Some facts about what happened in the 1980's:
1980
Failed U.S. Rescue Attempt to Save Hostages in Tehran John Lennon Assassinated Mount St. Helens Erupts Pac-Man Video Game Released Rubik's Cube Becomes Popular Ted Turner Establishes CNN - The Corning Museum of Glass opens in New York. Teachers were able to take their students to the museum to observe glass pieces. Visitors are also shown glass blowing demonstrations, something very few high schools have the facilities to teach on their own. - |
1981
Assassination Attempt on the Pope Assassination Attempt on U.S. President Reagan First Woman Appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court Millions Watch Royal Wedding on T.V. New Plague Personal Computers (PC) Introduced by IBM - MTV aired its first music video on national television. This had a huge impact on the visual culture and popular culture. MTV not only surpassed, and replaced the ever-popular radio; it change the music industry by showing the emotions of the artists with their work. MTV introduced and continues to make the world aware of a wide variety of music genres, social problems, political issues, racial relations, and fashion designs. - |
Contextual Studies - 1980's:
Performance Art:The term "Performance Art" got its start in the 1960s in the United States. It was originally used to describe any live artistic event that included poets, musicians, filmmakers, etc. - in addition to visual artists. If you weren't around during the 1960s, you missed a vast array of "Happenings," "Events" and Fluxus "concerts," to name just a few of the descriptive words that were used.
Some works by this type of art movement are:
Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, and Bas Jan Ader It's worth noting that, even though we're referencing the 1960s here, there were earlier precedents for Performance Art. The live performances of the Dadaists, in particular, meshed poetry and the visual arts. The German Bauhaus, founded in 1919, included a theatre workshop to explore relationships between space, sound and light. The Black Mountain College (founded [in the United States] by Bauhaus instructors exiled by the Nazi Party), continued incorporating theatrical studies with the visual arts - a good 20 years before the 1960s Happenings happened. You may also have heard of "Beatniks" - stereotypically: cigarette smoking, sunglasses and black-beret-wearing, poetry-spouting coffeehouse frequenters of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Though the term hadn't yet been coined, all of these were forerunners of Performance Art.
Performance may be scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or via media; the performer can be present or absent. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any venue or setting and for any length of time. The actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. Marina Abramovic:Here she does repeating of her own Lips of Thomas (1975), which she describes as:
I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon. I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass. I break the glass with my right hand. I cut a five point star in my stomach with a razor blade. I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain. I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks. The heat of a suspended space heater pointed at my stomach causes the cut star to bleed. The rest of my body begins to freeze. I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the audience interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath. "To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre," she replied. "Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real." In her 40-odd years as a performance artist, Abramovic has dealt in what she calls "true reality", often at great physical and psychological cost. She has stabbed her hand with knives and sliced her skin with razor blades. She has lain naked on a cross of ice for hours. She has allowed the public to prod, probe and abuse her prone body. Once she almost died when a performance, in which she lay inside a huge flaming star made of petrol-soaked sawdust, went horribly wrong. (The fire sucked the oxygen from around her, causing her to pass out. An audience member intervened and she was rushed to hospital with burns to her head and body.) Feminism:The Feminist Art Movement began with the idea that women’s experiences must be expressed through art, where they had previously been ignored or trivialized. Early proponents of Feminist Art in the United States envisioned a revolution. They called for a new framework in which the universal would include women’s experiences, in addition to men’s. Like others in the Women’s Liberation Movement, feminist artists discovered the impossibility of completely changing their society.
Interesting works from this type of movement are: Judy Chicago, Gina Pane, Lynda Benglis, Mary Kelly, Hannah Wilke, Barbara Kruger, and Martha Roslen. But what is Feminist Art? Art historians and theorists debate whether Feminist Art was a stage in art history, a movement, or a wholesale shift in ways of doing things? Some have compared it to, as being Surrealism, describing Feminist Art is not a style of art that can be seen, but rather a way of making art.
Feminist Art asks many questions that are also part of Postmodernism. Feminist Art declared that meaning and experience were as valuable as form; Postmodernism rejected the rigid form and style of Modern Art. Feminist Art also questioned whether the historical Western canon, largely male, truly represented “universality.” Feminist artists played with the ideas of gender, identity, and form. They used performance art, video, and other artistic expression that would come to be significant in Postmodernism but had not traditionally been seen as high art. Rather than “Individual vs. Society,” Feminist Art idealized connectivity and saw the artist as part of society, not working separately. Gina Pane:Gina Pane’s early works include a series of physical interventions in pastoral landscapes that are documented in sequences of still images. They anticipate the performance works—or actions as she called them in her native French—that later brought her widespread acclaim. Pane is best known for performances in which self-inflicted wounds were meant to shock her audience out of complacent states.
