Whoa! My mind keeps getting blown again and again by how awesome Craft Horizons was in the early 1970s. I'll extend that to include the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Art and Design) in New York. I keep reading article after article about amazing shows they held at that museum that incorporated performance, modern dance, happenings and other shows that would be cutting edge if they happened in the craft world today.
Among my favorites was an account of a show that was reviewed in the June 1971 issue by Carl and Heidi Bucher, Swiss artists who built environments and wearable sculpture that all but defied museum goers to participate. The images you're looking at are a couple of wearable sculptures by Heidi Bucher that are made out of foam and covered with nylon. The magazine didn't have photos of the really crazy things, which included entire walls covered with magic slates...you know, the kind you wrote on with a little stylus when you were a kid, then "erased" by lifting up the top layer of plastic.
Here's a paragraph about some of Carl's contributions to the show that I'm still trying to wrap my brain around:
Motivated by his wife's "Wearables," Bucher developed "Phosphorescent Inflatables," hung and strewn in a darkened room, waiting for bodies to become involved, engulfed in soft white finyl. Face to face with others, the participant who peered out of his solo capsule window realized that he resembled the peculiar visages he was confronting. Being confined encouraged lots of motion which activated dangling vinyl "arms," flailing radially as one turned. Sounds--the dull thuds of prizefighters working out with punching bags--reverberated within the vestments and without. Figures swung and thumped until lights went on (seemingly a signal that the ghostly ritual or bumper car ride was finished), dispelling the phenomenon of phosphorescence.
Heidi went on to become a famous artist in her own right. Her body of work in the 1980's focused on "casts" of interior spaces that prefigured artists like Rachel Whiteread.
Sadly, Bucher passed away in 1993. Fortunately, a website has been set up that contains some image of her work from the 1980s and 90s, but also some rare video of the Bodyshells in motion. Enjoy.
