The History
of Visual
Communication
Decades of Contradictions
Decades of Contradictions
Decades of Contradictions
The Thirty Glorious Years
The Swinging Sixties
If the Fifties were in black and white, then the Sixties were in Technicolor. The ‘Swinging Sixties’ remain the defining decade in Western Culture onto today. The nucleus of the transformation was London: In just ten short years, London had transformed from a bleak, conservative city, only just beginning to forget the troubles of the Second World War, into the capital of the world, full of freedom, hope and promise. It was the center of all excitement; the city where anything and everything was possible.
By the 1960s, the first teenage generation free from conscription emerged in Europe and America. Young people were finally given a voice and freedom to do what they wanted. The parents of the Sixties teenage generation had spent their youth fighting for their lives in the Second World War and wanted their own children to enjoy their youth and be able to have more fun and freedom. By the early 1960s, teenagers were already significantly different to those of a decade ago. The phenomenon has been agreed to have been caused by the large number of young people in urban centers due to the baby boom. These young people enjoyed greater freedom and fewer responsibilities than their parents' generation, and "[fanned] changes to social and sexual politics".
Mary Quant
Mary Quant was perfectly positioned to capitalize on the “youthquake” that took hold in the 1960s. She sensed that the days of the exclusive salons were numbered, and thought that even the great Parisian designers would follow ready-to-wear trends. The look she created was sexy and fun, a sharp break with the predictable floral day dresses commonly worn after the war, when food rationing was still in place and tight household budgets meant there was little disposable income. Quant introduced miniskirts with hemlines up to 8 inches above the knee to the London scene in 1966 and they were an instant hit with young people, in part because they shocked and offended many.
Asked by the Guardian newspaper in 1967 if her clothes could be considered “vulgar” because they were so revealing, Quant replied that she loved vulgarity and embraced it. “Good taste is death, vulgarity is life,” she said, adding that the provocative poses of her models reflected the new sexual openness of the times, which was fueled by the development of the birth control pill. She said the availability of contraceptive pills made it possible for women to enjoy sex and decide for themselves whether to conceive. “Snobbery has gone out of fashion, and in our shops you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dress,” Quant once said. She called the store “a sophisticated candy store for grown-ups.”
The shop was such a success that she soon moved into other parts of London and began exporting her clothes to the United States, where the “British invasion” was in full swing.
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The British Invasion
The British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom and other aspects of British culture became popular throughout Western societies with significant influence on the rising "counterculture" on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The rebellious tone and image of US rock and roll musicians became popular with British youth in the late 1950s. Young British groups started to combine various British and American styles in different parts of the United Kingdom, such as the movement in Liverpool known as Merseybeat or the "beat boom".
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The musical style of British Invasion artists, such as the Beatles, had been influenced by earlier US rock 'n' roll, a genre that had lost some popularity and appeal by the time of the Invasion. However, a subsequent handful of white British performers, particularly the Rolling Stones and the Animals, would appeal to a more 'outsider' demographic, essentially reviving and popularising, for young people at least, a musical genre rooted in the blues, rhythm, and black culture, which had been largely ignored or rejected when performed by black US artists in the 1950s. Such bands were sometimes perceived by US parents and elders as rebellious and unwholesome, unlike parent-friendly pop groups such as the Beatles.
Sometimes, there would be a clash between the two styles of the British Invasion, the polished pop acts and the grittier blues-based acts, due to the expectations set by the Beatles. Eric Burdon of the Animals said, "They dressed us up in the most strange costumes. They were even gonna bring a choreographer to show us how to move on stage. I mean, it was ridiculous. It was something that was so far away from our nature and, um, yeah we were just pushed around and told, 'When you arrive in America, don't mention the [Vietnam] war! You can't talk about the war.' We felt like we were being gagged."
The Beatles
The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) are regarded as the most influential band of all time and were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and the recognition of popular music as an art form. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock 'n' roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways. The band also explored music styles ranging from folk and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As pioneers in recording, songwriting and artistic presentation, the Beatles revolutionised many aspects of the music industry and were often publicised as leaders of the era's youth and sociocultural movements.
Late in 1965, the Beatles released the album Rubber Soul which marked the beginning of their transition to a sophisticated power pop group with elaborate studio arrangements and production, and a year after that, they gave up touring entirely to focus only on albums.
