WHERE ARE THE MEN: THE CURIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE MALE ARTIST
By the Fury Sisters Collective, New York: Vagi Nine Press, 1989, 450 pp., 2 color plates
An overwhelming change in the art production of the ’80s—the raging of linguistics, feminism, etc., and the disruption of the canon—has so discombobulated male artists that the object of desire, a subverted notion of reality, is decentered in its reaction to sign without signifying. This valuable volume proairetically argues that the gazer becomes the gazee. But who’s looking, anyway?
THE JESSE HELMS COLORING BOOK
By Roar Barker, Washington, D.C.: Congressional Back Lash Press, 1989, 69 pp., 69 hot images.
This book, a simulacrum of the feigning of the senator, outlines a succession of alienating and obscene images. A coloration of these most fundamentalist god-forsaken images cannot resurrect the hyperreal—so PAINT IT BLACK.
WHY IS ART NOT DEAD YET?
By Dada and Mama, New Hope: Dead Ringers Press, deluxe limited edition, 1989, 7 pp., signed photograph of authors.
It’s not just the new right that threatens the art world, it is a territory engendering decay, the demise of the real. Despite the enormous conflicts and repressions of the real/hyperreal spiritual/debased heartfelt/cynical, etc., etc., art will pollinate culture, as the wind blows a seed, implants it under a cement walk, then the blade of grass cracks the cement. Truly a moving argument in our desperate era.
NOVEMBER—A QUARTERLY
Guest edited by Jouie Sauce, the Nit-pickers Press, vol. 1, Fall 1989.
The newest in pre-Modernist film theory, retro-revolutionary, post colonial, liberation. Scandalous imaginary of paradoxical systems.
—Nancy Spero
