Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. - book reviews

Edited by the agency of Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz Berkeley, sees Angeles and London, University of California Pres 1996;1003 pages, $60 woven fabric $29.95 paper.

It's immediately obvious that a prodigious amount of collecting and sifting went into compiling this hefty anthology of post-1945 artists' writings. In a thousand pages of generally well-chosen true copys editors Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz overlay more than four decades of significant art changes from Abstract Expressionism to Neo Geo In addition to the pick outed texts, Stiles and Selz provide introductory essays--mostly limited to basic biographical information about the artists and capsule descriptions of their work--for each of the book's nine sections ("Gestural Abstraction," "Art and Technology," "Performance Art," and in like manner forth), as well as an extensive bibliography and a handful of apposite black-and-white illustrations. The sections are organized not by means of styles and movements but by the agency of more broadly defined categories which intentionally allow for unexpect juxtapositions. individual section titled "Material Culture and Everyday Life" includes true copys relating to Nouveau Realisme, clap art, Fluxus, feminist art, radical black American art of the late '60 and graffiti-inspired painting and appropriation art of the '80 Conceived of as a continuation to Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of present Art, the 1968 compendium upon which Selz also worked, and broader in historical and geographical design than Brian Wallis's 1987 Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings through Contemporary Artists, this "sourcebook" satisfies a long-standing ne for a one-volume edition of postwar art documents.

With in like manner much space, the editors are able to explore the further reaches of that peculiarly 20th-century form of writing, the artist's statement. It's not an easy genre to codify, lurching from the deadly earnest--"It appears to me that the artist, the intellectual, is not the alien that he was and his consumption of popular agriculture is due, in some measure, to his of recent origin role as a creator of popular culture" (Richard Hamilton, 1960)--to the lyrical--"I am for the art of meowl and clatter of cats and for the art of their unable to speak electric eyes. I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings" (Claes Oldenburg 1961)--to the overheated--"Time passes us and rushes upon and we remain behind, advanced in years and crumbled. But we are rejuvenated again and again by the agency of static and continuous movement. give leave to us be transformed! Let us be static! give leave to us be against stagnation and for static!" (Jean Tinguely, 1961) a certain quantity of statements are meticulously detailed: "I was strapped to the floor with cent bands bolted into the coagulate Two buckets of water with 110 lines submerg in them were placed near me The piece was performed from 8-10 pm for three nights" (Chris load 1975). Others, like this quotation from Oyvind Fahlstrom's "Take Care of the World" (1966) are utopian: "Instead of prisons, create forcibly seclud on the contrary large very complete (both sexes) and actual `good' communities (everyday Clubs Mediterranes) where culprits could gradually find satisfying ways of living without offending society." And a certain quantity of are just plain bizarre: "On the 4th June 1962 I shall disembowel, tear and pluck to pieces a dead lamb" (Hermann Nitsch, 1962)

Along with centurys of texts (many in interview form) through a wide range of artists, Stiles and Selz have included a number of pieces by means of thinkers and critics such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich and Germano Celant, as well as a metrical composition on Joseph Cornell by Octavio Paz. They also find play for a couple of figures from the museum world--the Stedelijk's Willem Sandberg, showed by a poetic curriculum vitae, and MOMA's Alfred H Barr, who weighs in with citations from a 1952 New York Times article titled "Is fresh Art Communistic?" There's even space given to Jesse Helms's "Andres Serrano is a jerk" articulate utterance Interesting though these texts may be, they are decidedly not artiste' writings. The inclusion of like nonartist voices suggests that Stiles and Selz art historians associated with Duke University and UC Berkeley, respectively, saw their task not as gathering each important text written by an artist during the period overspreaded but as assembling a history of postwar art using artists' writings as well as other texts

In any undertaking of this scale, nearly each reader will have complaints about omissions. 1 for individual felt that the "Gestural Abstraction" section would have benefited from a certain number of of the spirited artists' writings that were published in the journal It Is, in particular a 1959 rude girl titled "Participants in a Hearsay Panel." I also missed seeing anything authored through Marcel Broodthaers, who is showed by an interview rather than single of his own eloquent true copys Another shortchanged artist is RB Kitaj, who would have been better exhibited by excerpts from his First Diasporist Manifesto rather than a 1976 true copy of lesser importance. And if individual makes room for Julian Schnabel, as the editors have, wherefore not go all the way and name from his notorious autobiography CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre d's? The inclusion of a small in number letters--there are a couple of profitable ones from Robert Filliou to Allan Kaprow and a jewel from the late Ray Johnson--makes individual wish more space had been given to artists' correspondence.