Mike Kelley, The Little Girl’s Room, 1980, Installation at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1980

The Little Girl’s Room is Mike Kelley’s first attempt at creating an installation based on a performance script. The script details a little girl’s dream within a dream; in it, she envisions “the face of a pimp-like man whose smile reveals an infinity of sharp teeth,” and she transforms her flowery bedroom into a minimalist vision of geometry and grids lit by black light. The transformation of her room signals her entrance into adolescence. On the exterior of the work, Kelly placed drawings, photographs, and objects that relate to the script. He ultimately decided against incorporating a performance into the work.

John M. White, Say UH Several Ways Staying Behind to Tell Stories, 1979

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Although Bruce Nauman was recognized during the 1960s and 70s for his conceptually driven practice, he began to make more overtly political works beginning in 1981. In this raw, austere sculpture, the overturned chair serves as a surrogate for an individual who is both suspended and trapped inside what the artist considered the tight, disconcerting space of a triangle. One of a series of large-scale works that use the same iconography, this installation references the physical brutality and torture perpetrated by totalitarian governments in South and Central America throughout the 1970s.

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Lynn Hershman, Business card for the Floating Museum, 1975–78

A San Francisco–based organization founded in 1975 by Lynn Hershman, the Floating Museum was one of the many artist-run, alternative spaces that flourished in California in the 1970s. Designed as a temporary experiment, the museum existed for a mere three years; it did not maintain a physical venue, but assisted artists in locating and securing spaces in which to create one-time site-specific performances and installations. In its first year and a half, the Floating Museum sponsored a dozen individual projects around San Francisco, including performances by Eleanor Antin and the painting, by inmates of San Quentin prison, of a panoramic landscape based on a design by San Francisco artist Hilaire Dufresne. In May 1977, the organization extended its reach beyond the Bay Area by sending a group of nine artists to Europe as part of the exhibition “Global Space Invasion (Phase I).” The following year, its activities culminated in an exhibition produced in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled “Global Space Invasion (Phase II).” Accompanied by an exhibition brochure called Global Passport, “Global Space Invasion (Phase II)” featured the work of over one hundred artists at public spaces throughout the city.

Charles Gaines, Detail from Incomplete Text: Set 23, “U” Red Letters, 1979

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On an extended trip to Europe in 1972, San Francisco–based artist Terry Fox encountered the labyrinth set into the floor of the Chartres Cathedral in France. Fascinated by its circular structure, Fox made this motif the primary subject of his practice—which included performances, videos, sound pieces, drawings, and sculpture—until 1978. The labyrinth’s tight twists and turns formed a pattern of eleven concentric rings; worshippers followed the path until they reached the center as a way to become closer to God. Having just undergone a major operation after eleven years of alternating good health and debilitating illness, Fox saw the meandering, disorienting labyrinth as a metaphor for his life. Attached to the wall is a text the artist published in San Francisco magazine that suggests that the two stools that make up the sculpture represent the thirty-seven-meter-high cathedral and the river running beneath it thirty-seven meters below ground, with the string suspending the diagram of the labyrinth in between the two stools standing in for the labyrinth itself.

Carl Cheng, Natural Museum of Modern Art, 1979–80, Public art project installed at the Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica, California, 1979

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Ellen Brooks, Adolescents, 1975, “The Gallery as Studio,” installation at Lang Art Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, California, 1975

A pioneer in the practice of photographic installation, Ellen Brooks first mounted this massive collage of contact sheets at the Claremont Colleges art gallery in 1975. The work consists of several hundred individual images, taken over a period of three years, of nude boys and girls between the ages of ten and fifteen. Working with a copy machine and the assistance of a technician from the machine’s manufacturer, Brooks invented a technique that fused her photographic images onto ordinary household wax paper. This installation constituted a “fourth generation” of the photographs, according to the artist: the first generation was the negative; the second, the eight-by-10-inch contact sheet, the third, the machine copy of the contact sheet onto wax paper, and the fourth, the images glued onto the gallery walls. Brooks deliberately sought to reduce the clarity of the images through this multistep process. The resulting hazy portraits capture a sense of vulnerability and alienation associated with her adolescent subjects’ stage of life.

Bruce Conner, Still from Crossroads, 1976

Bruce Conner’s Crossroads was made a year after the fall of Saigon, an event that marked the end of American fighting in Vietnam. The video features government archival footage of the United States Military’s nuclear weapons testing program Operation Crossroads, which was carried out in Bikini Atoll during the summer of 1946. Over the course of thirty-six minutes, the work depicts the mushroom cloud from an underwater bomb blast unfolding in extreme slow motion, accompanied by a soundtrack that alternates between incidental noises and explosions and Minimalist music composed by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley. Crossroads is a poetic meditation on the unfathomable destruction brought on by the Atomic Age as well as the effects of both the Cold War and the Vietnam War on the American psyche.

Judith F. Baca, 101st Infantry (Japanese Americans), 1981

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