Edited by Dan Nadel, who also curated the accompanying exhibition at Rhode Island School of Design, What Nerve! is a book-length survey of four unconventional American art scenes, spanning from the 1960s to present day. The Hairy Who in Chicago and the “Funk” artists in California form the foundation for a shared temperament that, as Nadel writes, is fascinated by “the body as a generative force, audacious sexuality, an interest in disguise and obfuscation, the blurring of foreground and background, and an ambition to make works that break from the restraints of conventional categorization.” Styles were loose, absurdist, obscene, or intentionally kitschy. Artists like Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson experimented with acrylic on Plexiglas; fellow Hairy Who member Jim Falconer made silkscreen-and-oil-painted linoleum works in 1968 that could hang comfortably from today’s cutting edge. The narrative continues through the work of Destroy All Monsters (focusing quite a bit on the output of group member Niagara, often overlooked in favor of the better-known Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw). Painter, comic artist, musician and Peewee’s Playhouse set designer Gary Panter gets his own minisection focused on a 1981 series, “The Near Extinction and Salvation of the American Buffalo.” And the story concludes by bringing it all back home to Providence and RISD with Forcefield, a collective ecstatically dabbling across media. The unifying factor behind all of these artists is their distance from New York’s art scene, which may have hurt their visibility at times, but certainly not their wildly eccentric creative output. It’s enough to make you want to move to Dayton or Milwaukee and start getting weird.
What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present, will be on view at RISD’s Chace Center Galleries from September 19 through January 4.
A version of this article appears in the October 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
