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Haacke, Hans et al. - Kahn, Douglas & Diane Neumaier (ed.):

Cultures in Contention: Hans Haacke, Abbie Hoffman, Lucy R. Lippard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Holly Near, Arlene Raven, Archie Shepp, et al.

Kirkegaards Antikvariat
kir58924
Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985. 4to in wraps as issued. 286 pages. Illustrated. Very good clean copy.

"As mass culture spreads its web of dreams and illusions over the globe, creating a universal language of desire and belief, our universities and scholarly journals continue to teach and theorize about "art" as though it were some static object of "pure beauty" with no social or economic context or effect. The image of the artist as some isolated "gifted" seer off in an ivory tower persists, as does the ahistorical, nonmaterialist notion that "real art" can easily be distinguished from "mass art" by virtue of certain abstract qualities which, when studied closely turn out usually to be functions of social and historical conditions. Such ideas serve an important political function. They obscure and mystify an entire area of political reality. For as long as we view "art" as static, outside the realm of social forces, and by and large valuable in reverse proportion to its accessibility--the best art of course being produced in a distant past--we will fail to see what is happening under our noses. Such is the pervasiveness of this bourgeois way of thinking, that the activist left in this country (but certainly not in the third world) has rarely engaged in the kind of serious debate on artistic and cultural theory and strategy that the power of the media today demands. Art, for the left, still exists primarily as agitprop, as "entertainment" to be given as akind of light dessert after the serious business of political speeches. Cultures in Contention, which brings together a collection of writings by cultural activists in a variety of media and from countries across the world is no less than remarkable as a corrective to this sorry state of affairs. Its editors start from a theoretical position which is as radical as it is rich in implication. "Cultures in Contention," they say in the introduction, "seeks to reinstate an understanding of the preeminently social character of all cultural action." In so doing, it raises a variety of issues which are rarely discussed or understood. In fact, the book's greatest achievement may be to reveal the world of art production not only as collective, dynamic, and social, but also as theoretically and strategically informed."
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