During this latter, studio production phase the feel and especially the lyrics of their output changed from what used to mostly be happy love songs to surrealistic but oftentimes also occult symbology - as can be readily seen by the incorporation of Aleister Crowley into the "group photograph" that makes up the Sergeant Pepper's album cover. From a clean-cut, friendly boy band with mop haircuts, the Beatles evolved into a highly complex, sophisticated group of creative practitioners whose work carries a lot of questions and unsolved mysteries onto this day.
When photographers and fashion models become cultural icons
Robert Mapplethorpe
David Bailey
Iconic fashion models: Twiggy, Jane Shrimpton, Veroushka
David Bowie
David Bowie (1947 – 2016) was an English singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, and his music and stagecraft had a significant impact on popular music.
Ziggy Stardust was Bowie's stage persona during 1972 and 1973. Ziggy is an androgynous, alien rock star who came to Earth before an impending apocalyptic disaster to deliver a message of hope. After accumulating a large following of fans and being worshipped as a messiah, Ziggy eventually dies as a victim of his own fame and excess. The character was meant to symbolize an over-the-top, sexually liberated rock star and serve as a commentary on a society in which celebrities are worshipped. Influences for the character included English singer Vince Taylor, Texan musician the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and Japanese kabuki theatre. Bowie retired the character on 3 July 1973 at a concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, which was filmed and released on the documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
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The Counterculture
The Sixties gave birth to a culture in film and music that reflected and influenced the decade's social upheavals: the rise of Cold War politics, civil rights movements, student protests, and the Vietnam war all profoundly affected American society and culture. As the counterculture movement developed, artists began making new kinds of music influenced not only by politics but also by the use of psychedelic drugs. Lyrics became an important part of the work, as rock artists took on serious themes and social commentary/protest instead of simplistic pop themes. One of the contributing elements to this new awareness among artists and musicians was the widespread usage of consciousness altering drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD:
During the 1960s, a group of casual lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) users evolved and expanded into a subculture that extolled the mystical and religious symbolism often engendered by the drug's powerful effects, and advocated its use as a method of raising consciousness. The personalities associated with the subculture, gurus such as Timothy Leary and psychedelic rock musicians such as the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, Janis Joplin, the Doors, and the Beatles, soon attracted a great deal of publicity, generating further interest in LSD.
The popularization of LSD outside of the medical world was hastened when individuals such as Ken Kesey participated in drug trials and liked what they saw. As most research on psychedelics began in the 1940s and 1950s, heavy experimentation made its effect in the 1960s during this era of change and movement. Timothy Leary and his Harvard research team had hopes for potential changes in society. Because of their personal experiences with LSD, Leary and many of his colleagues, including Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception) and Alan Watts (The Joyous Cosmology), believed that these were the mechanisms that could bring peace to not only the nation but the world.
Woodstock
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, commonly referred to as Woodstock, was a music festival held during August 15–18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 40 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock. Billed as "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" and alternatively referred to as the Woodstock Rock Festival, it attracted more than 460,000 attendees. Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite overcast and sporadic rain. It was one of the largest music festivals in history, and became synonymous with the counterculture of the 1960s.
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The festival has become widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history as well as a defining event for the silent and baby boomer generations. The event's significance was reinforced by a 1970 documentary film, an accompanying soundtrack album, and a song written by Joni Mitchell that became a major hit. Musical events bearing the Woodstock name were planned for anniversaries, which included the tenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, thirtieth, fortieth, and fiftieth. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine listed it as number 19 of the 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll. In 2017, the festival site became listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Psychedelic Graphics
The word “psychedelic” is a combination of the Greek words psyche and delos, meaning “mind manifesting” or “soul manifesting.” In order to emulate the visual experience of an LSD trip and the soul-manifesting ideals of the movement, psychedelic artists infused their designs with vibrant and intense colors, optical illusion patterns, and hard to read typography - very often all at one. Hallmark psychedelic characteristics include curvilinear shapes, intense color vibration, and Inspiration from Eastern, African and Native American cultures.
Psychedelic design didn’t just emerge fresh from the brains of LSD-fuelled hippies. As with other art styles, it was highly influenced by previous genres. This includes Art Nouveau, which tended to include looping shapes and organic imagery, Surrealism, which was dreamlike and trippy, Op Art, which used optical illusions to mess with the viewer’s perception, and Pop Art, which used super bright colours.
