Synopses & Reviews
Cultural Writing. Critical Essays and art. This volume contains over 200 texts by more than fifty participants in the U.S. Surrealist Movement, making this the most comprehensive, diverse and lavishly illustrated compilation of American surrealist writings to have ever been assembled. This anthology "supersedes the narrow and tiresome literary/artistic categorizations to which surrealism is usually assigned by critics, and situates it in the much broader context that surrealists themselves have always preferred: the revolutionary context" - from the Foreword by Franklin Rosemont. Editor Ron Sakolsky is the co-editor of two other Autonomedia anthologies: GONE TO CROATAN: THE ORIGINS OF NORTH AMERICAN DROP-OUT CULTURE and SOUNDING OFF!: MUSIC AS SUBVERSION/ RESISTANCE/ REVOLUTION also available from SPD.
Synopsis
In these fierce and lyrical essays, David Levi Strauss calls for an art—and implicitly for an approach to art writing—that is passionately experiential, intellectually grounded, and politically fearless. He addresses the always conflicted relation between aesthetics and politics by concentrating on specific instances—from allopathic art to Desert Storm propaganda, from Columbus's legacy to Robert Smithson's prophesies, and from new art in post-Soviet Russia to public art in the United States—and by focusing on the work of artists as various as Grünewald, Jean Genet, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Carolee Schneemann, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Daniel Joseph Martinez.