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Allan Kaprow--Art as Life
A self-described "un-artist," Allan Kaprow championed an artistic practice that moved art out of the museum and into the everyday. His works insistently blurred the boundaries between art and life, requiring active participation rather than passive spectatorship, interactive collaboration
rather than solitary creation.
This richly illustrated volume documents five decades of Kaprow's life and work. Its six essays range across his shifts from painter to environmental artist to the inventor of the Happening and the Activity, while its extensive chronology features scores, letters, posters, photographs, and
clippings, most drawn from the Allan Kaprow Papers held by the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Though the forms Kaprow largely invented have lost their shock value and were meant in most cases to be ephemeral, in fact they live on, captured in scores and other surviving
documentation, still stretching the boundaries of art in the modern world.
Allan Kaprow--Art as Life is being published to coincide with a retrospective of the artist's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on view from March 23 through June 30, 2008.
rather than solitary creation.
This richly illustrated volume documents five decades of Kaprow's life and work. Its six essays range across his shifts from painter to environmental artist to the inventor of the Happening and the Activity, while its extensive chronology features scores, letters, posters, photographs, and
clippings, most drawn from the Allan Kaprow Papers held by the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Though the forms Kaprow largely invented have lost their shock value and were meant in most cases to be ephemeral, in fact they live on, captured in scores and other surviving
documentation, still stretching the boundaries of art in the modern world.
Allan Kaprow--Art as Life is being published to coincide with a retrospective of the artist's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on view from March 23 through June 30, 2008.
- GenresArt
408 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2008
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About the author
Alex Potts
29 books3 followersAlex Potts’ work on art and artistic theory covers a number of areas - sculptural aesthetics and the history of sculpture, experimental practices and the aesthetics of realism in twentieth-century art, art and artistic theory in the nineteenth century, and Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of the classical ideal. His main publication on the latter was his book Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994).
In addition to the book The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000), his work on sculpture includes a co-edited anthology of texts on modern sculpture, The Modern Sculpture Reader (2007; reissued 2012), and articles on David Smith, Alberto Giacometti and other twentieth-century sculptors.
In his more recent research he has been arguing for the larger significance of experimental forms of realism in post-war European and American art. This was the subject of the Slade Lectures in Fine Art he gave at the University of Oxford in 2008 and of the Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2009, and also of his book, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art, published by Yale University Press in 2013. The latter examines a variety of different kinds of art, from the postwar painting of De Kooning and Dubuffet to New Brutalist and Pop image and object making and actions and assemblages of artists such as Rauschenberg and Beuys.
In his current project, he is exploring ways in which political commitment informed conceptions of naturalism and realism as well as more abstract forms of representation in the art of the late-nineteenth and earlier-twentieth centuries.
- http://www.lsa.umich.edu/histart/peop...
In addition to the book The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000), his work on sculpture includes a co-edited anthology of texts on modern sculpture, The Modern Sculpture Reader (2007; reissued 2012), and articles on David Smith, Alberto Giacometti and other twentieth-century sculptors.
In his more recent research he has been arguing for the larger significance of experimental forms of realism in post-war European and American art. This was the subject of the Slade Lectures in Fine Art he gave at the University of Oxford in 2008 and of the Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2009, and also of his book, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art, published by Yale University Press in 2013. The latter examines a variety of different kinds of art, from the postwar painting of De Kooning and Dubuffet to New Brutalist and Pop image and object making and actions and assemblages of artists such as Rauschenberg and Beuys.
In his current project, he is exploring ways in which political commitment informed conceptions of naturalism and realism as well as more abstract forms of representation in the art of the late-nineteenth and earlier-twentieth centuries.
- http://www.lsa.umich.edu/histart/peop...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 17, 2014
Brilliant resource for any scholar on Kaprow - essays reflect interestingly on the Getty archive material. Nice presentation of works.
Displaying 1 of 1 review