Thomas Crow, The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge (2023)
Authors
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Mark Harris
University of Cincinnati
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58519/aesthinv.v6i2.18527Keywords:
Bruce Conner, Mike Kelley, Harald Szeemann, the counterculture, political art, experimental filmAbstract
Thomas Crow’s book The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge reappraises West Coast art as enmeshed in the counterculture. The first five of its twelve chapters discuss Bruce Conner’s development as a multimedia artist in San Franscisco and Los Angeles producing assemblages, films, drawings, magazine illustrations, and light shows for rock concerts. The next five chapters expand Crow’s argument by appraising anti-war manifestations, Black and Latino protest work, Land Art, and West Coast conceptual practices as aspects of the counterculture. Moving forward to the late 1970s, the final two chapters review first Conner’s reemergence as a photographer documenting California punk bands and then Mike Kelley’s transplanting of Detroit’s alternative rock idealism to fuel the development of his own radical art practices.
References
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Cándida Smith, Richard. ‘Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California’. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
Crow, Thomas. The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Leider, Philip. ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation or, An and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah’. Artforum 9, no. 1 (1970): 40–49.
Stevens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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