Talk:Anti-art/Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
http://www.oxfordartonline.com Anti-Art An obviously paradoxical neologism, antiart, like art, is composed of many elements in shifting combinations, and paradox dogs its definition. Although the exact relationship between art and anti-art is always one of contradiction, any recognizable pattern in this opposition is gained by hindsight, meaning that the fact and form of its appearance is entirely unpredictable.

Anti-art is an anarchic aesthetic, in a broad sense of the term, an anarchy that includes both Michael Bakunin and Buster Keaton and that informs, among other trends, the fractal psychedelia of Chaos Theory, King Mob, Hakim Bey's Poetic Terrorism, Richard Neville's Play Power, and Paul Feyerabend's theory of scientific progress, where anything goes. It is an aesthetic most easily discerned in the modern era, and although it may extend before and after, it has a history that often mirrors and interacts with modernism.

There is more to anti-art than simple transgression of cultural boundaries, although such violations, with corollaries of outrage, sensation, and even crime, are often associated with anti-art activities. Therefore, although Impressionism revolted against visual norms, and its supporters called for the abolition of official beauty, it is difficult to imagine anti-art flourishing under Claude Monet. The anti-art value of shock, however, is proven by Alfred Jarry, whose antihero Ubu Roi launched a tradition of insult with a barely disguised expletive. Although disgusting and suitably offensive, Père Ubu is ultimately less important to an understanding of anti-art than is Jarry's concept of 'pataphysics. The épater le bourgeois approach, although a continuing staple of anti-art, has become a cliché that requires increasing doses of irony in order to be effective.

'Pataphysics (preceded by an apostrophe so as to avoid a simple pun) is the philosophy of exceptions, a science of absurd solutions, which Jarry postulated most cogently through the mouthpiece of Dr. Faustroll. It must be understood as a product of nineteenth-century scientific excess, pseudoreligious inquiry, and Symbolist melodrama, a combination that Jarry suicidally exemplified in his daily life. As a model for anti-art, however, such exercises as defining God through algebra retain considerable contemporary power: taking a conventional belief and applying relentless logic to it until it assumes a bizarre, absurd, or even malevolent complexion is a method used throughout the twentieth century. It is another appropriate paradox that anti-art developments should become models for art production, from the Theater of the Absurd to Minimalism.

Because anarchy has gradually assumed political connotations, anti-art activities often coincide with politicalcultural movements. This is clearly demonstrated by Italian Futurism, whose germinal anti-art reflected the political heterodoxy of its anarchist, socialist, and ultimately fascist members. It is evident from the voluminous production of manifestos that accompanied their activities that they were engaged in a direct political process. It also becomes apparent on reading their texts that, far from agitating for the dissolution of art as it was currently understood, Futurists were intent on ultimately transforming art to suit their sociocultural purposes. The utopias they imagined still reserved a place of glory for their monstrous, Futurist, artist; even though the art they proposed was so radically different from contemporary practice as to constitute an opposition, and the demands that they made were violently antiestablishment, they wanted to change art, not destroy it. Some of the techniques they used, however, particularly simultaneity and bruitism, were rapidly appropriated and refined by Dada, which seized upon them as ideal generators of confusion, irritation, and chaos.

It is Dada, the explosive movement that first developed in neutral Zurich during World War I, that is perhaps most closely associated with anti-art. Dada was the crucible in which many of the recognizable attributes of anti-art were formed, and Dada is responsible for some of the confusion that still surrounds—and is perhaps inevitably a part of—anti-art. A complex alchemy in which antiauthority protest was distilled from a romantic, even Expressionist impatience with the stolidity of the art establishment, transmuted through chance operations, and sublimated by a poetic anarchist philosophy, the 'pataphysical argument of Dada might be schematized as an attempt at total rejection of the culture that led to the massive devastation of World War I: if logic led to such lunacy, could chance-based irrationality lead to anything worse? Tristan Tzara reiterated the impetus of Dada as disgust, a disgust that is almost spiritual in its allencompassing scope:

Dada applies itself to everything, and yet is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.

