Alfred Young (born 1936) is a British artist working in California. He is best known for his early contributions to the San Francisco conceptual and environmental art movement of the 1960s and 70s. His works include pieces of conceptual and mixed media, as well as paintings and drawings.
Video Alfred Young (artist)
Biography
Alfred Young was born in 1936 in Lambeth, London. After completing a printing apprenticeship at the age of twenty-one, he quit his job to become a student at the London School of Printing (now the London College of Communication). After studying intense painting for a year, he was allowed to join the Royal College of Art and continue painting as a graduate student. While studying at the Royal College, Young became very interested in the works of cubist Jacques Villon featuring bright prism colors. This causes initial attraction with Additive colors. Three years after becoming an art teacher at Kingston School of Art (now Kingston University), Young went to the United States. He spent three years teaching art at the University of New Mexico before moving to San Francisco, California.
Maps Alfred Young (artist)
Conceptual work
Young arrived in San Francisco and began teaching at the University of San Francisco shortly before the Third World Liberation Front strike of 1968, with which he was involved. Taking inspiration from nonviolent demonstrations and creative forms of protest against the 1968 strike, Young became interested in producing works to be experienced outside art galleries, in a democratic and indeterminate way. In 1969, he began a series of collaborations with fellow art faculty USF Mel Henderson and Joe Hawley.
In September 1969, the three created public environmental artwork, using a toxic yellow dye to spell the word "OIL" in large letters in the bay of San Francisco. The work was made after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and anticipated the devastating 1971 San Francisco Gulf oil spill, occurring near the site of the artwork. This work is reviewed in the exhibition 2013 'State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970' at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, alongside the works of other conceptual artists such as Ant Farm and Chris Burden.
In November 1969, the three began another work that tried to take advantage of the participating public and the public sphere. Organizing with friends and students, they generate a hundred yellow cab traffic jams in San Francisco's Castro district. The initial confusion and disturbance caused by road traffic disturbances evolved into tingling because of the absurdity of the situation becoming apparent to commuters and spectators. Partial notes from the show exist as short films compiled from the air and ground recordings of the intersections.
The final collaboration plans to use another dye to draw next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Young, work improvisation, drawing a spiral large enough to be seen from the bridge, allowing images to be drawn and distorted by the current. Young then stated "We can not predict what the visual experience is for people - the scene depends on them taking part in it."
Later Work
Around the year 2007, Young began to create digitally edited pictures and collages of Stereography to be viewed through lorgnette. It produces a collection of works entitled "The Optimix Suite", which now appears in several university collections. Subsequent collections become available to the public in the form of Google Cardboard apps.
References
External links
- Official website
- 2 Paintings by or after Alfred Young on Art UK site
- Yellow Cab video documentation, 1969
- Optimix Suite - Yale University Library
- Pix Optimix App
Further reading
- Painters and Photos by Van Deren Coke, UNM Press 1972
- Graphics in New Mexico by Clinton Adams, UNM Press 1991
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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