Drunken Boat #2: Art Rebellion Anarchy

By Max Blechman

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570270023
• ISBN13: 9781570270024
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Left Bank Distribution
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Under the luminous star of anarchy & culture

This extensive, totalling nearly three hundred pages, collection of essays on when art & anarchy converge is indispensable. In the last piece George Woodcock writes, "It is because writers---and especially poets---have been so straightjacketed into the structure of academic literary bureaucracy that poets no longer equate freedom and creativity and no longer publish truly radical magazines of the arts, and why Drunken Boat should be welcomed and nurtured and perhaps be the forerunner of a new liberation of literature." Featuring well known writers such as Hakim Bey, Ferlinghetti, Andre Breton, Judith Malina, as well as one of John Cage's last interviews, essays on Herbert Read & the anarchist predilections of artists Man Ray & Kandinsky. Also featured prominently are essays on and by lesser known people such as filmmaker Jean Vigo, writer Holley Cantine, poet Voltairine de Cleyre, & psychoanalyst Otto Gross. There is a wonderful piece by Pat Frank detailing the literary scene, many involved shared anarchist leanings, in San Francisco right after World War II largely initiated by anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth, that set the ground for the San Francisco Renaissance & reception of the New York Beat writers. The general spirit of the book may be summed up in the following passage from editor Max Blechman's introduction, "The work of art has generally been considered worthy only so far as it presents a historically viable content on the one hand (Marxist aesthetics) or decoration and market value on the other (bourgeois aesthetics). In both cases the cognitive function of art is ignored, which is that process of imaginatively exploring subjective emotional content. By becoming aware of one's own repression, and speaking the poetry that is found in the recesses of the imagination the individual posits a different experience. This is the task of art. The autonomy of art embodies the anarchic, self-determining conciousness without which emancipatory movements are doomed to repeat all the atrocities of previous revolutions."