For Action Escalade non-anesthésiée [Action Non-anaesthetized Climb] (1970) Pane installed a ladder-like metal structure whose rungs were covered with sharpened metal points on a wall of her studio. Grids of photographs document Pane climbing on the structure to the point of exhaustion and are shown alongside the object. Pane’s constats d'action [proofs of action] are unique montages of photographic images, occasionally including drawings and notations, with which the artist contextualized her actions. Pane considered the constats d’action as autonomous works and not mere documentation; they extend the life of her performances and communicate their sensibilities. Pane’s final series of works, the Partitions, transform Christian iconography into abstract expressions of otherworldly concerns. Saint Sébastien, Saint Pierre, Saint Laurent – Partition pour trois portraits [St. Sebastian, St. Pierre, St. Lawrence – Partition for Three Portraits] (1986) addresses the martyrdoms of these saints with an alchemical materiality. |
Photo Realism:The general overview of Photorealism is genre of painting based on using cameras and photographs to gather visual information and then from this, creating a painting that appears to be photographic. The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Interesting works from this type of genre in art are: Chuck Close, Malcolm Morley, and Richard Estes Photorealist art is often referred to Super-Realism, New Realism, Verism, Hyper-Realism, although each of these names falls under its own type of genre. Photorealist artists were reacting against the ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM art genre, for which many years this was the predominant painting style in the United States. Whereas Abstract Expressionism preferred spontaneous application of the paint used, with no pre-planning. Photorealist art was required to have intricate pre-planning and the careful replication of the said chosen image. Photorealist art shares some similarities within the POP ART movement, whose return to representational forms was also a reaction against the subconsciously-driven, process-oriented paintings of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. Both Photorealist Art, and Pop Art feature a recognizable imagery that is based heavily on consumer culture.
Explore:The media used in this type of art movement, was mosty: Acrylic, watercolour, coloured pencil, mixed media, pastel and ink.
The subjects used in this type of art movement was: Still life, landscape, nature, portraiture, and abstract. Conceptual Photography:The term 'conceptual photography' used to describe a genre may refer to the use of photography in Conceptual Art or in contemporary art photography. In either case the term is not widely used or consistently applied.
Interesting works of Conceptual Photography are: Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, and Cindy Sherman, Conceptual photography is a type of photography that illustrates an idea. There have been illustrative photographs made since the medium's invention, for example in the earliest staged photographs, such as Hippolyte Bayard's 'Self Portrait as a Drowned Man' (1840). However, the term Conceptual Photography derives from Conceptual Art, a movement of the late 1960s. Today the term is used to describe either a methodology or a genre. As a methodology conceptual photography is a type of photography that is staged to represent an idea. The 'concept' is both preconceived and, if successful, understandable in the completed image. It is most often seen in advertising and illustration where the picture may reiterate a headline or catchphrase that accompanies it. Photographic advertising and illustration commonly derive from Stock photography, which is often produced in response to current trends in image usage as determined by the research of picture agencies like Getty Images or Corbis. These photographs are therefore produced to visualize a predetermined concept. The advent of picture editing software like Adobe Photoshop has allowed the greater manipulation of images to seamlessly combine elements that previously it would only have been possible to combine in graphic illustration. |
Body Art:
Body painting, or sometimes body painting, is a form of body art. Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body:
body painting, tattoos, body art performances, body piercings, scarification, branding, a full body tattoo.
Unlike tattoo and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary, painted onto the human skin, and lasts for one day, or at most (in the case of Mehndi, "henna" or temp tattoo, glitter tattoos) a couple of weeks. Body painting that is limited to the face is known as face painting.
Body art is also a sub-category of performance art, in which artists use or abuse their own body to make their particular statements.
It is a part of their social and spiritual life and is a main element in the important moments of the human life:
Rite of passage
(Rites of passage are often ceremonies surrounding events such as other milestones within puberty, coming of age, marriage and death.)
The child becomes adult:
Weddings
Preparation for war or hunt
The birth of a child
Spiritual rituals
Death
Body art also shows the position of a person in a certain group.
It can represent:
Your origin, your position, symbol of power, what you have reached and experienced, it can be like an ID card (Maori and Polynesia , it protects from evil forces, it shows bravery and beauty, can be an act of transformation, mourning, connecting with the spirits of animals or the earth, symbol of fertility. In the last 100 years in some countries like Japan it has been also connected with the Mafia and crime.
Some rituals are connected with personal preparation: a period of silence, no sexual activities, isolation, some tribes also have to fast.
Contemporary body painting (after 1980)
Fine art body painting
Advertising
Fashion body painting
Commercial body painting
UV body painting
Special Effects
Airbrush
Competition body painting
Paintloon
Action painting
Body painting shows and performances
Some of these artists include of:
Chris Burden
Gina Pane
Marina Abramović
Ana Mendieta
Rebecca Horn
Bob Flanagan
body painting, tattoos, body art performances, body piercings, scarification, branding, a full body tattoo.
