BYU showcases '60s and '70s art rebels

PROVO — Cool has come to Provo.

With "Turning Point: The Demise of Modernism and the Rebirth of Meaning in American Art" at the BYU Museum of Art through Jan. 3, visitors come face to face with artwork by two groups of '60s and early '70s American artists who rebelled against current trends in modernism.

"This exhibition is an important historical exhibition focusing on a narrow but highly significant period in American and world art history," said Campbell Gray, director of the Museum of Art. According to Gray, the period extends from 1960-72, the moment when the tenets of modernist art collapsed under pressure from newer forms of artistic expression.

"At this moment," Gray said, "the United States of America had the greatest influence on the history of world art, and the results of the change formed the foundation of all that we see in contemporary art today."

The 31 pieces in the exhibit include large abstract paintings by modernist adherents Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella; minimalist works by Ronald Bladen, Donald Judd and Robert Morris; and conceptual works by Terry Atkinson, Robert Berry, Ian Burn, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden, Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt.

"Turning Point" also includes works by contemporary artists Jenny Holzer, Byron Kim, Marco Maggi, Maggie Michael and Georges Rousse. These works help visitors understand how the reaction against modernism opened the door for a wide variety of voices to be expressed in a diverse array of media.

"These rebels of the late 1960s restored volume, space, context and most important, a recognition of an intellectually and emotionally engaged viewer to the art experience," said Gray. "They repudiated the idea of a single, ruling art authority and opened the door for many voices to be heard and many paths of meaning to be pursued."

To Gray's thinking, the richness and vitality of today's post-modernist art world "owes much to the minimalist and conceptual artists of the late 1960s whose revisionist ideas remade the art world."

While the museum has created an open-space, contemporary environment in which to display the show, "Turning Point" is easily divided into four areas: late abstraction, minimalism, conceptualism and contemporary art.

The artists of the late-abstractionist movement did not want their works to contain references to anything outside the canvas itself. The goal was to arrest the eyes of the viewer, and keep them on the surface of the canvas.

Stella's "Agbatana III," 1968, (fluorescent acrylic on canvas) measures 10 feet by 15 feet and is a consummate example of the movement's goal of keeping the viewers' eyes riveted to the brightly colored, protractoresque designed canvas.