Intelligent Action

Intelligent Action looks at how artists in the long 1960s offered alternatives to dominant ideas of research and knowledge production. Drawing on archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner and Suzanne Lacy, among others, it asks how these artists responded to ideas of research, information, knowledge production and pedagogy. The works discussed date from 1958 to 1975, when boundaries between media were breaking down under technological, cultural and generational change.

The book is organised around particular institutional formations: artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the founding of new schools or teaching programs. Formal and social analysis shows how artistic practices in academic settings took on the look, feel or language of research and teaching. In some cases artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others they developed new modes of practice and pedagogy.

By reading these works through their institutional histories, author Timothy Ridlen shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed within and alongside academia, and how that process changed the role of the artist.