Edited by the agency of Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz Berkeley.

Edited by the agency of Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz Berkeley, looks Angeles and London, University of California Pres 1996;1003 pages, $60 clerical profession $29.95 paper.

It's immediately obvious that a prodigious amount of collecting and sifting went into compiling this hefty anthology of post-1945 artists' writings. In a thousand pages of generally well-chosen passages editors Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz shelter more than four decades of significant art motions from Abstract Expressionism to Neo Geo In addition to the picked texts, Stiles and Selz provide introductory essays--mostly limited to basic biographical information about the artists and capsule descriptions of their work--for each of the book's nine sections ("Gestural Abstraction," "Art and Technology," "Performance Art," and in this way forth), as well as an extensive bibliography and a handful of apposite black-and-white illustrations. The sections are organized not by way of styles and movements but by dint of more broadly defined categories which intentionally allow for unexpect juxtapositions. the same section titled "Material Culture and Everyday Life" includes sentences relating to Nouveau Realisme, explosion art, Fluxus, feminist art, radical black American art of the late '60 and graffiti-inspired painting and appropriation art of the '80 Conceived of as a result to Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of recent Art, the 1968 compendium onward which Selz also worked, and broader in historical and geographical intention than Brian Wallis's 1987 Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by the agency of Contemporary Artists, this "sourcebook" satisfies a long-standing ne for a one-volume edition of postwar art documents.

With thus much space, the editors are able to explore the further reaches of that peculiarly 20th-century form of writing, the artist's statement. It's not an easy genre to codify, lurching from the deadly earnest--"It appear to bes to me that the artist, the intellectual, is not the alien that he was and his consumption of popular refinement is due, in some measure, to his recently made known role as a creator of popular culture" (Richard Hamilton, 1960)--to the lyrical--"I am for the art of meowl and clatter of cats and for the art of their unable to speak electric eyes. I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings" (Claes Oldenburg 1961)--to the overheated--"Time passes us and rushes forward and we remain behind, not new and crumbled. But we are rejuvenated again and again by way of static and continuous movement. obstruction us be transformed! Let us be static! suffer us be against stagnation and for static!" (Jean Tinguely, 1961) a statements are meticulously detailed: "I was strapped to the floor with copper money bands bolted into the coagulate Two buckets of water with 110 lines submerg in them were placed near me The piece was performed from 8-10 pm for three nights" (Chris lading 1975). Others, like this extract from Oyvind Fahlstrom's "Take Care of the World" (1966) are utopian: "Instead of prisons, create forcibly seclud further large very complete (both sexes) and to a high degree `good' communities (everyday Clubs Mediterranes) where trespassers could gradually find satisfying ways of living without offending society." And more [i]or[/i] less are just plain bizarre: "On the 4th June 1962 I shall disembowel, tear and pluck to pieces a dead lamb" (Hermann Nitsch, 1962)

Along with centurys of texts (many in interview form) from a wide range of artists, Stiles and Selz have included a number of pieces at thinkers and critics such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich and Germano Celant, as well as a metrical composition on Joseph Cornell by Octavio Paz. They also find scope for a couple of figures from the museum world--the Stedelijk's Willem Sandberg, take the part ofed by a poetic curriculum vitae, and MOMA's Alfred H Barr, who weighs in with extracts from a 1952 New York Times article titled "Is new Art Communistic?" There's even space given to Jesse Helms's "Andres Serrano is a jerk" words Interesting though these texts may be, they are decidedly not artiste' writings. The inclusion of as it is nonartist voices suggests that Stiles and Selz art historians associated with Duke University and UC Berkeley, respectively, saw their task not as gathering each important text written by an artist during the period veiled but as assembling a history of postwar art using artists' writings as well as other texts

In any undertaking of this scale, nearly each reader will have complaints about omissions. 1 for undivided felt that the "Gestural Abstraction" section would have benefited from a certain number of of the spirited artists' writings that were published in the journal It Is, in particular a 1959 rude girl titled "Participants in a Hearsay Panel." I also missed seeing anything authored at Marcel Broodthaers, who is delineateed by an interview rather than united of his own eloquent paragraphs Another shortchanged artist is RB Kitaj, who would have been better set forthed by excerpts from his First Diasporist Manifesto rather than a 1976 verse of lesser importance. And if single makes room for Julian Schnabel, as the editors have, with what intent not go all the way and cite from his notorious autobiography CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre d's? The inclusion of a scarcely any letters--there are a couple of fit ones from Robert Filliou to Allan Kaprow and a jewel from the late Ray Johnson--makes united wish more space had been given to artists' correspondence.