Main Body
11. Art and Music in the 1980s
Clayton Funk
Neo Pop Art
While the Neo Expressionists were causing everything from excitement to worry in the art world, there were other voices that were drawn to the escapism of television entertainment, in MTV, Movie Channels, and the wealth of media that could be had on cable television. In Visual art, Neo Pop art was filled with political protest and sometimes satire.
Compared to the Pop Art of the 1960s, with Oldenberg’s enlarged wedding rings and giant soft hamburgers, Neo Pop artists were preoccupied with protest images and a backlash to the conservative 1980s. This was also the time when Punk scenes splintered into New Wave, Grunge music, and more. Images of protest in art and music influenced a savvy audience of college-aged generation X students, who took to the tools of philanthropy, marketing, and politics they had learned well and put them to work against the status quo.
The AIDS epidemic exploded at this time and the U.S. Federal government was largely unresponsive to the problem, so groups of young people sought to disrupt business as usual, but they did so systematically. Young people of the 1980s, particularly in the LGBTQ communities, organized large nonprofits, like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and Act Up. GMHC was a nonprofit that raised funding and established services for people with AIDS. The other arm of this movement was Act Up, whose strategy was very organized but its medium was disruption through social protest. The slogan “Silence=Death” (Silence equals Death) became folklore as they pasted their posters and stickers any place they would be seen. They disrupted official functions, chained themselves together as barriers and made a presence that is still remembered along with red lapel ribbons.
These urgent protests were also the starting ground for a new take on visual forms. The Act Up stickers were early forms of what is now called sticker graffiti. Human chains continue as a form of protest, but sometimes as performance art, and the red lapel ribbons of AIDS Awarness have been replicated many times over in Pink, Yellow, blue, and other colors, for other causes.
Kieth Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat were two important figures in what became known as Neo Pop Art because they drew images from Graffiti and hip-hop culture. Some considered them opportunists for capitalizing on and misrepresenting those cultures, while others considered their works as innovations that bridged gaps between forms from street culture and forms in the art world.
The Names Project and the AIDS Memorial Quilt were also forms deployed as a visual demonstration of social action. Its impact illustrated the massive numbers of people who had died of HIV and AIDS in just a few years. The quilt was one of the first of its kind. Individuals, and groups created quilt squares in memory of someone they knew who died of AIDS. Each square was sewn together into larger blocks and arranged on the Capital Mall i