Contributed by Bill Arning / Teddy Sandoval, a gay Mexican American artist who died of AIDS in 1995, made such art copiously. “Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art” at El Museo Del Barrio offers mostly small-scale Xerox punk zines, erotic magazine illustrations, album covers, decorative ceramics, and minuscule works on paper. It is an outstanding show. Its overflowing curatorial style, bringing in a dozen kindred artists, is a poignant reminder that artists’ trajectories are inseparable from their economic and social contexts.
Tag: Fluxus
Call it Orphism
Contributed by Adam Simon / At a Four Walls event in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, Erik Oppenheim, at that time a young artist, stood up and said, “I’m starting an art movement. Anyone who wants to join, meet me in the back after the show.” It was a hilarious and audacious gesture, in part because no one joins an art movement on a whim, like a list-serve or an exercise class, but also because there hadn’t been any artist-initiated movements for a very long time. They proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dada, and enjoyed something of a resurgence in the 1960s with Fluxus in the United States, Supports/Surfaces and Zero in Europe, and the Gutai Group in Japan. Most of what we consider movements were proclaimed by an outside observer, usually a critic or curator, looking to group artists who had similar concerns and made work that fit the designation. For the artists themselves to rally around a specific cause, even an aesthetic one, was not required.

























