Matthew Cheale

Grand Eccentrics, Radical Forms: Sculptural Networks in American Counterculture

Supervised by Professor Jo Applin
Advised by Dr Lucy Bradnock

Funded by AHRC/CHASE

My thesis traces the alternative history of sculpture that came to prominence in the out-of-the-way corners of the 1960s art world in America – a history centred around a particular network of artists including Paul Thek, Nicola L., John Outterbridge, Marisol Escobar and Melvin Edwards, alongside scores of critics and curators who wrote about their work. Many of the artists under discussion, mired in a world of resistant minority and ambivalence, have been dismissed as lacking political will. They eschewed both the spartan aesthetics of critique and the spontaneity of everyday life and Happenings. Nevertheless, it is precisely their irritant activities and mixed messages that make these sculptors worthy of our attention, for they seem to inform us about how the parameters of the major sculptural discourses loosened over time and eventually became available to these artists to rethink and register the heteronormative colonial past out of which they had been constructed. This was no easy task.

My writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Monthly, Apollo, Burlington Contemporary, Texte zur Kunst, The Art Newspaper, The Burlington Magazine, Art History, and elsewhere. I have previously held positions at the Burlington Magazine, Henry Moore Foundation and the Frank Bowling Studio and have worked with international galleries such as Hauser & Wirth and Maximillian William.