lobby or shopping mall, locations in which many 20th-century styles are now quite at home. Writing in 1970, Lurie noted with some bitterness that “our acts if noticed at all were rewarded with deathly silence,” while “market oriented pop-art and decorative hard-edged abstraction” became “a fitting background for Park Avenue cocktail parties”–something that will probably never happen with Lurie’s montages of girlie photos and images of emaciated Holocaust survivors or corpses. (NO!art: Pin-ups, Excrement, Protest, Jew-Art, available for perusal in the gallery, contains a number of such statements by the artists.)
Some of the NO! artists’ preoccupations are better understood in their historical context. The many sexual references, from nudes to the title written in big letters across Sex, are efforts to subvert the sexual repression of the time. In a 1961 statement, Fisher compared art to love: “Both are meaningful only insofar as the involvement is passion.” (Highly active sexually, Fisher in the late 60s lived with a group that included several girlfriends, Lurie told me.) Fisher also made the statement, in 1960, that “the earth is a line-drive single to the slaughterhouse”–and the threat of global thermonuclear annihilation gave much of this work its urgency. An untitled 1964 work by Fisher arguably reflects street life far better than any sanitized pop painting: prominent amid an aggressive clutter of genitalia, breasts, and paint is a gas mask, while Christmas-tree lights around the edges ironically reference mass-culture showmanship.
The piece also includes swastikas both large and small, and many of Lurie’s (and Goodman’s) pieces make even more explicit references to the Shoah. Immigrant’s NO-Box (1963) is a rough wooden container that suggests a shipping trunk; an image of an emaciated camp survivor appears on the side and top, and the top also incorporates small, titillating photos of women fighting each other. Two of Lurie’s pieces consist of retitled found photos: he calls another reproduction of the emaciated man on the wooden box From a Happening, 1945 by Adolf Hitler (1963) and an image of a mound of corpses on a train Flatcar Assemblage, 1945 by Adolf Hitler (1963).
Yet Lurie has said, “Eichmann is in you, too,” which means he must recognize the murderer in himself. His work implies that all the categories we make, such as art genres–all the images and objects we collect for our pleasure–are akin to Hitler “collecting” corpses. This is a far more troubling view than the now conventional notion of the Shoah as something apart, a view that confirms our moral superiority and denies any need for change. Lurie asks instead that we confront the demons in ourselves and in our culture.
