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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathWieland
 
 
 
 
 

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was mentioned only in passing three times in David E. James' «Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties,» which, given the exemplary broadness and eclecticism of James' approach, would have been an ideal context for a more detailed consideration of her place within the arts of that decade. Ultimately Wieland is a figure both perplexing and paradoxically very much representative of several struggles going on within and between the art and film worlds in the 1960s.

The Here and Now

Allan Kaprow's astute description in 1958 of what he judged to be a turning point in the future of the visual arts two years after Jackson Pollock's death, speaks to much that is at the heart of Wieland's many projects, as diverse as they may appear. Wondering, quite literally, «what do we do now?» Kaprow suggested a fresh engagement with a wide range of material: »Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of

 

Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other sense, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents.» [3] From the disaster motif prevalent in her work in the early sixties to the fusion of the solemn with the ridiculous, a great many of precisely these elements came to play a significant part in both the visual and time-based art made by Wieland through the 1960s and 70s. She took a keen interest in the space and objects, the delights and hazards of her own everyday life, focusing often on the domestic sphere, its instruments and implements, its techniques and its tactile sensual pleasures, all

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