TY - BOOK ID - 112292776 TI - No more masterpieces : modern art after Artaud PY - 2021 SN - 9780300251036 PB - New Haven : Yale University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Art, American KW - Installations (Art) KW - Experimental drama, American KW - Social aspects. KW - Artaud, Antonin, KW - Influence. KW - Art américain KW - Art KW - Art, American. KW - Art, Modern KW - Collage (Art) américain KW - Collage (Art) français KW - Collage, American KW - Collage, French KW - Happening KW - Happenings (Art) KW - Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.). KW - Performance art KW - Influence française KW - French influences KW - 1900-1999. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:112292776 AB - "My central claim in this book is that, despite (or perhaps because of) the apparent lack of a "school of Artaud", the artistic production of post-war America manifested a widespread, if haphazard, mobilization of Artaud's ideas. From the 1950s, Artaud's reception developed as a complex discursive matrix in relation to which we might better understand a number of the central imperatives and tensions of the art of this period. Although Artaud had always been situated on the periphery of European surrealism in the pre-war period, often labeled a "dissident surrealist", his posthumous American reception positioned him as a crucial figure in the development of a number of performance, process-oriented, and conceptual practices. Although only a tiny percentage of his output was ever translated into English, his writing was devoured by those seeking an alternative to the hegemonic abstraction of the New York School painters and the psychoanalytic inflections of mainstream surrealism and its legacies. In the chapters that follow, I chart Artaud's reception across various sites, practices, and media, through a close examination of the work of Rachel Rosenthal and John Cage, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner and Michael McClure, Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann and Nancy Spero. I read their work through the lens of key ideas proposed by Artaud in written works that were circulated contemporaneously in translation, read and in many cases directly cited or more obliquely referenced by those artists and their peers. In addition to the liberatory model proposed by Artaud's theater of cruelty, I identify themes of authority and judgment, the body in crisis and dismantled, and the universal unreliability of representation. Common to the work of the artists that I discuss is an emphatic dedication to dis-organization, enacted at the conjunction of the corporeal, the material, and the linguistic. Aimed at dismantling multiple cultural, political, and philosophical hegemonies, this impulse was directed toward the construction of a non-hierarchical and deliberately anarchic space of artistic creation beyond the autonomous realm of the modernist masterpiece"-- ER -