Beginning in the 1960s, Dutch artist Pieter Engels (1938-2019) made conceptual work in which he poked fun at the seriousness of the art world. His projects reflected a questioning of the value of art, its commercialization and the genius of the artist. In 1976, Engels & Es, his fictional publicist/alter ego, founded BAMM: Brain-squad Against Mass-communication and Mediocrity. One of BAMM’s most important projects was ‘Owlglass,’ a series of eight poster-sized prints, whose text and imagery mock conceptual and minimalist artists, critics and the art audience. The posters were each published in an edition of 1,000, folded and sent around the world by the Worldwide Wandering Gallery.
Engels captures his image as the subject in two of these posters. One of the posters, Egnels A Magician Amongst Artists or A Loner Without A Claque, on the left, shows Engels wearing a magician’s top hat. The image is meant to be a symbolic plea for the non-conformist among those artists who, because of their mentality, go through life (art) alone and perhaps because of that pure.
A pioneer of the feminist and mail art movements, May Wilson (1905–1986) moved to New York City in the 1960s when she was 61. Wilson was friends with Ray Johnson and other avant-garde artists and had made a shift from creating traditional landscape and portrait paintings to making surreal junk assemblages and her notorious “ridiculous portraits.” Consisting of May's distorted face collaged onto postcard reproductions of paintings and photographs of idealized women, the portraits (detail below) are early feminist explorations into the issues of gender and identity. May would mail the portraits to her friends and other people associated with the mail art network.
Like May, American photographer Anne Noggle (1922-2005) began her art career in her 40s, having first served in the Air Force as a service pilot and then as a captain. Noggle studied art and art history at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and although she was an insightful art historian, she was most drawn to becoming a photographer stating that her discovery of photography ”...was the first time since I’d been grounded that I felt the same excitement that flying always gave me.”
Noggle’s photographs consistently challenge the stereotypes and standard mythologies of women. Her portraits, both of herself and others speak directly to issues of self, identity, and the female body. Her self-portraits, which she calls “sagas of fallen flesh,” look unabashedly at aging, a process all of Noggle’s photographs handle with humor, honesty, and respect. The photo to the right is Noggle's Stonehenge Decoded from 1977.
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1914-1990), also known as GAC, was an Italian artist and art collector. Beginning his career as a painter in the 1940s, Cavellini then became a major collector of contemporary Italian abstract art. In the 1960s Cavellini resumed his activity as an artist creating a broad range of works from Neo-Dada to performance art to mail art. In 1971 Cavellini coined the term autostoricizzazione (self-historicization), upon which he created a deliberate personal history through self-promotion believing it to be his task to write his biography before it could be written after his death, which he determined would happen in 2014. An example of this self-promotion can be seen in the above image of a poster as announcement for “International Cavellini Cincinnati Week.” Clearly reading as a celebration of Cavellini's life, the oversized poster features a portrait of the artist by Andy Warhol and was signed by Cavellini in 1986, long before his proclaimed death.
