Ed Ruscha: Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (2002)

“Ed Ruscha is among the most innovative artists of the last forty years. He is also one of the first Americans to introduce a critique of popular culture and an examination of language into the visual arts. Although he first made his reputation as a painter, Ruscha is also celebrated for his drawings (made both with conventional materials and with food, blood, gunpowder, and shellac), prints, films, photographs, and books. He is often associated with Los Angeles as a Pop and Conceptualist hub, but tends to regard such labels with a satirical, if not jaundiced, eye. Indeed, his work is characterized by the tensions between high and low, solemn and irreverent, and serious and nonsensical, and it draws on popular culture as well as Western art traditions.

Leave Any Information at the Signal not only documents the work of this influential artist as he rose to prominence but also contains his writings and commentaries on other artistic developments of the period. The book is divided into three parts, each of which is arranged chronologically. Part one contains statements, letters, and other writings. Part two consists of more than fifty interviews, some of which have never before been published or translated into English. Part three contains sketchbook pages, word groupings, and other notes that chart how Ruscha develops ideas and solves artistic problems. They are published here for the first time. The book also contains more than eighty illustrations, selected and arranged by the artist.”

Edited and with an Introduction by Alexandra Schwartz
Publisher MIT Press, 2002
October Books series
ISBN 0262182203, 9780262182201
473 pages

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Clement Greenberg: Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (2000)

“In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington College in 1971, Greenberg provides his most expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art. He insists that despite the attempts of modern artists to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged, taste is inexorable. He maintains that standards of quality in art, ohe artist’s responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic’s responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us to watch the critic’s mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his controversial and influential theories. Charles Harrison’s introduction to this volume places Homemade Esthetics in the context of Greenberg’s work and the evolution of 20th century criticism.”

Foreword by Janice Van Horne Greenberg
Introduction by Charles Harrison
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2000
ISBN 0195139232, 9780195139235
256 pages

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Hannah Higgins: Fluxus Experience (2002)

“In this work, Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate, contentious—Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as affirming transactions between self and world.

Fluxus began in the 1950s with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how and why it’s important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics’ and curators’ perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus art for pedagogy in general.

Although it was commonly associated with political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520228677, 9780520228672
259 pages

Reviews: Ken Friedman (Design Research, 2003), Jennie Klein (PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2004), Roy R. Behrens (Leonardo, 2004), Branislav Jakovljevic (TDR: The Drama Review, 2004), Ágnes Ivacs (Artpool, n.d.).

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)