Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life / Edition 2

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More About This Textbook

Overview

Allan Kaprow's "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to contemporary performance art, and his essays are some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential of his generation. His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
In the late 1950s, Kaprow coined the word ``happenings'' to describe the performance pieces that approximated in art the unpredictability of everyday life. In this collection of 23 thought-provoking essays, reviews and manifestos written between 1958 and 1990, Kaprow takes aim at an insular art avant-garde. Criticizing popular trends in modern art (colorfield, hard edge, pop, video art, assemblage, etc.) as ``developmental'' instead of truly experimental, he envisages a more ``lifelike'' art that probes, tests and reintegrates reality. For Kaprow, who is currently a performance artist and a visual arts professor at UC-San Diego, it is the neo-Dadaist Fluxus artists, earthworkers, body artists, shamans and performance poets who point the way toward a participatory art rooted in daily activities. Illustrated with photos and reproductions of artworks, these essays give Kaprow's take on artists such as Mondrian and Jackson Pollock and on wider topics like the transition of the artist from Beatnik to businessman. (Oct.)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780520240797
  • Publisher: University of California Press
  • Publication date: 12/15/2003
  • Edition description: Expanded Edition
  • Edition number: 2
  • Pages: 297
  • Sales rank: 889,843
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 0.75 (d)

Meet the Author

Allan Kaprow is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Jeff Kelley is a critic and teacher.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Legacy of Jackson Pollock 1
Notes on the Creation of a Total Art 10
Happenings in the New York Scene 15
Impurity 27
The Artist as a Man of the World 46
The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the Happenings! 59
Experimental Art 66
Manifesto 81
Pinpointing Happenings 84
The Shape of the Art Environment 90
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I 97
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II 110
Doctor MD 127
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part III 130
Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle 148
Formalism: Flogging a Dead Horse 154
Nontheatrical Performance 163
Participation Performance 181
Performing Life 195
The Real Experiment 201
Art Which Can't Be Art 219
Right Living 223
The Meaning of Life 229
Selected Bibliography of Allan Kaprow's Writings on Art 243
Index 247
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