black wall, was criticized for being too abstract for
such a memorial.
Installation art also flourished in the 1980’s. In
1983, by incorporating sculpture and installation
art, Jonathan Borofsky, at the Paula Cooper Gallery
in SoHo, created a chaotic environment that incor-
porated painting, drawing, and sculpture in a variety
of styles, subjects, and scales. The effect produced
was that of entering the intimacy of the artist’s mind.
Installation artist Jenny Holzer also came to the fore
in the 1980’s. Holzer created art based in words with
her “truisms,” one-line adages that reflected a vari-
ety of beliefs and biases by in turn critiquing their le-
gitimacy. In 1982, her “truisms” flashed in electronic
signage above Times Square in New York. Placed in
public areas where normal signage was expected,
the work confronted viewers that might not other-
wise have ventured into a museum or given art any
consideration.
Impact The pluralistic art of the 1980’s explored
diverse ideas of race and gender, disavowed the pos-
sibility of originality in art, and both critiqued and
celebrated late twentieth century corporate con-
sumer culture. Ties to the traditional modern mas-
ters of the early twentieth century were broken, and
art of many different styles and ideas flourished side
by side. While the traditional media of painting and
sculpture continued to prosper, photography and
art installations explored visual languages and
themes that were new to these media and often con-
troversial in their scope. This climate in turn set the
stage for art of the 1990’s and beyond, in which art-
ists continued to explore similar themes and proj-
ects.
Further Reading
Fineberg, Jonathan.Art Since 1945: Strategies of Being.
Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000. Ex-
cellent overview including art of the 1980’s.
Hall, James. “Neo-Geo’s Bachelor Artists.”Art Inter-
national, Winter, 1989, 30-35. Good article focus-
ing on this specific group of artists.
Hills, Patricia.Modern Art in the U.S.A.: Issues and Con-
troversies of the Twentieth Centur y. Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001. Excellent over-
view of the many facets of art of the 1980’s, draw-
ing on primary source documents.
Hopkins, David.After Modern Art, 1945-2000.Ox-
ford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Brief yet useful overview of art in the 1980’s.
Kuspit, Donald.The Rebirth of Painting in the Late
Twentieth Centur y. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2000. Excellent selection of a variety of
essays from one of the most important art critics
of the period.
Smith, Joshua P.The Photography of Invention: Ameri-
can Pictures of the 1980’s. Washington, D.C.: Na-
tional Museum of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, 1989. Very good overview of photog-
raphy in the 1980’s.
Tomkins, Calvin.Post to Neo: The Art World of the
1980’s. New York: Henry Holt, 1989. Essay written
during the 1980’s by this well-known art critic.
West, Thomas. “Figure Painting in an Ambivalent
Decade.”Art International, Winter, 1989, 22-29.
Excellent article focusing on the neoexpression-
ist painters.
Sandra RothenbergSee also Architecture; Basquiat, Jean-Michel; Multi-
culturalism in education; Neoexpressionism in paint-
ing; Photography.Artificial heart
Definition A mechanical device implanted into a
patient’s body to replace a damaged or
defective biological heart
Although researchers were unable to develop a fully satisfac-
tor y, permanent replacement artificial heart in the 1980’s,
the knowledge gained during the decade led to the develop-
ment of cardiac-assist devices that would allow heart-
disease patients to live longer and more fulfilling lives.
In 1982, news that an artificial heart had been im-
planted in Seattle dentist Barney Clark startled the
general public. Cardiologists and bioengineers,
funded through the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), had been working on an implantable, per-
manent artificial heart since the 1960’s, but the exis-
tence of a working device came as a shock to persons
outside the medical research community. The un-
usual transparency of the procedure, which took
place at the University of Utah’s medical center, may
have contributed to the high level of interest dis-
played by the news media. The university press office
gave daily briefings, reporting both successes and
setbacks, allowing the public a rare opportunity to
view a medical experiment in progress. Clark, whoThe Eighties in America Artificial heart 71