Harrison charles

PJH51856 — MIT 2002. Fine in publishers cloth in like dustjacket. 326pp. 1st edition. 4to. These essays by art historian and critic Charles Harrison are based on the premise that making art and talking about art are related enterprises. They are written from the point of view of Art and Language the artistic movement based in England-and briefly in the United States - with which Harrison has been associated for 30 years. Harrison uses the work of Art and Language as a central case study to discuss developments in art from the 1950s through the 1980s. According to Harrison the strongest motivation for writing about art is that it brings us closer to that which is other than ourselves. In seeing how a work is done we learn about its achieved identity: we see for example that a drip on a Pollock is integral to its technical character whereas a drip on a Mondrian would not be. Throughout the book Harrison uses specific examples to address a range of questions about the history theory and making of modern art-questions about the conditions of its making and the nature of its public about the problems and priorities of criticism and about the relations between interpretation and judgment. ISBN 0262083000 MIT 2002 hardcover