Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980

by Kelly Baum, Lucy Bradnock, Tina Rivers Ryan

An extraordinary, unconventional reevaluation of postwar art through the lens of delirium

Addressing the maniacal, eccentric, and disorienting in artworks made between 1950 and 1980, Delirious situates a fascination with the absurd and irrational within the context of the violence and brutality witnessed during World War II as well as the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism in the 1950s.  Skepticism of science and technology—along with fear of its capability to promote mass destruction—developed into a distrust of rationalism, which in the arts had the paradoxical result of extracting irrational effects from rational means.  Disturbing and challenging, these works upended traditional notions of aesthetic harmony.
 
This thought-provoking book features work by approximately 70 artists from Europe, Latin America, and the United States, including Dara Birnbaum, León Ferrari, Bruce Nauman, Howardena Pindell, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and many others.  Placing the fascination with delirium within historical, literary, political, and cultural contexts, it offers a provocative view of how like-minded artists experimented with irrational subject matter and techniques—ranging from sculpture, painting, photography, and works on paper to film, video, and book design—and forged a new aesthetic that directly responded to the unbalanced times in which they were created.

Genres: Nonfiction

236 pages, Hardcover

Published October 10, 2017

Reviews

[William West]

Baum's thesis is that artists globally responded to the aftermath of WWII, the revelations of the holocaust, the ensuing Cold War and the televised atrocities of the Vietnam War with art that challenged the very concept of order. This strikes me as a questionable at best historical thesis. Surrealism and Dada, after all, both pre-date WWII and both were decidedly committed to shattering the safety of "art space". The surrealists, in particular, wanted to shatter the safety of the viewer/ subject by unearthing the suppressed, violent associations one has with everyday objects by reveling in their own subconscious impulses as revealed in their work. Essentially Baum is saying that late twentieth century art tended to be anarchistic. I guess I would respond, "when has it not been, in one form or another?"

What one is left with from the show is, of course, the art on display. The pieces which best fit into Baum's historical narrative tend to be, for me, the less interesting. Many works included are determined to demonstrate that our means of bringing order and rationalizing- mathematics, cartography, charts and grids- themselves create their own kinds of chaos. After the first such work I thought, "Yeah, I get it. Next...." Then there were at least a couple more galleries of works making exactly the same point in near identical ways.

There were, however, clearly some highlights and these were made all the more refreshing by being the work of less-well-known artists who I had not previously encountered. Many works on display allude to violence, be it domestic, judicial, or militaristic. Jim Nutt's "Miss E Knows" comes dangerously close to making female battery colorful, but is perhaps all the more discomforting for it. Similarly, Peter Saul's comical play on words in "Criminal Being Executed" is no less powerful an indictment of statist violence for being laugh inducing. Paul Theck's series of wax not-quite-identifiable mangled body parts, "Technological Reliquaries" strives to be just plain creepy, and succeeds. But perhaps my favorite work was one of good ol' fashioned feminist irreverence: Hannah Wilke takes a series of photos of "iconically American" sites, such as Grant's Tomb, and covers them with cute, clay vulvas. Who could not love that?