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Book Reviews 131 the artist's work hist.orica~ly~ teaches the reader some of the techniques used, and then provides listings of records that illustrate the work. . The final sectlO~ provides short interviews with artists working in the field, such as Luciano Berio, Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick. S~hrader ask~ these artists questions about how they became involved with electronic music and about specifics of particular pieces for which they are known. I d.o have ~OI~e reservations about the book. It is difficult to fully des~nbe .muslc In words, and some descriptions of particular works don t qurte ~ucceed. The book will be a much richer experience if the reader can listen to the records suggested in coordination with reading. Als?, I felt the computer music section was not as thorough as the other se.ctlOns. Readers interested in using computers for music generation will need to consult other sources for technical information. Overall however, readers interested in electronic music will find this book an excellent resource. Re~iewed by S. Wilson, Art Department, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, U.S.A. The UnlNecessary Image, Peter D'Agostino and Antonio Muntadas, eds. Tanam Press, New York, 1982. 104 pp., iIIus. Paper. ISBN: 0934378 -30-4. This collection of 21 written and visual essays purports to examine the interrelationship of art, advertising and technology, or more specifically, art that deals with the content and meaning of public information. As is often the case with such collections, the individual contributions vary widely in degrees of analytic acumen. The result is a highly tendentious book that, with the exception of a few insightful pieces, does little to elucidate the growing interdependence of art and commerce. Instead, the writers and artists represented here direct an unmitigated and palpable hatred towards corporations and the mass media. The art world has long cast a jaundiced eye at Wall Street and Madison Avenue, and a recurring theme throughout the book is the "deevolution " of visual imagery through business and media manipulation. Images are equated with plastic, a pliant commodity that may be easily bent or molded to suit the purposes of the sender. Perhaps the best account of this process is John Brumfield's 'What Do You Know When You Know a Picture', which cogently scrutinizes the recontextualization of visual imagery that ultimately results in its trivialization. David Craven's lucid exposition of Hans Haacke's highly politicized and confrontational art is another highlight of the book, as is an excerpt from Haacke's 'On Social Grease'. Haacke's art ischarged by a rage and contempt that burns through the laconic understatement, making it all the more effective. The same cannot be said of much else here, unfortunately. The Un/Necessary Image is most convincing when dealing with tangible referents rather than theoretical abstracts. Kristine Stiles' jeremiad 'The Luciferian Marriage' is a case in point. Her account of how media coverage of antinuclear protests at Diablo Canyon degenerated into a circus of nostalgia rings all too true, but when she turns to the question of why, the piece ends with a white-eyed screed awash in self-righteousness, proclaiming that the Apocalypse is just around the corner. Even a tenuous toehold on reality is gleefully abandoned in pieces like Dan Graham's portentous 'The End of Liberalism (Part II)', where he myopically views abstract expressionism as the last gasp of the autonomous American 'artist, or Judith Barry's 'Space Invaders, or the Failure of the Present,' which, as one might infer from the title, is the worst sort of incomprehensible pseudo-intellectual blather. Other contributors dissect advertisements with prosaic results, often delineating the obvious and seldom advancing beyond the levelof analysis one receives in Advertising 101. For a book about images, the overall layout appears surprisingly slapdash. Many of the visual contributions are little more than rudimentary cut-and-paste collages, and a few essays are riddled with typographical errors. The Un/Necessary Image ostensibly deals with artistic pandering on the part of the media and corporations, but in a book filled with irony perhaps the biggest irony of all is that it is essentially a polemic, a book...

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