Term Paper on "Counter Culture 1955-1975 Pamphleteering"

Term Paper 7 pages (2071 words) Sources: 1+ Style: Harvard

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Counter-Culture (1955-1975) Pamphleteering

Between the mid 50s and mid 70s the western world went through a series of radical changes, which had their epicenter in America. As an answer to the conventional traditions of the late 19th and early 20th century, and all the political and social containment that developed until the decade of the 50s, U.S. went through a social revolution. This resulted from the Cold War conservative repression and other stirring events like the participation of the government in the Vietnam conflict.

The Vietnam War was the root of many protests during the sixties primarily because the information from the war zone was highly accessible to the public. The media would divulge the horrors of the fighting practically on a daily basis, thus bringing various critics towards the government and influencing people in deciding to stand against it.

During this decade, the citizens, particularly the young, began to claim their right to speech and opinion and began to dissent about many subjects that oppressed them. They protested especially about human rights, in the pursuit to even the different ways of treating a social group based on skin color, gender and other such differences. Since the Civil War, there had been many organizations focused on fighting the discrimination based on race differences but they had little success and slow in getting results, until this dramatic awakening propelled more determined actions. Other subjects such as women's rights that had been also a topic of discussion since the end of the past century was another issue that got more and direct action taken during that period. It was a chain reaction that triggered a wave of disagreement between the young generation and the established order of society, which resulted in a crowd of rebels that dreamed of changing the world from every possible angle.

In answering this state of things, young people began to revolt against a world that seemed to be falling apart from their point-of-view and new ideas began to take shape. Revolutionary plans and ideals started to appear in the minds of more and more college students that mainly complained against the old structures that had been proven wrong.

This brought forth a counterculture movement that expressed itself with a wave of raging freedom, attempting to break down the conventional point-of-view of the past generations. The new life style manifested itself on every level and stage, dramatically changing the look and expression of the society. From music, art, philosophy, even dress fashion, the rising "flower children" wanted to create their own world, where they wanted everything to be focused within their own rules.

The hippie culture dictated a radical change of behavior that contradicted the usual system: men wore long hair, grew beards, and developed an inclination towards psychedelic colors. Women returned to the retro fashion of no make-up and ragged clothes. People seemed to have traveled back in time and adopted the looks and attitude of an ancient society, as if trying to build one. All of them seemed stunned, dreamy, and disdainful of their elders and all the conventions. Their attitude defied the common rules and encouraged them to adopt behaviors formerly forbidden: they dropped school, lived in communities, traveled and experimented, turned their backs to any kind of institutionalized system.

This new generation was against the repressions of past stiff standpoints that encouraged resignation and acceptance of a certain pattern. Their new position advertised hedonism, freedom and pleasure, ignoring any annoying side of the existence, denying the rules they did not agree with, urging them to take opposite sides to the system and take into account only what was most beautiful in life. This point-of-view promoted ideas of rebellion, craziness and selfishness. Their ideal of life was based on hedonism which means, literally, pleasure as a form of life. Drugs were openly spread and their use became a common and popular habit. People that had spent a lifetime of restrictions now claimed freedom to do everything that had been forbidden in the past. The tolerance to different religions proliferated and became a new vogue to experiment different ways of spirituality. They inspired themselves from Native American rituals where drugs were used for ceremonial purposes to justify their habits.

All of these changes reflected in the world of art, as it has always been a primary form of expression for humanity and culture. The first half of the century had been characterized by a succession of short-lived artistic currents that reflected the rapidly changing world and acted as a response to the many conflicts and rearrangements of the society. The movements that most influenced the resulting visual taste of the mid 20th century were the Fauvism, Dadaism and Surrealism, and later the Abstract Expressionism that appeared in the forties as a result of the influence of many European surreal artists moving to New York during World War II. Their influence helped American artists discover the freedom of spontaneous creation and helped them detach themselves from America's conventional inclinations of the first decades.

By that period the new consumer culture offered too many products to buy and a fast expanding market. Advertising became essential to sell and keep the mass-consumption lifestyle. As a consequence to this phenomenon, people found themselves surrounded by ads. In magazines, news papers, posters, and the slowly monopolizing film industry the image played a vital role. As a reply to the monochromatic world of early films and photography, the world of publicity, the new art of the purchaser public, became more colorful, cheerful and bright.

In the modern consumerist society any form of artistic expression was highly influenced by the industrial, commercial lifestyle. By the mid 50s, Pop Art was beginning to take over the public's interest. The term Pop Art, which is the graphic current that defines this stage of history, was first introduced by the critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954 to define the work created by advertising, world that reflected the industrial or commercial side of life. It defined the kind of art especially conceived to be easily understood by the common every-day public. It appeared as a reaction against the Abstract Expressionism, so far away from reality and people's understanding.

Contrary to the abstract fashion, that refused a subject or a clear image carrying an easily identifiable message, Pop Art introduced an attempt to return to the objective reality that had been neglected in the past years.

The language was figurative and realistic. It portrayed trivial things like customs, ideas and looks of the contemporary world. Its thematic was borrowed from the urban environment. In this conception, the critic, philosophic message was absent; the image merely exists for its own sake. It used, mainly, a large scale and proportions to show the potential of the industrial world. The shapes and forms were flat, with no interest for the perspective. Bright colors were inspired from the mechanized ones used in market products. Pop Art took its major influences from the Dada style, Duchamp's ready-mades and Schwitters's collages.

In this period graphic approach developed into one less outlined than it used to be in the early days of the century. Colors became more emphasized and lines more flexible, drawing stylized, deformed or simplified, representing a vague form of hallucination. Strong colors had been in vogue before, during the Fauvist period, but now returned to the local taste, following the growing psychedelia that was taking the minds of the public over. Free lines, flexible, alive, determined and powerful colors, denoting strength, through a minimalist layout, symbolized their desire for erasing everything existing in the world. They attempted to portray the illusion to start over with a brand new design of humanity, establishing a new order.

Graphic expression became highly symbolist, pseudo-abstract and leaning towards surreal. The use of hundreds of shades was abandoned and focused on a limited palette of very strong, cheerful and violent, dramatic and shocking contrasting colors.

Ironically, in a world where the new ideas promoted peace and harmony, visual taste became rather sharp and aggressive, perhaps intending to express the inner fears that their attitude pretended to ignore.

The hippie world focused towards the search for happiness to selfish edge, ignoring the world around and all its faults and dark shades. Pleasure became the new fashion: dreaming, searching for tranquility and positive sensations, detaching oneself from reality. Graphic design pictured the new hedonist generation's point-of-view: the use of cheerful colors that reflected their pursuit for constant joy, the freedom of lines reflected the anti-academic concept of a generation that rebelled against the rigid rules of the society they criticized. The minimalist expression showed their denial for details, refusing to acknowledge the many complications of the world.

Artists like Andy Warhol played with the images of the moment: celebrity portraits, dollar bills, commercial drinks and other products. Trivial objects that did not intend to carry out a message but merely to show the plain and shallow reality they lived in. He used the repeating of images to portray the mass-production… READ MORE

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