Boris Lurie:
Statement for the Exhibition
"Art and Politics"
at Karlsruhe Kunstverein
(Germany 1970)
NO!art is anti worldmarket - investment art: (artworldmarket-investment art equals cultural manipulation).
NO!art is against "clinical", "scientific" estheticisms: (such estheticisms are not art).
NO!art is against the pyramiding of artworldmarket-investment-fashion-decorations ("minimal", "color field", "conceptual"): such games-decorations are the sleeping pills of culture. It is against "phantasy" in the service of the artmarket.
NO!art is against all artworldmarket "salon" art.
NO!art is anti Pop-art: (Pop-art is reactionary - it celebrates the glories of consumer society, and it mocks only at what the lower classes consume - the can of soup, the cheap shirt. Pop-art is chauvinistic. It sabotages and detracts from a social art for all.)
NO!art is anti chauvinistic: (Domination by any national "school" is based mainly on the size of investment capital available. Domination by any national "school" is equivalent to cultural imperialism).
NO!art is the crisis art of cultural suffocation.
NO!art is socially relevant personal expression it is social art, it is protest art, it is political art, it is anti-art (anti artmarket art).
NO!art naturally creates new esthetic forms or naturally operates within contemporary esthetic forms. Form (style) naturally derives from content, esthetic innovation is but a by-product of free unhampered expression.
NO!art abhors the "clinical", "scientific", pseudo-esthetic search for "esthetic innovation".
NO!art opened up and influenced certain artworldmarket deviations for which it cannot be held responsible. It is at the misgrown root of artworldmarket Pop-art, of certain present day erotic-escapist, and horror-for-the-sake-of-horror work.
NO!art influenced positively present day political art, underground press and underground films and comics, "subversive" advertising in underground press, art (guerrilla) action groups, events of social content.
NO!art fighting since 1959 from within the Lion's Mouth in New York City.
NO!art ruthlessly suppressed and decimated but not eliminated or exterminated by artworldmarket suppression.
NO!art from Pinups to Excrement: a social art rebellion. (Survey, book to be published soon).
NO!art is "programmatic", through theme shows and manifestations freely growing within co-operative group effort. Each show, manifestation, naturally pointing towards next activity.
NO!art attempts to influence life through art and therefore calls for quick strategic artistic response.
NO!art done from the gut, is not an artistic occupation.
NO!art The time for Yes-art is not at all at hand.
Source: Lurie, Boris; Krim, Seymour: NO!art, Cologne 1988
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About BORIS LURIE: Born in 1924, in Leningrad, Russia. Together with his parents he moved to Riga in 1925/26. Captured by the Germans 1941 and suffered in the ghettos and concentration-camps of Riga, Salapils, Stutthof and Buchenwald-Magdeburg in Germany. Emigration to USA in 1946. Lived in Paris from 1954 to 1955. Founded with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher the NO!art movement in 1959 in co-operation with the March gallery in the Tenth Street in New York, later so called March Group. He works always in continuing the NO!art movement.—Died 2008 in New York. ►more
