Michael Schwager: Don't Hide the Madness, Bay Area Art in the 1950s and '60s

 Let me get this out of the way, right now. I don't enjoy lectures. I already have to go to lectures nearly every day of the week, so attending a lecture outside of class on my own time is not my idea of fun. Plus, it takes me 30-40 minutes both ways to get to college, so when I have to go to a mandatory lecture series on a Saturday all the way on campus, you can bet real money I'll be simmering in my seat.

Why do I say all this, you ask? Well, besides the fact that I like to complain, I have to admit that while I hated being there, I did not hate the speaker. I didn't even hate what he had to say. In fact...I kind of liked it, which is why I bring up my hostility-by-default in the first place. If a speaker can win over somebody who's already in a bad mood, that says a lot more about their ability than a speaker who can impress an already interested crowd.

So let's meet the speaker, shall we?

"The name's Schwager. Mike Schwager."

Michael Schwager was the keynote speaker for the 11th Annual Art History Symposium for Sacramento State, titled, "Here as Everywhere: Art of the Sixties and Seventies in Northern California". While the series was largely focused on, as the title indicates, '60s and '70s art, mostly around the Bay Area, Schwager focused on elements of '50s art that contribute to the '60s and onward. One interesting trend he revealed is a prevalent message in '50s art that carried over to later ideals.

What, oh what, could that message be?

Hmm...

It is a mystery.

 So what could have possibly contributed to this message of seeking peace in the '50s, I wonder?

Oh right. War. Yeah, that'll do it.

And why don't most people seem to know about tha--oh right. Because this is what people imagine when they think about the '50s. Huh.

It's nice to know even back then, people spent hours in front of a screen. The more things change...

 And that's the problem with how a lot of people see history. We like to divide things into neat little decades, but reality doesn't work that way. The difference between 1959 and 1960 wasn't some huge leap, it was a gradual change building on what came before. We get a popular image of the '50s being idyllic, when the reality is there was just as much tension as there was in later decades, if not more. This lecture took a rusty chainsaw to our inaccurate notions of history and showed the progression of ideas we link to later decades. But as we can see, sometimes things aren't as new as we would like to believe. Even I've fallen prey to that. I had no idea the peace sign was made in 1958--and I bet you didn't either. Seeing this lecture made me appreciate the subtle progress that comes with time and how everything we see in contemporary art is merely the culmination of ideas. Our art today is a product of history. That's actually a really profound thing to realize, isn't it? And that's why I like this lecture. It's realistic. It's challenging.

It's inspiring.

 As an interesting side note, he also showed some Bay Area Figurative art, which I'll place here.

Bay Area Figurative is known for expressive figures...

...focusing on building form through shapes and lighting...

...and the subject is typically the human form.

 I also took the time to ask him a direct question, and this time, since I didn't forget to charge my camera like a complete moron, I got the answer on tape memory card.

Just...ignore the first several seconds, okay? I'm not a video editor, for crying out loud.

I may not have liked being there, but I liked hearing what this speaker had to say. I give him a lot of credit for being able to hold my interest despite my annoyance at the entire production. I'm rating this lecture A King-Sized Bar on Halloween. I may not have expected Good, but I think what I got was pretty Awesome.