Like everything in life, Dada is useless.

Dada is without pretension, as life should be.

Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions (as quoted in Motherwell)

The founders of Dada only briefly, if ever, shared a coherent set of tactics, or even a program. Only through the plethora of contemporary and subsequent contradictions identified within the Dada program is it possible to see, if not a distinct stratagem, then at least a vague unity in the direction of their opposition: a preference for chance over choice or reasoned decision; a general antipathy to logic, to bourgeois compromise (whether over material, philosophical, or aesthetic assumptions), and to the constraints—formal and metaphysical—that logic and bourgeois values combine to enforce. Any convention, whether philosophical, political, moral, or social, was a valid target for Dada. Its activities moved outside traditional academic study, to linger on the fringes of accountability, or even sanity, like Johannes Baader's bid for the presidency of the Weimar Republic. This accounts, perhaps, for another of the paradoxes associated with anti-art: the successful anti-artist may never be “discovered” by official culture, and may disappear, like Arthur Cravan; or, as in the case of Marcel Duchamp's mythical cessation of art, the reality may lie hidden from history for years.

Duchamp, anti-art's missionary of insolence, is credited with coining the term, and his contributions to anti-art are manifold. They sprang from his refusal of the merely retinal justification for art; his extension of chance-based operations as a method of working; his use of industrially mass-produced objects chosen, avowedly, with indifference to aesthetic emotions; his investigation of puns and the paradoxes inherent in language, particularly in combination with imagery. Thus, on the simplest level, without recourse to psychology or occult readings, his proposal of an unaltered mass-produced bottle rack or pissoir as a work of art distilled the venomous cacophany of Dada into a refrain of deceptively simple questions, loaded with ironic ramifications: if a work of art is inevitably composed of aesthetic decisions, whose should they be, what should determine their limits, and how much control can artist or audience claim over effect or meaning, given the remarkable shifts in potential caused by context or other external variables?

Duchamp's contributions to anti-art were revitalized after World War II by John Cage, who, although never labeled an antimusician, effected such a radical reappraisal of music as to be clearly open to the accusation. Apart from introducing Duchamp to a new generation of artists, and, by way of the Yi jing and Zen Buddhism, providing a plausible set of alternatives to the prevalent Western, modernist aesthetic, Cage's influence on anti-art stems from his refusal to countenance conventional aesthetic hierarchies. He not only eschewed qualitative judgment—arguing that the difference between good and bad was an uninteresting distinction that offered little explanation, analysis, or understanding of a work—but he also expanded on a proposition made earlier in the century by the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, who noted that the difference between noise and music was an arbitrary, socially driven distinction, which was therefore open to modification. Cage championed a return to chance-based operations, best exemplified in his most famous work, 4′33″, an interval that is filled only, but inevitably, with ambient sounds and the audience's imagination. The proposition formed by 4′33″—that music is where any individual chooses to hear it—has been applied subsequently in other anti-art areas.

On 27 November 1960, French painter Yves Klein declared that every act in the world during that day was part of his Théâtre du Vide; and in a work of 1961, Piero Manzoni placed the world on a pedestal (Le Socle du Monde), thus including the entire planet in a sculpture: these ambitious individual attempts portended an exhilarating decade of anti-art activity in many disciplines, and for many different reasons, whose reverberations are still being felt. Manzoni's other anti-art gestures included a limited edition of his feces, canned, with a signed label; his breath was also for sale, packaged in balloons; and he developed a system for authenticating people as works of art—by Manzoni. In a similar vein, Klein successfully marketed a number of apparently empty spaces, filled only with his Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity. It is here, however, defending their authority as artists, that both men return from the zone of paradox, while their actions, alongside Cage's and Duchamp's, serve as new benchmarks for the ubiquity of aesthetic experience—and thus its negation. After these eloquent arguments—each of which was quickly accepted as affirmative evidence, and thus orthodox—simple absence of an object can no longer guarantee anti-art status: conceptual art stands as witness to this fact.

