The Rutgers Group: Garden State Avant-Garde - various artists, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Richard Kalina

From 1957 to 1963, at Rutgers University, eight young artists turned an unlikely academic outpost into a laboratory for innovative art.

Taking the wide view, we can look at advanced American art of the 1960s (particularly if we think of how the issues were seen by the artists and critics of the time) as a large-scale investigation into the kinds of boundaries or framing devices possible in a work of art. However the question was couched, whether in terms of the nonrelational objectness of Minimalist sculpture, the "what does a painting do that nothing else does" approach of Greenbergian formalism, Conceptualism's radical dematerialization of the art work, Earth Art's projection of the art work onto the landscape, Pop's aggressive appropriation of hitherto inadmissable images from popular culture or the move of Fluxus and performance art into the arena of ordinary activity, the new art of the '60s was engaged in a project of self-definition that was most remarkable for its cooled-down objectivity. Younger artists of the time expressed relatively little interest in transcendence, archetype, the unconscious, gesture, social identity, self-exploration, politics or many of the other subjects that have preoccupied artists before and since.

The drive to wrench art away from its normal subject matter and materials so as to bring it closer to the chaotic vitality of everyday life figured prominently in this new approach. Some of the most interesting and influential art of the period was formed and furthered in what might seem the unlikely crucible of New Brunswick, N.J., home to Rutgers University. The Newark Museum's recent exhibition, "Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963," charted the progress of eight artists living in the area and associated with the university during this fruitful time: George Brecht, Geoffrey Hendricks, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Robert Watts and Robert Whitman. These artists taught, studied, exhibited and brainstormed together; and in the process they developed some of the basic strategies of Pop art, Fluxus, Happenings, environments and performance art.

Of the group, Kaprow seems to have wielded the greatest influence. Hired by the university to teach studio art and art history in 1953, Kaprow, a critic as well as an artist and teacher, was passionate, articulate and in touch with the advanced work of the time. In 1952 he had co-founded the Hansa Gallery, an important artists' cooperative, and thereafter showed regularly in New York. Under the inspiration of John Cage, whose New School class in music composition he took and retook, Kaprow was ready by 1958 to move away from his early environments and Rauschenbergian assemblages towards more complex performance events, which came, not entirely to his liking, to be called Happenings. These activities generally required spectator participation, and although they seemed to be free-form and certainly employed throwaway materials, they were, in fact, carefully structured in both time and space.

Kaprow's Beauty Parlor IV, originally from 1958, was re-created for the Newark show. A series of interconnected spaces made of wood, lights, polyfilm and roofing paper, the piece offered up costumes, masks and drugstore photo booths for the audience to interact with. Kaprow allowed for the operation of chance here, and in similar pieces, such as the 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (the score of which was in the show) and the better-known Yard (1961), in which the enclosed backyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York was stuffed with an assortment of tires, tarpaper mounds and barrels. For Kaprow, though, chance was not chaos, but rather something to be bracketed and framed; the artist remained in control, however unobtrusively.

Kaprow's activities and the freewheeling ethos they represented inspired his students, Robert Whitman and Lucas Samaras, to explore their own idiosyncratic paths. Whitman's early performance pieces, like American Moon and E.G. (both 1960), coaxed complex effects out of the most casual materials; they remain classics of the genre. Shower, a simpler but highly effective 1962 installation, consists of a seedy-looking metal shower stall complete with running water and plastic curtain; inside, a film loop of a nude woman taking a shower is rear-projected into place, completing the tableau. The effect is creepy, voyeuristic and startling. When I told the guard that it reminded me of Psycho, he patiently replied, "That's what everybody says."

Shower, owned by Robert Rauschenberg, is one of six contemporaneous pieces by Whitman that combine real objects and film loops. Others (none of them in the exhibition) include an actual dressing table in whose mirror can be seen the filmed image of a woman using makeup to alter the color of her face, while the scene behind her changes; a dinner table onto whose mirrored surface is projected a film of people both spitting food out and having it poured on them; an open garbage bag with a film projection of trash floating down a river; and a multipaned window showing a filmed scene of trees and a woman undressing.