Psychedelic design is also infused with the ideas and motives behind San Francisco’s hippie movement. Set against the backdrop of the deadly Vietnam War, the counterculture movement promoted peace and love as opposed to war and hatred, raged against the military-industrial complex, and hated the inevitable poverty created from unchecked capitalism. These ideals were reflected in psychedelic art by way of flowers, natural shapes, and non-conformist elements, tending towards the experimental and away from the conservative.
Biba
In everyday fashion, Barbara Hulanicki's London’s retail shop, Biba, incorporated late-19th-century dress codes into its designs, namely from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Biba fashion illustrations and fashion catalogues caught the psychedelic buzz, while borrowing heavily from 1920s Art Deco, and turn-of-the-century graphics. In contrast to Mary Quant’s Mod mini dresses, Biba offered fluid alternatives in line with the psychedelic style of the late sixties: long dresses, straw hats, and lace details, floral prints, velvet, bishop sleeves, dark colored fabrics. Classic Biba girls would wear longer hair, often with curls à la Alphonse Mucha or voluminous Gibson Girl buns.
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Punk and the 1970s
The punk subculture includes a diverse and widely known array of ideologies, fashion, and other forms of expression, visual art, dance, literature, and film. Largely characterised by anti-establishment views, the promotion of individual freedom, and the DIY ethics, the culture originated from punk rock. Punk subculture emerged in the mid-1970s; in New York in 1974 and in the United Kingdom in 1976.
The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action, and not "selling out". Punk aesthetics determine the type of art punks enjoy, which typically has underground, minimalist, iconoclastic, and satirical sensibilities. Punk has generated a considerable amount of poetry and prose, and has its own underground press in the form of zines. Many punk-themed films have also been made showing considerable artistic prowess.
Vivienne Westwood
Rejecting the hippie ethos that was fashionable towards the end of the 1960s, Vivienne Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren created clothes that referenced youth culture's recent past, selling rock'n'roll fashion in a shop unit at 430 King's Road in Chelsea. In 1974, the shop took on its most notorious identity: SEX, with Westwood and McLaren designing fetish wear that they sold to prostitutes, those with 'underground' sexual tastes, and young proto-punks brave enough to take a seriously edgy look out onto the street. The pair enjoyed shocking people, designing garments and shoes that referenced 'deviant' sexual practices, including rubber dresses and stilettos bristling with spikes.
In 1976, 430 King's Road was refitted and renamed Seditionaries: Clothes for Heroes. The collection remained in the same risqué territory as the clothes sold in SEX, featuring the likes of bondage trousers. A punk archetype, these trousers mix references to army combat gear, motorcyclists' leathers and fetish wear, and feature a zippered seam under the crotch, a removable 'bum flap' and 'hobble' straps that restrict movement. Other key looks that expressed a new 'distressed' form of fashion included loose-woven, 'unravelling' mohair jumpers and torn-looking dresses and tops decorated with metal chains and safety pins.
Cyberpunk
The origins of cyberpunk are rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where New Worlds, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, began inviting and encouraging stories that examined new writing styles, techniques, and archetypes. Reacting to conventional storytelling, New Wave authors attempted to present a world where society coped with a constant upheaval of new technology and culture, generally with dystopian outcomes. Writers often examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution with an avant-garde style influenced by the Beat Generation, Dadaism, and their own ideas. Ballard wanted to write a new myth for the modern reader, a style with "more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics."
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Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick (1928 – 1999) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films—nearly all of which are adaptations of novels or short stories—span a number of genres and are known for their intense attention to detail, innovative cinematography, extensive set design and dark undertones of meaning.
Like the monolith that appears in 2001, Kubrick’s films are awesome to behold, but they can also appear totally imposing to the uninitiated; he has the reputation of a master admired by masters, from Scorsese to Steven Spielberg to Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan. That Kubrick’s movies, including Dr. Strangelove (1964), his one true comedy (though most of his work is fortified with a lethal deadpan humour), are so hefty both thematically and compositionally makes them yet more intimidating.