This interplay between anti-art and art depends on an understanding of art as an open concept that functions in some connection to power. Marxism proved to be a useful and convincing method of revealing the existence—if not the nature or the workings—of the connection, and many anti-art ideas have depended on modifications of Marxist arguments. Situationists, beginning from this base in post-World War II Europe, argued that bourgeois domination of artistic values had robbed Dada and Surrealism of meaning, leaving only a reactionary shell of spectacle that promoted passivity and conspired against freedom. Their solution, a transcendance of art through its simultaneous abolition and realization, was, as articulated by the French Situationist International, dense in theory and rarely specific; the basic elements involved applying modified Dada techniques of collage and Surrealist notions of the unconscious to everyday life. They experimented with unfettered physical and psychic behavior under conditions of urban existence, incited provocations, and believed themselves to be the theoretical motor and aesthetic fuel of the tumultuous uprisings in Paris during May 1968.

The rapid cultural changes that occurred during the 1960s provided energy and occasion for many varieties of anti-art argument, some of which have yet to surface. The compound fracturing of authority that occurred throughout the decade led to myriad splinters that have ossified at different rates, leaving more or less jagged edges—the most obvious of which exist where anti-art activity stands in direct negation of art tenets: however art might be defined, anti-art contradicts the definition. Therefore, because one essential element of art is creation, anti-art revels in destruction, as witnessed by the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium, whose attendees celebrated the cathartic effects of violence to the body and idea of art through literal demonstration (including the burning of artworks, books, and so on) and symbolic gestures (as when an audience was invited to cut the clothing off Yoko Ono's motionless body). In an era where gesture dominates and the “radical heterogeneity” of collage is standard, destruction can certainly be manipulated into a creative act: and if inspired creation is central to art, then automatic destruction will be its shadow.

Again, if art is permanent—in the sense of ars longa vita brevis— then anti-art finds meaning in change and the opportunity for brief life. Fluxus, a collective that blossomed with the 1960s, was named for change and became the century's most coherent site of anti-art since Dada—with which it is often compared. Fluxus might be characterized as an international constellation of poets, musicians, intermedia experimenters, and anti-artists who combined a general disdain for conventional kinds of art practice with radical strategies to attack art in favor of lived experience. Although few among them fully believed the published call to “Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art” (as quoted in Maciunas), and few more actively undertook the program, to replace art with Fluxus art-amusement (the former of necessity appearing complex, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skillful, significant, the latter antidote being simple, amusing, etc.), they nevertheless attacked art on three basic levels, and did in some ways “promote living art, anti-art.” First, the use of a corporate name, under which individual personalities would be subsumed, was a vain, but nonetheless sincere assault on the notion of the artist as hero, touched by genius. Without an identifiable creator, without the possibility of personalizing the product, connoisseurship would be threatened, mythologizing histories would be prevented, and audiences would more readily concur that their role in the completion of the work was literally vital: Fluxists understood in the early 1960s that author and authority are inextricably linked. Their attempt to counter what they saw as the parasitical and elitist status of the artist, although quickly doomed, has subsequently been modified and retried by correspondence artists and “Neoists.” Second, Fluxus works defied categorical norms: deliberately intermedial, they operated in the interstices between and around conventional disciplines—between poetry and music, between sculpture and theater, between reality and reflection—creating hybrids that not only reinforced Duchamp's disparagement of the object, but that continue to outwit the careful schemes of museums and other conventional classifying systems. By contradicting all the usual apparatus of art-ness, replacing unique, precious, discrete objects with cheap, ephemeral, multiples that were difficult to characterize and that welcomed interpretations, Fluxists aimed to deny the fixity of art and celebrate instead the process of experience. Although their practices failed to preserve them from eventual museum status, the idea of art as process was an enormous influence on following generations. Third, Fluxus was deliberately not serious, and called for an emphasis on playfulness of approach, whether in works, in analyses, in the serious business of history, in measures of significance, or in aesthetic paradigms. Using humor almost as a weapon to puncture intellectual and theoretical pretension also served to temporarily preserve Fluxus pieces from the purportedly deadening effects of art-historical analysis. This antipathy to the serious also meant that, for Fluxists, purpose, solidity, and the immortality conferred by history were suspect, leading them not only to celebrate vaudeville and the gag, but to startling developments in live art, initiating performative events that by definition were ephemeral, deliberately open to endless emendation, and often ludicrously funny.