Unlike tattoo and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary, painted onto the human skin, and lasts for one day, or at most (in the case of Mehndi, "henna" or temp tattoo, glitter tattoos) a couple of weeks. Body painting that is limited to the face is known as face painting.
Body art is also a sub-category of performance art, in which artists use or abuse their own body to make their particular statements.
It is a part of their social and spiritual life and is a main element in the important moments of the human life:
Rite of passage
(Rites of passage are often ceremonies surrounding events such as other milestones within puberty, coming of age, marriage and death.)
The child becomes adult:
Weddings
Preparation for war or hunt
The birth of a child
Spiritual rituals
Death
Body art also shows the position of a person in a certain group.
It can represent:
Your origin, your position, symbol of power, what you have reached and experienced, it can be like an ID card (Maori and Polynesia , it protects from evil forces, it shows bravery and beauty, can be an act of transformation, mourning, connecting with the spirits of animals or the earth, symbol of fertility. In the last 100 years in some countries like Japan it has been also connected with the Mafia and crime.
Some rituals are connected with personal preparation: a period of silence, no sexual activities, isolation, some tribes also have to fast.
Contemporary body painting (after 1980)
Fine art body painting
Advertising
Fashion body painting
Commercial body painting
UV body painting
Special Effects
Airbrush
Competition body painting
Paintloon
Action painting
Body painting shows and performances
Some of these artists include of:
Chris Burden
Gina Pane
Marina Abramović
Ana Mendieta
Rebecca Horn
Bob Flanagan
Time Line:
1980's TV programmes:
Here's a list of some 80's programmes
The A Team; is an American action-adventure television series, running from 1983 to 1987
Dallas; is a long-running American prime time television soap opera that aired from April 2, 1978 to May 3, 1991 on CBS. The series revolves around the wealthy and feuding Texan, Ewing family, who own the independent oil company, Ewing Oil and the cattle-ranching land of Southfork.
The series originally focused on the marriage of Bobby Ewing and Pamela Barnes, whose families were sworn enemies with each other. As the series progressed, oil tycoon, J.R. Ewing grew to be the show's main character, whose schemes and dirty business became the show's trademark. When the show ended in 1991, J.R. was the only character to have appeared in every episode. More than 80 million viewers tuned in to find out who shot JR The shooting in Dallas. Who shot JR Ewing: For millions of people around the World the most important news of the 80's was not for the Polish Revolution, the hostages in Iran, the catastrophic Earthquakes, the Iraq-Iran war or the American presidential elections. In fact the number one topic, all the way from Philadelphia to Hong Kong, from London to Johannesburg wasn't anything real at all. It happened in America on March 21st 1980, and was the simulated shooting of a greedy Texas oil baron at the hands of his low life mistress, his wife's sister. |
Charlie's Angels; Although the cast changed over the years, Charlie's Angels ran from 1976 to 1981.
Hawaii Five-O; The investigations of Hawaii Five-0, an elite branch of the Hawaii State Police answerable only to the governor and headed by stalwart Steve McGarrett.
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1980's Clothes:
Here is a list and some descriptions of clothes from the 80's:
Batty Goths:
In '81 a new London club, the Batcave, became the birthplace of the goth movement. Recreating the gothic style of the 1800s, goths sought inspiration from novels such as Dracula (1897), Fabrics (in black, blood reds and purples) included velvet and lace, mixed with fishnets and also leather. Soap Style:
The glamourous woman who 'had it all' was popular in soap operas at this time: characters included Sue Ellen Ewing (played by Linda Gray) in Dallas and Alexis Carrington Colby (Joan Collins) and Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans) in Dynasty. Soaps revealed the look for men, too. The stars of Miami Vice wore double breasted designer suits with vests or teeshirts underneath and slip on Gucci Loafers. Their designer stubble emphasised their rugged masculinity. |
Gender Benders:
As the girls dressed up like boys, some boys went the other way, including pop singers such as Boy George (who wore make-up and skirts with his long plaited hair and in ribbons) and Marilyn. |
1980's Music:
The male image went through some interesting changes in the eighties. The beginning of the decade saw a fantastic peacock look in some quarters, drawing very much on the early nineteenth century dandy with the use of silks, and velvets. An absurdly overblown version was taken up by pop stars such as Boy George, Prince and Michael Jackson, with the use of lavish make up and wild hairstyles. While women in the 1970's had been fighting to promote a stronger, more powerful image within a male dominated world, in the early eighties some men seemed to be struggling to create a sympathetic, caring and even beautiful new image for themselves. The rise in popularity of the yuppie* look pointed male fashion in a new direction, with more conservatively styled suits and ties becoming hugh fashion even for youngsters.
Billboard number one hits of the 80's:
1980's Films:
List of 80's Films
Beetlejuice 1988