A provocative firsthand account delving into the importance of artist collectives, the making of hybrid art forms, and the...
A compendium of writing from an innovative publisher and pioneering avant-garde artist of the 1960s and ’70s.
An experimental composer, writer, critic, editor, and visual artist, Higgins (Modernism Since Postmodernism: Essays on Intermedia, 1997, etc.), who died in 1998, did not subscribe to entrenched categories when it came to art; accordingly, he pursued a variety of aesthetic interests. A member of the Fluxus artist collective, Higgins sought to create hybrid forms of art, or what he called intermedia—cross-genre works like sound poetry, visual poetry, and happenings (live, interactive theatrical performances). Taking the form of manifestos and critical essays, these assorted writings set down the principles of Fluxus, including an emphasis on internationalism, experimentation, ephemerality, and playfulness, and also detail Higgins’ time as editor of Something Else Press, an independent publisher devoted to short runs of experimental art books and writing. Editors Clay, publisher of Granary Books, and Friedman (Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies/Tongji Univ.), the former manager of Something Else and the editor of The Fluxus Reader (1998), have created an attractive book, with some of Higgins’ essays reproduced in facsimile and sample covers of Something Else books and pamphlets also reprinted. Higgins is strongest in his ability to convey the heady feel of an avant-garde arts movement and the haphazard zeitgeist surrounding an innovative small press. He also excels at explaining complex experiments in art in a straightforward, clear manner. However, few manifestos age well, and a dated quality occasionally arises here due to some jargon and the repetition of anecdotes. Nevertheless, anyone interested in the history of experimental arts movements in general, and Higgins and other Fluxus artists in particular, will find much value in these pages, particularly those seeking a blueprint for their own innovative arts community or advice about how to run a small press.
A provocative firsthand account delving into the importance of artist collectives, the making of hybrid art forms, and the trials of independent publishing.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938221-20-0
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Siglio Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
A concentrated study of the conditions in Weimar Germany that spawned the Bauhaus, its struggles to survive, and its eventual destruction. Critically wounded in WW I, the architect Walter Gropius returned to Berlin ``burning with hope, throttled artistic impulses, and pain,'' and it was in this condition that he opened the doors to an arts and crafts school in the xenophobic city of Weimar. Gropius, writes Hochman (Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich, not reviewed), had been inspired by the idea of a medieval workers' guild. For the next decade the state-funded school would weather the country's strikes, economic catastrophes, and power swings, but it would never thrive with the ideological and artistic unity that Gropius had hoped to achieve. The Bauhaus failed financially, and eventually Mies van der Rohe took over, moving the institution to Berlin, where he bankrolled it himself until it was raided by the Gestapo in 1933 and closed permanently. Meanwhile, America's infatuation with the Bauhaus ideal had begun in 1926, when Alfred Barr, who would soon head up the Museum of Modern Art, began to write about the new ideas coming from Bauhaus-nurtured architects and designers. But whereas ``the tenets of Gropius' Bauhaus emerged out of the trenches of war, Barr's interpretation of them developed within a milieu of elegant lunches,'' and this, Hochman thinks, was not a good thing. Stripped of its ideological fervor, American Bauhaus ``lacked substance,'' contenting itself with bastardized versions of a style that was never really coherent in the first place. While the author's socio-historical approach fills in a neglected dimension, she pauses too rarely to emphasize what the Bauhaus was producing amid the chaos; the narrative is thus more about the obstacles the Bauhaus faced than what it accomplished. (16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 29, 1997
ISBN: 0-88064-175-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
In his time, the late Francis Bacon was regarded both as England's ``most important living painter'' and as a ``cheap sensationalist.'' This excellent biography reveals a dramatic self- mythologizer who painted brilliantly enough to realize his self- cast, epic-tragic role. Bacon created a closely guarded myth of his excessive, tumultuous personal life, never wanting his enigmatic, powerfully disturbing paintings to be explained away with a simple biographical anecdote. He also blocked biographies from being published, and destroyed many of his paintings that didn't pass muster. Peppiatt, a friend of the artist's and the editor of Art International, respects Bacon's controlling, antireductionist instinct—not out of deference, but because no brief catalog of life experiences could explain the complex horror of any one of Bacon's paintings. The artist spent his early years in Ireland and England. He was as flamboyantly gay as the times would allow and was thrown out of the family by his father, who caught him wearing Mrs. Bacon's underwear. He traveled to Berlin and Paris and lived on the edge, associating with high society and low-lifes alike—a social fluency he retained his entire life. He endured, and sometimes enjoyed, beatings from various lovers. He drank to excess, took pills, and slept little. Ultimately, Bacon synthesized an artistic territory distinctly his own; he was ``insufficiently surreal'' to join the surrealists and too figurative to be an abstractionist. The unsettling power of his work eventually brought throngs of visitors to the most prestigious galleries in Europe and America. And his appeal endures: A recent exhibition in France drew up to five thousand visitors a day. Peppiatt stalks and bags elusive prey: a better understanding of a disturbing body of work created by a man who lived inscrutably, in purposeful chaos. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-10494-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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