Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 - Hardcover

Antin, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226020967 ISBN 13: 9780226020969

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Synopsis

“We got to talking”—so David Antin begins the introduction to Radical Coherency, embarking on the pursuit that has marked much of his breathless, brilliantly conversational work. For the past forty years, whether spoken under the guise of performance artist or poet, cultural explorer or literary critic, Antin’s innovative observations have helped us to better understand everything from Pop to Postmodernism. 

Intimately wedded to the worlds of conceptual art and poetics, Radical Coherency collects Antin’s influential critical essays and spontaneous, performed lectures (or “talk pieces”) for the very first time, capturing one of the most distinctive perspectives in contemporary literature. The essays presented here range from the first serious assessment of Andy Warhol published in a major art journal, as well as Antin’s provocative take on Clement Greenberg’s theory of Modernism, to frontline interventions in present debates on poetics and fugitive pieces from the ’60s and ’70s that still sparkle today—and represent a gold mine for art historians of the period. From John Cage to Allan Kaprow, Mark Rothko to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Antin takes the reader on an idiosyncratic, personal journey through twentieth-century culture with his trademark antiformalist panache—one thatwill be welcomed by any fan of this consummate trailblazer.

About this title

About the Author:

David Antin is professor emeritus in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. A poet, critic, and performance artist, he is the author of ten books of poetry, including Talking, Talking at the Boundaries, Tuning, What It Means to Be Avant-Garde, i never knew what time it was, and John Cage Uncaged Is Still Cagey. He received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984 and has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Review:

"Ever since he began publishing in the midsixties, David Antin has been a remarkably interesting and intelligent poet." -New York Times "A decade before he became the seminal 'talk poet' we all know, David Antin was already writing some of the best art criticism in America. In the waning days of Abstract Expressionism, Antin introduced other ways of thinking about art that looked ahead to twenty-first-century modes of conceptualism, performance, and digital poetics. This superb selection from his writings, which brings together essays-some of them already classics-and a number of talk-pieces from the last forty years, is a real treasure." -Marjorie Perloff"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0226020967
• ISBN 13: 9780226020969
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384