Kubrick’s work grapples with only the most enormous subjects. He tells tales of men on the brink – of sanity, of the law, and of their own destruction in an amazing if indifferent universe. Heavy stuff, though the director’s painstaking approach – Kubrick would sometimes demand upwards of 100 takes for every set-up, on marathon shoots wherein he would obsess over every little detail – ensured that the viewing experience would never be less than hypnotising.
Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers (1925 – 1980) was an English actor and comedian. He first came to prominence performing in the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. Sellers featured on a number of hit comic songs, and became known to a worldwide audience through his many film roles, among them Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series.
Motown
One cannot speak about music of the time from the 1960s to the 1980s without speaking about Motown, the historic record label that produced the music of most Black American musicians during this period. As the label got its start in Detroit, Michigan, it was named "Motown" after Detroit's nickname, Motor Town.
The Motown sound, as it came to be known, was a hybrid style of soul, rhythm and blues, gospel, and vocal jazz artists like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. The founder of Motown, Barry Gordy described his label as 'the sound of young America.'
The musicians in the gallery above were all affiliated with the Motown label at early points in their careers although they eventually broke away from it since they became tired of the control that the label exerted upon their output. However, the style of Motown carried on in their music.
Civil Rights, Anti-War and the Generation of '68...
The Sixties still looms large in history as one of its most chaotic and inspiring epochs. After World War II, much of the world experienced an unusual surge in births, creating a large age demographic. These babies were born during a time of peace and prosperity for most countries which meant that they were also the first generation in which education became available to very wide segments of societies. These young people knew more, had learned more and for longer, and thus had also achieved the ability to question more. And the direct result of questioning became a demand for change.
“Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
In his “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963, minister and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. outlines the long history of racial injustice in America and encourages his audience to hold their country accountable to its own founding promises of freedom, justice, and equality.
Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.
The Vietnam anti-war movement was one of the most pervasive displays of opposition to the government policy in modern times. Protests raged all over the United States. San Francisco, New York, Oakland, and Berkeley were all demonstration hubs, especially during the height of the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The 1960s in the United States of America (and by extension the entire globe) witnessed the rise of a generation that rejected and opposed conventional norms. It was a decade of political and cultural mass protest and activism. A revisionist wave resisted American interventionist foreign policy – protesting American military involvement in Vietnam. This would represent the birth of the Antiwar Movement – the first mass-protest movement that defied and disapproved warfare in world history. Indeed, popular opposition to the Vietnam War was unprecedented. Never before had so many Americans affiliated with diverse organizations to openly demonstrate against the government’s policies in times of war.
The protests of 1968 brought about a worldwide escalation of social conflicts, which were predominantly characterized by the rise of left-wing politics, anti-war sentiment, civil rights urgency, and popular rebellions against state militaries and bureaucracies.
The most prominent manifestation was the May 1968 protests in France, in which students linked up with wildcat strikes of up to ten million workers, and for a few days, the movement seemed capable of overthrowing the government. By the time they started college, the majority of young people identified with an anti-establishment culture, which became the impetus for the wave of rebellion and re-imagination that swept through campuses and throughout the world. College students of 1968 embraced progressive, liberal politics. Their progressive leanings and skepticism of authority were a significant impetus to the global protests of 1968.
A Decade of Assasinations
“Murder Most Foul” is about the assassination of JFK. But it is also about what constitutes an event, and about how an event takes on meaning beyond itself.
Although the most impactful, JFK's assassination was only one of a long list that occurred throughout the 1960s and beyond, also taking shape in the form of coups that removed and killed popularly elected leaders in many countries - from Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan in 1977, to Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), who was assassinated on 17 January, 1961.
The assassinations however, that immediately spring to mind when thinking of the 1960s assassinations all happened in the United States and targeted 5 very different individuals that nevertheless had one major commonality: All 5 were vehemently, staunchly anti-war:
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November 22 1963 John F. Kennedy - US President. Killed by gunshot.
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February 21 1965 Malcolm X - Civil Rights Activist. Killed by gunshot.
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April 4 1968 Dr. Martin Luther king Jr. - Minister, Civil Right Activist. Killed by gunshot.
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Jun 5 1968 Robert Kennedy - Former Attorney General of the USA, Presidential Candidate. Killed by gunshot.
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4 December 1969 Fred Hampton - Activist, Black Panther movement. Killed by gunshot.