Playfulness and laughter were also recommended by Fluxus contemporary Allan Kaprow as escape routes, not only from the dead hand of history but eventually, slyly, from the discrete category of art-ness. Kaprow has reported that he deliberately set out to do whatever what art was not, and by this process, paradoxically, nurtured and named a whole new direction in art—in the Happening. In subsequent theoretical texts, he laid out what amounts to a program for creating the opposite to art, arguing that, given the criteria for aesthetic experience, all the best opportunities lay outside the purview of art. Hence, conversations between ground control and astronauts are “better” than poetry, lint from the bedroom floor is “more engaging” than contemporary sculpture, the drama of real life is “richer” than theater. Kaprow is careful to point out that these are examples of “nonart,” a category he distinguishes from anti-art—and from what he calls art art—by virtue of the former's lack of intent. Aware of the paradox that implies the presence of art within anti-art, subsequent plans toward the phasing out of art superseded his initial formal rule breaking, introducing ideas and actions that ignored almost all the conventions of art, defining a new territory that he called “un-art.”

New territories and new titles also play a part in the anti-art concerns of Henry Flynt, whose philosophical efforts to reject art led to the proposal that brend—his term for purely subjective experiences that parallel, but precede aesthetic experiences—should be recognized as offering far superior insights than does art. Flynt's argument—that art and the experiences it offers are the result of social conditioning—meant that, for him, modern art should be rejected because the distance between the object and the aesthetic experience was unnecessarily great. Once a population had been trained to locate and develop its own “brend,” that is, once it had isolated its own subjective affinities (he referred to these as “just-likings”), then art would be redundant, everyone would be personally more fulfilled, and the intellectual fraud of art—whereby other people's subjective experiences are presumed to have a higher value than one's own—would cease. This transference of value onto the object, simply because of its social position, was an affront to Flynt, partly because of the intellectual sleight of hand involved, but more so because he regarded modern art as increasingly filled with irrelevancies, waste, and superficial prestige garnered as a result of worthless innovation.

This hostile conception of art as a frivolous fraud at the expense of purportedly genuine experience, which is, perhaps, an echo of Dada disgust, resounded throughout the 1960s, and could be illustrated with a multitude of further examples ranging in intensity from physical assault to complete withdrawal—from the Guerilla Art Action Group's visceral attacks on the fabric of the museum world to Gustav Metzger's call for an industrial-style, three-year-long art strike. That anti-art activity disappears—or is much less visible—for more than a decade after this might be explained by some of the effects of sixties activism: ecology-minded Process Art, feminism, Correspondence Art, the trend toward consumer-friendly museum education—each provided some relief from, or appeared to answer some element of the anti-art argument. The pluralist veneer of the 1970s allowed less scope for overt contradiction of a visual norm, although the oppositional nature of individual efforts did not lessen, they went underground or became an anti-art element in more general works.

The apparent diffusion of anti-art in the polystylistic disorder of the 1970s—which has yet to be thoroughly historicized—conforms to ideas about the dearth of antiliterature. As Jules Laforgue suggested in the 1880s, if artists were allowed the stylistic freedom and solitude of writers, then perhaps “official” beauty would cease to exist. Certainly, literature had no parallel to Duchamp or Cage until William Burroughs and Bryon Gyson injected new life into Dada's moribund cutup, extending the method into prose. Despite an embryonic antitheater at the turn of the century, and the best efforts of Futurists, the world of letters seems more familiar with—and thus less vulnerable to—anarchy. Language has been subverted variously throughout the modernist era: lettristes sought to replace it with icons, and concrete poets continued the dispersal of text into image begun before the twentieth century. These rarely amount to a consistent negation, and are closer perhaps to Marcuse's idea of desublimation than to an attack on the principles of writing.

