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Writer's picture@ Cynthia Adina Kirkwood

Coimbra Exhibit: A Who's Who of Counterculture Art

Ouve-me (Listen to Me) (1979) by Helena Almeida is in the exhibit at Centro de Arte Visuais, Pátio da Inquisição, in Coimbra, Portugal, which ends on December 1.

 

Far out is how the work of conceptual artist Helena Almeida would be described in the U.S. lingo of the Sixties, a decade well represented in the Coimbra exhibit, Radical Papers, at Centro de Arte Visuais.


In her 50-year career, Lisbon's native daughter pushed the boundaries of painting and art, in general. The internationally acclaimed artist used drawing, photography, video and her own body to express herself, according to Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (May 2010).


Helena Almeida shares space in the show with a plethora of other artists who also broke with convention. The daughter of Leopoldo de Almeida, who sculpted Lisbon's Monument to the Discoveries, is in the company of colleagues, such as Alberto Carneiro and António Palolo, who also exhibited in Alternativa Zero, Controversial Trends in Portuguese Contemporary Art, in 1977, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Lisbon.


The landmark Alternativa Zero occurred only three years after the end of nearly half-a-century of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime censoring newspapers and other media and inculcating paranoia and fear among the people.


The current Coimbra exhibit, Radical Papers is, indeed, radical, including artists such as John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha.  


"Before the opening of Radical Papers, a journalist asked me: 'How long have you been preparing this exhibition? It must have been months,' to which I replied: 'It's been about thirty-five years,' " said the curator, Miguel von Hafe Pérez, who was born in 1967 in Porto.


His answer is unsurprising considering the breadth of the show. Visiting Radical Papers is like striking gold. There are so many nuggets.

 

This Sylvester record album cover (1986) by Keith Haring is in the exhibit.

 

What makes this ambitious exhibit stand out is the inclusion of music and language.


Musicians' images (David Bowie when he was young and had bad teeth; Bob Dylan, 20, playing harmonica at Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York in 1961; Patti Smith dancing) and their words (John Cage and Andy Warhol), also are in this show and people who defy category, such as Patti Smith, who says in the exhibit notes:


"I'm not a rock 'n' roll singer who makes art. I don't see myself as essentially a singer or a rock star. I consider myself essentially as an artist."


John Cage said about Andy Warhol in the show's notes:


"Andy has sought by repetition to show us that there is no repetition really, that everything we look at is worthy of our attention. That's been a major direction for the twentieth century, it seems to me."


Beat poet Gregory Curso's Bomb, published in 1958 by San Francisco's City Lights Books as a centerfold in the shape of a mushroom, arrests the visitor at the start of the show. Lawrence Weiner, a sculptor whose medium was language, has nine panels devoted to him and his typography. Yoko Ono's Mirror Piece looks the gallery-goer in the face: "Instead of obtaining a mirror, obtain a person. Look into him. . . ."

 

Guerrilla Girls Talk Back (1986) is in the show. The Guerrilla Girls are artists, who protect their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks. The group uses disruptive headlines, visual material and statistics to expose gender and ethnic bias in art, film, politics and pop culture. Born in 1985, it is still "chipping away", says its website.

 

Posters along with underground newspapers and other periodicals (Rolling Stone, inter/VIEW and the renamed Interview) also abound in this space.


Independently published and distributed underground newspapers grew out of the counterculture of the Sixties. Tear sheets of United States and United Kingdom (International Times) underground papers are on display.


These papers scared the Establishment because they sought to turn it on its head.


Readers were young ("Don't trust anyone over 30.")


This writer was born in 1954 in New York City and has lived in many other places n the United States, including San Francisco and the Southland of Los Angeles.


We did not want to live like our parents or what our parents aspired for us: a mortgaged house in the suburbs, 2.5 kids and becoming "comfortably numb". And we were open to experimenting with "sex, drugs, and rock and roll", meditation, and Eastern religions to raise our consciousness . . . and just because. Underground newspapers reflected our search for the future and challenge to the present. They reported stories about issues such as the feminist horror of becoming a Stepford wife, police beating up young white demonstrators and blacks and killing the latter, and the Vietnam draft lotteries, which increased anger about a war that we considered immoral.


A 1971 roster, published in Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book, listed 271 Underground Press Syndicate-affiliated papers; 11 in Canada, 23 in Europe and the remainder in the United States.


Underground newspapers often had a symbiotic relationship with community artists and bands. They publicized bands, making it possible to tour and get record deals. Radical Papers features The Velvet Underground (with the singer and guitarist Lou Reed), Iron Butterfly and Joy Division (pioneers of post-punk and gothic rock from Greater Manchester, England).

 

The Black Panther Party advocated self-defense by blacks against police and instituted "survival"  programs, including Free Breakfast for Children, free medical clinics, self-defense lessons, and study groups on history, politics and economics. Founded by college students Huey P. Newton (shown above) and Bobby Seale, the party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982 with chapters in many major U.S. cities and prisons. It also had chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria.

 

The Berkeley Barb, published from 1965 to 1980 in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Berkeley, California, was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture underground papers. In an alcove of the gallery, a 1970 front page (headlines: Black Panther Rally and The Swami's Gift: My Wife's First Orgasm) hangs near a 1969 front page of The Black Panther. The Black Panther Party, in neighboring Oakland, published the paper from 1967 to 1980.


The first issue was dedicated to the police killing of Denzil Dowell, 22, an unarmed black man. The Berkeley Barb offered their printer to the Panthers.


In another section of the exhibit, a Los Angeles Times pink tear sheet (May 5, 1966) critiques A Far Out Night With Andy Warhol as:


"Wham! Bam! Pow!!!"


An apt description of those heady times.

 

Helena Almeida (Lisbon 1934 - Sintra 2018)

 




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