The Object of Performance: The American Avant Garde Since 1970 by Henry M. Sayre, and: Feminism and Traditional Aesthetics, Special Issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, No. 4 (Fall 1990) ed. by Peg Brand, Carolyn Korsmeyer (review)

He also provides helpful suggestions for doing time-notation exercises in the classroom or studio. Maria Gonzalez examines the history and use of photocopiers by artists from an international perspective and then provides a detailed description of the imageprocessing techniques and concepts she employs in her own copiergenerated artwork involving metamorphosis and motion. Duane Palyka, noted computer-graphics artist, demonstrates how he infuses content into a computer program so that it becomes the work of art itself. This piece was originally designed by Palyka to teach programming in the C computer language to art students. Finally, in the closing essay, Willard Van De Bogart explores changing concepts of reality from a phenomenological and information-science perspective , and suggests that our perception ofreality is being dramatically altered by exposure to threedimensional computer imagery. In summary, a sumptuous array of approaches to teaching and learning about art is presented in this issue. The overall impressions one gets from reading these offerings are that traditional curricular models grounded in nineteenth-century art practices are becoming increasingly obsolete and that any art education program today that does not address the integration of knowledge will fall far short in preparing the next generation of artists. Indeed, the future holds the promise of rich interchanges between the worlds of art, science and technology. Art educators need to take advantage of this linkage by developing and implementing multidimensional approaches for the study of art, revealing to their students the interconnections among events, ideas and things. In short, the underlying supposition of this issue is that a new world is emerging; therefore, art educators need to lay a 'new foundation' for their students to create new tools, new ideas and new art forms. For those art educators searching for guidance in this endeavor, this issue will serve as a suitable compass. THE OBJECT OF PERFORMANCE: THE AMERICAN AVANT GARDE SINCE 1970 by Henry M. Sayre. Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, U.S.A., 1989. 308 pp., illus. ISBN: 0-226-73557-5. FEMINISM AND TRADITIONAL AESTHETICS, SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM 48, No.4 (Fall 1990) Peg Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds. American Society for Aesthetics, Univ. ofWisconsin, Madison, WI, U.S.A., and the Univ. ofAlberta, Edmonton , Canada. Reviewed byRogerF. Malina, Center for EUVAstrophysics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. According to Henry Sayre in his book The Object ofPerformance, "It is my conviction that since 1970 the most interesting work in the arts has been done, for the most part, by women. Very little of it has been the work of painters ...." (p. 87) And according to Peg Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer in the Special Issue, Feminism and TraditionalAesthetics : "Aesthetics and the philosophy of art, traditionally construed , have come in for relatively little revision from a feminist perspective " (p, 277). This lag between artmaking and the institutional and analytic context is reinforced by the statistics quoted by Sayre. In 1975, 67% of university bachelor degrees in art (studio and history) in the United States were awarded to women. Yet in 1984 the New York Museum of Modem Art's international survey of recent paintings and sculpture included only 14 women in the group ofl65 artists represented. As argued by both Sayre and the authors of Feminism and Traditional Aesthetics, when analysing the current situation in the art community, one needs to be aware both of external factors, such as the endemic sexism of our institutions, and internal factors, such as gender differences resulting in emphasis toward different aspects or properties of artmaking. These two publications provide a large amount of both raw information and informed analysis on these issues, while demonstrating that any analysis of 'postmodern' artmaking in Western Europe and North America must include a discussion offeminist issues. Such analysis may point postmodernism toward new and meaningful kinds of artmaking, rather than backward to a pessimistic end, with art mired in the recycling of ideas of the past. Not only are we witnessing an era of new kinds of artmaking and new kinds of art media, but also of new artmakers who were only marginally involved in the past. It would be misleading to characterise Sayre...