Preachy and polemical essays trace 25 years of alternative public art, addressing an exciting topic with airless earnestness. Editor Lacy is a conceptual and performance artist, a founding member in the 1970s of the West Coast's Feminist Studio Workshop, and currently dean of fine arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Her introduction defines ``new genre art,'' now an established movement of artists who engage in installations in public spaces, collective group endeavors, and activist actions and stand in opposition to what they see as the elitist traditions of museums, galleries, and grandiose public statuary. Essays by a bevy of contributors follow. Mary Jane Jacob, an independent curator, struggles over the medium's attempts to embrace a nonexclusive public. Critic Patricia C. Phillips tries to tackle public art's ``challenge to modernism,'' as well as its failures as a marginalized genre. More cogent are offerings from well-known art writers Suzi Gablik, on the artist's role in society, and Lucy R. Lippard, on the definition of public art; both manage to reach concrete conclusions. Lighter, and most entertaining, is artist Allan Kaprow's first-person account of recruiting inner-city kids for a collaborative project documenting bathroom graffiti in Berkeley, Calif., in the late 1960s. Most helpful to general readers and students will be the book's second half, an alphabetized compendium of both well- and lesser-known works of some 90 artists and collective groups assembled by Susan Steinman (Art/California State Univ., Hayward). Described here: Joseph Beuys's 1974 three-day cohabitation of a New York gallery space with a live coyote; Jerri Allyn's activist ``40 Woman All-Waitress Marching Band'' from L.A. in the 1970s; and New York City's Guerrilla Girls, who raised the art world's consciousness in the 1980s. Essays laden with the verbal clunkiness of the politically correct art cartel, joined by a more useful index of artists and projects.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-941920-30-5
Page Count: 295
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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