Picked this up from Walden Books, Kentish Town, on Saturday...
(Hold on, I'm having trouble thinking because of the bloody racket made by a workman outside who is oblivious to the fact that I'm transmitting essential information to THE WORLD!!!)
...eats the remains of a pain au chocolat...drinks coffee...yes, that's what we do in bourgeois North London, home the the socialist elite!...
...drill starts up again and I know it's not going to stop anytime soon, so...
...what about Art and The Future eh? What happened since this book was published in 1972? I dunno, ask a historian. But this is a good book, well-written, loads of pics and that font I love but can't remember the name of...the Fluxus folk used it...
I scanned some pages, just for you, using technology...badly, or not as well as I could, but you see, there's this noisy bastard outside working and that's my excuse.
I used Technology today to create a visual poetry piece. I would reveal details but my recipe for Art Success is a closely guarded secret. Art and technology in the 60s interests me for several reasons, one being that I can't fully grasp its significance but love the idea, a bit like science-fiction, actually, no, better, because sci-fi is all promise and usually disappointing product whereas Art and Technology delivered, from early computer art, to Jean Tinguely's cranky machines, Nam June Paik's video and TV creations and...so on...
I was going to say I used to make a lot more art using Technology than I do today but I still use the printer a lot and wasn't the typewriter a flashy new piece of technology when it was mass produced? Truman Capote famously said of Kerouac's On The Road, 'that's not writing, it's typing' - ha-ha! He didn't get it, did he?
Warhol said he wanted to be a machine. I am a machine and so are you, biological ones. It's all currently working right now as I type. Thankfully, to prevent us all acting like robots, we have this thing in our heads called a brain...a mind...a soul?
Before I start thinking too much I'm going to shut up.
TTFN
I have an obsessive interest in the late 60s-late 70s intersections of performance art, dance, theatre, video, installation, etc., mainly in New York - many of the people who came later or just after the Paiks and Cunninghams and Rauschenbergs (although obviously with much overlap and collaboration). Before "postmodernism" became the thing, but after modernism's height. Early Robert Wilson, Wooster Group, and Richard Foreman, Squat Theatre, the Judson Church group and the Grand Union choreographers, installation artists like Alice Aycock and Gordon Matta-Clark, the hard-core minimalists, etc. Ah, disenchantment - how enchanting - and fruitful - it can be!
ReplyDeleteI've not heard of many of the artists you mention but if you don't have it I recommend the book, Hippie Modernism.
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