NO!art is a radical avant-gardeanti-art movement started in New York in 1959. Its founders sought to deliver a shock to the complacent consumerist society around them.[1]
The movement was initiated by Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher who had come together to organise exhibitions at the March Gallery. They gave the name NO!Art to the movement on the occasion of their show at the Gallery Gertrude Stein. They set themselves against the contemporary trends in Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in art, and used their work to attack Fascism, racism and imperialism in politics.
The NO!art exhibitions bore titles such as the Doom Show, the Involvement Show, the No Show and the Vulgar Show. They were often scatological in theme with one exhibition, the 1964 No Sculptures/Shit Show featuring works resembling piles of excrement.[2] The Holocaust was another recurrent theme and the artists sometime provocatively referred to their work as "Jew Art."[3]
In his essay, “Bull by the Horns” art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote “NO!art reflects the mixture of crap and crime with which the mass media floods the mind of our time. It is Pop with venom added.”[4]
^Rosenberg, Harold “Bull by the Horns.” 1974 cited in First and Final Refusal—Resurrecting Boris Lurie, the Original NO!art Man Ezra Glinter, Forward, July 14, 2010
