The Pictures Generation at Hallwalls : Traces of the Body, Gender, and History

In this book, Vera Dika rewrites the story of the Pictures Generation from the perspective of the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY. Her work is based on interviews with living artists, archival research, and personal collections, including films, videotapes, and sound recordings. At once aesthetic, cultural, and political, this renewed perspective asks new questions and rewrites past assumptions about the artists’ work.

The legendary members of the East Coast Pictures Generation emerged at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo in the mid-1970s. These young people had started Hallwalls, an artist-run organization that invited artists from a variety of mediums to show their work. It also featured productions by the founding members themselves: Robert Longo, Charles Clough, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, and Michael Zwack. The works discussed in the volume include performance, video, films, painting, music, and literature, and have been chosen because of the way they foreground states of the body in relationship to conditions of their medium. As a distinguishing feature of Hallwalls artists’ work, the practice uses these traces to make metaphors on the process of mechanical reproduction itself. The Hallwalls artists’ work also gives testament to Buffalo and to New York City, the cities that formed their historical contexts.

This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, performance studies, film studies, and gender studies.