The most obvious anti-art influence after 1968 surfaced in music, where punk erupted in ranting, furious anger against the status quo. Following the contradictory tenets of anti-art, punk opposed the complex, artificial, specialized music of the early 1970s with post-Elvis noise in which energy surpassed ability, emotion outweighed reflection, and simple experience meant more than messages or motifs. Punk's original thrust, which is most clearly articulated in brutal generalizations, proposed an aggressive anarchy, individual action and ironic ad hoc-ism—Situationism, but without the theory, and more fun. Despite the popularity of insolent defiance, and a successful translation into American, punk as a music and lifestyle was rapidly repackaged as a commercially viable entity, and diluted into a studied nihilism, almost indistinguishable from old-fashioned teenage angst. Punk did, however, at least contrive to expose these commercial developments even as they were happening—it added appropriate injury to the insult—and, continuing a situationist heritage, this seditious honesty offers a clue to current trends in anti-art.

Given the current connection between art education, art history, and art production, it is inevitable that the dissident strain within modernism should infect contemporary practice, and should spread quickly to art history and theory, whether or not it undermines the idea of an avant-garde. Thus it seems that the virus of discontent should become a diffuse but palpable presence throughout the body cultural. It may be diagnosed in benign stylistic refusals—as in “bad painting”—or in more exotic strains, such as Stewart Home's playful appropriation of Gustav Metzger's proposed art strike. Home provides a shrewd palliative for the paradoxical complications of anti-art history by hilarious and well-informed invention, presented in the same dead-pan manner as his other research, so that history, theory, fiction, pornography, and even prophesy become indistinguishable. Otherwise, despite published threats to develop an anti-aesthetic, postmodern theory has fallen for the “ruse of reason,” and has largely failed to surpass the frank refusal of belief that constitutes genuine opposition.

It almost goes without saying that as anti-art becomes the subject of historical scrutiny—or definition—it becomes suspect. Perhaps, like duration, anti-art suffers as soon as it is described, becoming a trite metaphor, a grain of sand in an oyster, a mutant cell, a theoretical root system that invites hypothetical evaluations but that simultaneously must acknowledge the insufficiency of rhetoric. Endlessly oppositional, the paradox of anti-art may unfortunately be reducible only to the elemental discrepancy between relative and absolute conceptions of existence—at which point anti-art returns the argument to its rightful realm: metaphysics.


 * Simon Anderson

See also Cage; Dadaism; Duchamp; Essentialism; Futurism; and Situationist Aesthetics.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. Indianapolis, 1949.

Flynt, Henry. Blueprint for a Higher Civilization. Milan, 1975.

Graver, David. The Aesthetics of Disturbance: Anti-Art in Avant-Garde Drama. Ann Arbor, 1995.

Gray, John. Action Art: A Bibliography of Artists' Performance from Futurism to Fluxus and Beyond. Westport, Conn., 1993.

Home, Stewart. The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War. London, 1988.

Hulten, Pontus. Futurism and Futurisms. New York, 1986.

Hulten, Pontus, ed. Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life. Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

In the Spirit of Fluxus. Minneapolis, 1993. Published on the occasion of the exhibition “In the Spirit of Fluxus” organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss.

Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley, 1993.

Knabb, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, 1981.

Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. John Cage: An Anthology. New York, 1991.

Lippard, Lucy R., ed. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York, 1973.

Maciunus, George. Manifesto (originally published by Fluxus [no date]). In happening + fluxus, edited by H. Sohm. Cologne, 1970.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Meyer, Ursula. The Eruption of Anti-Art. In Idea Art, edited by Gregory Battcock. New York, 1973.

Motherwell, Robert, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. 2d ed. Reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Originally published as “Conference sur dada” Merz. 2 no. 7:68 January 1924. Translated and published as Tristran Tzara: Lecture on Dada. 1922.

Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London, 1965.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I. Rev. ed. New York, 1968.

Stansill, Peter, and David Zane Mairowitz, eds. BAMN: (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera, 1965–1970. Harmondsworth, England, 1971.

Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. 2d rev. ed. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Seattle, 1994.


 * Simon Anderson

Photomontage
The novelty of the work of the Berlin Dadaists lay in their motives rather than their techniques. They were particularly interested in photomontage as a product of, and a comment on, the chaos of World War I. More specifically, they saw it as a mechanical, impersonal alternative to what was considered the excessive subjectivism of German Expressionist art and attitudes. This movement had greatly affected many of the Dadaists, but they felt it had been discredited by the war and made redundant by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Photomontage began as an anti-art provocation, but became a respected medium in Germany and elsewhere by the mid-1920s. As well as becoming a subdivision of fine art, it was also rapidly assimilated by the applied arts of advertising and political propaganda.

David Evans, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press. MoMA

Philip Johnson
Everybody hated us deeply for being anti-art. Barnett Newman—I've been reading his new book—has a strong attack on machine artists being the antithesis of what art should be, which is very funny coming from Barney, who's a modern artist.

Philip Johnson discussing the 1934 exhibition Machine Art (Excerpt from Philip Johnson Oral History, conducted by Sharon Zane, 1991 (pp. 60–64)). MoMA

Tomio Miki. (Japanese, 1937-1978)
Japanese sculptor. After finishing junior high school, he entered a barbers’ school in Tokyo. As an artist he was self-taught. From 1957 until 1963 he exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibitions. His works from this period have a strong anti-art element and are composed of such things as lorry tyres or smashed beer and whisky bottles. During this time he was also active in the avant-garde group Neo-Dadaism Organizers, although he was not actually a member. Yasuyoshi Saito, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press. MoMA

Jean Dubuffet
Not only did he regard Art Brut as a more authentic, genuine, imaginative, and spontaneous form of artistic expression, but he also came to reject the methods and values of traditional art. "Beautiful" and "ugly" had no meaning for him, and he tirelessly defended his "anti-art" and "anti-culture" theories in lectures and in two volumes of essays (1967).

Apartment Houses, Paris, 1946: Jean Dubuffet (French, 1901–1985). Metropolitan Museum of Art

Johns and Rauschenberg
In the mid-1950s in America, independently of the activities in England, the terms for certain aspects of Pop art were established by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The irony and anti-art gestures of their work initially attracted the term ‘neo-Dada’. Johns took as his imagery ‘things the mind already knows’, such as the American flag, maps, targets, arabic numerals and the alphabet. By changing the format, colour and medium, he demonstrated the formal and philosophical possibilities of an austere and direct presentation of blandly familiar images. Rauschenberg’s self-styled ‘combines’ such as Monogram (1955–9; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.) were roughly made paintings and sculptures that incorporated photographs, newspapers and disparate objects collected in the street. Like Johns, Rauschenberg applied techniques from Abstract Expressionist painting to recognizable imagery and inspired many artists to dwell on subject-matter drawn from their immediate urban environment.

Marco Livingstone, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press. MoMA

Rauschenberg and Manzoni
Artists concerned with criticizing rather than with affirming the value of painting in art have, paradoxically, also employed the monochrome. In such cases the monochrome functions polemically as metonym, substituting one type of painting for all painting or art in general. Examples of this strategy include the white and black monochromes of the early 1950s by Robert Rauschenberg and the achromes of Piero Manzoni; both artists aimed to reinvigorate the nihilism associated with earlier anti-art movements such as Dada. Michael Corris, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press. MoMA

Fluxus
Under the organization and direction of Maciunas, a specific programme of ideological goals was formulated and disseminated through a series of manifestos. The manifesto of 1963 exhorted the artist to ‘purge the world of bourgeois sickness, “intellectual”, professional and commercialized culture … dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art … promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art, … non art reality to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals’.

Michael Corris, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press. MoMA

Serra and Anselmo
Serra's One Ton Prop (House of Cards) and Anselmo's Torsion share a vocabulary of unprestigious "anti-art" industrial materials (lead and concrete).

MoMA (Flash - text as on google search result)