Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now

New York: Harry N. Abrams; Prentice Hall, Inc., 1995. 176 pages, illustrations; 24 cm. Near fine. Tight, clean copy. Age toning. Profusely illustrated. "Offering a critical perspective-rather than a traditional survey, this provocative text explores the art of the last twenty years-the latter 1970s, the 1980s, and the first half of the 1990s-in both a thematic and chronological fashion. Using an engaging and approachable style-and an abundance of color illustrations, it takes a long look at dominant tendencies in contemporary art in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Russia-and provides a series of challenging view points on the most advanced art forms, themes, and issues." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Introduction: Tradition and Avant-Garde; 1. Alternatives to Modernism: the 1970s; A new women's art; Performance art; The trials of conceptualism; The spectre of affirmative painting; 2. Painting and Politics: 1976-90; The return of the figure and of "expression"; Expressionism contexted; Something called "post-modernism"; Painting and "the feminine"; 3. Stolen Forms: 1976-90; Photography and gender; objects and the market; Painting and appropriation; 4. Art within the Museum: the later 1980s; Culture itself as subject; Installation as decay; The curator's part; The power of the photograph; A kind of publicity; 5. Narrating Identity: the early 1990s; The body and AIDS; West-coast post-modernism; Installations and the declasse; Narrating the body; The discourse of race; 6. Coda: Future Prospects.. 1st. Paperback. Very Good. 8vo.