NO!art is a radical

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

anti-art Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage poi ...

movement started in New York in 1959. Its founders sought to deliver a shock to the complacent consumerist society around them. The movement was initiated by Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher who had come together to organise exhibitions at the March Gallery. They gave the name NO!Art to the movement on the occasion of their show at the Gallery Gertrude Stein. They set themselves against the contemporary trends in Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in art, and used their work to attack

Fascism Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy an ...

racism Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonis ...

and imperialism in politics. The NO!art exhibitions bore titles such as the Doom Show, the Involvement Show, the No Show and the Vulgar Show. They were often scatological in theme with one exhibition, the 1964 No Sculptures/Shit Show featuring works resembling piles of excrement. The

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

was another recurrent theme and the artists sometime provocatively referred to their work as "Jew Art." In his essay, “Bull by the Horns” art critic

Harold Rosenberg Harold Rosenberg (February 2, 1906 – July 11, 1978) was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. Rosenberg is best known for ...

wrote “NO!art reflects the mixture of crap and crime with which the mass media floods the mind of our time. It is Pop with venom added.” Since 1999, The NO!art is led by Dietmar Kirves (headquarters Berlin), and Clayton Patterson (headquarters New York). Members are Rocco Armento, Isser Aronovici, Enrico Baj, Paolo Baratella, Herb Brown, Ronaldo Brunet, Guenter Brus, Al D'Arcangelo, Aleksey Dayen, Frank-Kirk Ehm-Marks,

Erró Erró (born Guðmundur Guðmundsson in 1932 in Ólafsvík, Iceland) is a visual artist and painter, who is best known for his painted pop art collages of images from comic books and advertisements.

, Klaus Fabricius, Charles Gatewood, Paul Georges,

Jochen Gerz Jochen Gerz (born 4 April 1940) is a German conceptual artist who lived in France from 1966 to 2007. His work involves the relationship between art and life, history and memory, and deals with concepts such as culture, society, public space, parti ...

, Dorothie Gillespie, Esther Morgenstern Gilman, Amikam Goldman, Leon Golub, Blalla W. Hallmann, Harry Hass,

Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the " Environment" and " Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well ...

, Kommissar Hjuler (Detlev Hjuler) and

Mama Baer Mama Baer (born Andrea Katharina Ingeborg Göthling; 29 October 1981) is a German sound recordist of noise music and post-industrial music. She is a filmmaker and visual artist at Flensburg. She has had solo and group art exhibitions around the wo ...

(Andrea Katharina, Ingeborg Hjuler),

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attribute ...

, Konstantin K. Kuzminsky,

Jean-Jacques Lebel Jean-Jacques Lebel (born in Paris on June 30, 1936) is a French artist. His father was also a poet, translator, poetry publisher, political activist, art collector, and art historian. Besides his heterogeneous artworks and poetry, Lebel is also k ...

, Martin Levitt, Suzanne Long (Harriet Wood), LST, Enzo Mastrangelo, Stu Mead, Peter Meseck, Lil Picard, Leonid Pinchevsky, Bernard Rancillac, Francis Salles, Naomi Tereza Salmon, Reinhard Scheibner, Bruno Schleinstein, Dominik Stahlberg, Michelle Stuart,

Aldo Tambellini Aldo Tambellini (29 April 1930 – 12 November 2020) was an Italian-American artist. He pioneered electronic intermedia, and was a painter, sculptor, and poet. He died at age 90, in November 2020. Childhood Aldo Tambellini was born in Syracu ...

, Seth Tobocman, Jean Toche, Toyo Tsuchiya,

Wolf Vostell Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 – 3 April 1998) was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are c ...

, Friedrich Wall, Mathilda Wolf, Natalia E. Woytasik, Miron Zownir.NO!art Members
NO!art website. Accessed July 1, 2015.

References

External sources

* * Fletcher, Rober
''Beyond resistance: the future of freedom'' (chapter 'No!art Negative Aesthetics as Resistance to the Art of Forgetting')

Colin Moynihan, NY Times January 12, 2008
''First and Final Refusal - Resurrecting Boris Lurie, the Original NO!art Man''
Ezra Glinter, Forward, July 14, 2010

Jan Herman, Arts Journal Blog
''NO-Art: An American Psycho-Social Phenomenon''
Emanuel K. Schwartz and Reta Shacknove Schwartz, Leonardo, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Summer, 1971), pp. 245–254 MIT Press
ArtCat - Soho - Westwood Gallery - Boris Lurie: NO!art. An Exhibition of Early Work
{{Authority control American art movements Avant-garde art 1959 establishments in New York (state)