NO!art is a radical

avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...

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.

History

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 Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...

and Pop Art in art, and used their work to attack

Fascism Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hie ...

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 (human categorization), race or ethnicity over another. It may also me ...

and

imperialism Imperialism is the maintaining and extending of Power (international relations), power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power (diplomatic power and cultura ...

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 (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...

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 h ...

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 was led by

Dietmar Kirves Dietmar Kirves (born 1941 in Fürstenwalde, Germany). Early work Since 1964, he works in the field of mixed media works with film, photos, music, sculptures and environments. In 1970, he created a media contact agency in Düsseldorf in coll ...

(headquarters Berlin), and Clayton Patterson (headquarters New York). Since 2024, after the loss of Dietmar Kirves ( headquarters east), the "headquarters east" is represented by LST, Lars Schubert, in Småland, Sweden.

Members

Members included:NO!art Members
NO!art website. Accessed July 1, 2015. * Rocco Armento * Isser Aronovici *

Enrico Baj Enrico Baj (31 October 1924 – 16 June 2003) was an Italian artist and writer on art. Many of his works show an obsession with nuclear war. He created prints, and sculptures but especially collage. He was close to the surrealist and dada mo ...

* Paolo Baratella * Herb Brown * Ronaldo Brunet * Guenter Brus * Al D'Arcangelo * Aleksey Dayen * Frank-Kirk Ehm-Marks * Erró * Klaus Fabricius * Charles Gatewood * Paul Georges * Jochen Gerz * Dorothie Gillespie * Esther Morgenstern Gilman * Amikam Goldman *

Leon Golub Leon Golub (January 23, 1922 – August 8, 2004) was an American painter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his BA at the University of Chicago in 1942, and his BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute ...

* Blalla W. Hallmann * Harry Hass *

Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American performance artist, installation artist, painter, and assemblagist . He helped to develop the " Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. ...

Kommissar Hjuler Kommissar Hjuler (born Detlev Hjuler; 1967) works as a sound recordist in the field of Noise (music), Noise and Post-industrial music, visual artist, film maker and police officer at Flensburg, a town on the German border with Denmark. He often work ...

(Detlev Hjuler) and Mama Baer (Andrea Katharina, Ingeborg Hjuler) *

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and Installation art, installation, and she is also active in painting, performance art, performance, video art, Fashion design, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her wo ...

* Konstantin K. Kuzminsky * Jean-Jacques Lebel * Martin Levitt * Suzanne Long (Harriet Wood) * LST (Lars Schubert) * 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 Michelle Stuart (born 1933) is an American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture, painting and environmental art. She is based in New York City. Early life Stuart was born in 1933 and she grew up in Los Angeles, California. After ...

* Aldo Tambellini * Seth Tobocman * Jean Toche * Toyo Tsuchiya * Wolf Vostell * Friedrich Wall * Mathilda Wolf * Natalia E. Woytasik * Miron Zownir

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 category:1959 establishments in New York (state) category:American art movements category:avant-garde art