Thomas McEvilley: The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism (2005)

“From roughly 1965 to 1980, Conceptual Art and Performance Art took center stage throughout the western world, introducing new and complex ideas to the practice of contemporary art which reverberate to this day. Thomas McEvilley’s The Triumph of Anti-Art not only explains the origins of these controversial and compelling art forms, but also uncovers many relatively unrecognized yet indisputably important artists, American and European. He guides the reader through a thicket of seemingly arcane meanings of these nonrepresentational art form, and brings clarity to the intentions and agendas of these artists, as well as to their real world contexts. The long-term effects of “anti-art,” and the development of the pluralistic situation known as post-Modernism, are described in vivid detail.

From the Greek philosopher Diogenes, through the 19th-century German romantic tradition, to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg, McEvilley traces philosophical ideas and political impulses that temporarily led to a toppling of painting and sculpture in the decades right after World War II. Following an overview of Modernism and Marcel Duchamp’s influence, a chapter on Yves Klein sets the state for surveys of Conceptual Art and its practitioners, including Bernar Venet, John Baldessari, and Francis Alys. McEvilley then gives equal focus to Performance Art with chapters on Andy Warhol, Brian O’Doherty, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay, among others. At the end of the volume the “triumph” of “anti-art” is explored in depth, as are the origins of the terms, practices, and politics of global art history.”

Publisher McPherson & Co., Kingston, N.Y., 2005
ISBN 0929701674, 9780929701677
391 pages

Reviews: Publishers Weekly (2005), Lisa Paul Streitfeld (NY Arts, 2006).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (73 MB)

Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (1968)

“A collection of texts from letters, manifestos, notes and interviews. Sources include, as the title says, artists and critics—some expected, like van Gogh, Gauguin, Apollinaire, Mondrian, Greenberg, just to name a few—and some less so: Trotsky and Hitler, in the section on Art and Politics. The book is a wonderful resource and insight into the way artists think and work.”

Edited by Herschel Browning Chipp
Contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor
Publisher University of California Press, 1968
ISBN 0520014502
xv+664 pages

Reviews: Romare H. Bearden and Carl Holty (Leonardo, 1970), Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (Art Bulletin, 1972).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (179 MB, no OCR)

Hugo Ball: Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (1927–)

“Hugo Ball—poet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, mystic—was a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time and carried in their wake. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who gathered there were the beginnings of Dada. Ball’s extraordinary diaries, one of the most significant products of the Dada movement, are here available in English, along with the original Dada manifesto and John Elderfield’s critical introduction, revised and updated for this edition, and a supplementary bibliography of Dada texts.”

First published as Die Flucht aus der Zeit, Duncker & Humblot, Munich, 1927.

Edited and with an Introduction by John Elderfield
Translated by Ann Raimes
Publisher Viking Press, New York, 1974
Documents of Twentieth-Century Art series
New edition, University of California Press, 1996
ISBN 9780520204409
lxiv+274 pages

Review: Kirkus Rev (n.d.).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (19 MB, updated on 2020-2-27)