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
Art critic Weber (The Drawings of Josef Albers, etc.—not reviewed) offers vivid, laudatory portraits of five individuals who helped revolutionize American artistic sensibilities in the 1920's and 30's. The best-known figure here is Lincoln Kirstein, prolific author and a founder of the New York City Ballet, who, as an undergraduate in 1928, started, along with the ``animated,'' well- connected Edward M.M. Warburg, the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Kirstein and Warburg showed staid New England the wonders of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, Calder's Circus, and design from the Bauhaus. They regularly had lunch with Agnes Mongan, who, at the Fogg Museum, was beginning the scholarship that ``fostered an unprecedented appreciation of drawings.'' In Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum director A. Everett Austin was picking up some of the Harvard group's avant-garde shows, while James Thrall Soby began collecting modern paintings and shocked the insurance city with a living-room showing of Bu§uel and Dali's film, L'Age d'Or. In 1933, Kirstein enlisted Austin, Soby, and especially Warburg to bring choreographer George Balanchine to this country. Certainly Weber achieves his stated purpose of conveying ``something of the spirit'' of these privileged and complicated five, but it's hard not to want even more on Kirstein and Warburg—who both became disillusioned with the art world—and, above all, on Mongan, not a modernist yet in some ways the most pioneering. We get a glimpse of the passions that drove this distinguished woman (who finally became head of the Fogg in her 60s) when she writes to Bernard Berenson of ``the magic and unearthly beauty which you led me into when we emerged from the grove in darkness.'' A welcome inside look at a loose circle of patrons in an era when money, taste, and risk-taking could steer the progress of art in America. (Seventy-seven illustrations.)ica. (Seventy-seven illustrations.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57854-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
``My purpose is to tell a story,'' Crunden (American Civilization/Univ. of Texas at Austin; Ministers of Reform, 1982, etc.) writes in this spirited, learned, and epic first volume in a projected three-volume history of American encounters with modernism. After introducing the ``precursors'' of American modernism (James Whistler, William and Henry James), Crunden describes centers of modernism such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, their special institutions, and the music, film, and people associated with them—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude and Leo Stein—who were seminal to modernism in America. American encounters with European modernism took place in the salons of W.B. Yeats in England (where, ironically, Pound met T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost) and of the Steins in Paris (where Picasso painted Gertrude and discussed William James). The alchemy of people and places continued in N.Y.C., in the salons of Alfred Stieglitz, Mabel Dodge, and others, who in turn encouraged new artists, styles, criticism, exhibits such as the Armory Show, and various kinds of communal endeavors such as the Provincetown Playhouse. Each group had its own preoccupations—whether photography, education, politics, or painting—and each had its own personality. Crunden excels at depicting personalities, building his story on well-told biography and anecdote: The first encounter between modernism and postmodernism, he tells us, was a pretend tennis match between Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in New Jersey. The author concludes with a stunning reading of Wallace Stevens's ``Sunday Morning'' as a summation of American modernism. Crunden assimilates an amazing amount of information and, like his modernists, brings an inventive form, charm, color, and imagination to what were once aesthetic abstractions. He tells his ``story'' very well indeed.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-19-506569-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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