The Birth of Artistic Integrity: The Artist’s Self-Analysis of Dynamic Thought Potential by Ye. V. Sintzov (review)

for it lacks intelligence and draws its computing power from links over a telecom network. Of course, there are other ways to approach the book and enjoy it. But exactly because I believe mail art to be an exciting cultural activity accessible to a wide range of people and that networking is indeed necessary, the future of mail art remains a concern for me. And although we are not being thoroughly introduced into mail art's future possibilities in this book, we are given a good deal of helpful information , both anecdotal and critical, about mail art's past. Furthermore, the editor provides us with a variety of ways in which we can choose to join this participatory art form. A set of six appendices (60 pages in all) help one determine whether one is a newcomer or an old boy, with or without technology : archives, magazines, articles, recordings , books, a 24-year selection of mail-art activity, an ongoing networker databank. Unfortunately, no discipline has been exercised-there are no descriptive titles and subtitles that would assist indexing and retrieval. The index is a good "who's-who," but includes no issues or concepts. (Is anyone arguing on network content? I cannot say. Is there any mention of privacy ? Readers may find it by chance on page 171. Is performance a valid direction ? Yesit is, but one needs to read the book and check the illustrations. Anyone interested in the Internet? Of course. There are six references in the index, but tourism is not included.) There are approximately 125 illustrations , of which more than half are artworks . However, they give us little sense of the interactivity involved (it is like having answers without having the questions-Fig. 99 is a rare case in that we do know what is being exchanged). And only Fig. 98 gives us (in the background ) a sample of the wide range of responses a mail-art call prompts. But I am sure the book will win readers over to add their own world maps on the inside cover-necessary for the planetary dimension and any indexing one might choose to do. This publication should also receive attention outside the mail-art community , for it will fill a vacuum for those members. Artists involved in the electronic arts, for instance, should note that, unlike them, all mail artists are networkers. What is more, all mail-art processes are interactive, or at least 162 Reviews they could be. This is not so with technological art, where response systems are on the increase: machines programmed to be triggered by humanswhether by moving through space or by making decisions or, more likely, random choices. In mail-art activity, my definition of how it feels to be in a network fits well: One can alternatively become the center or remain at the periphery . One can plug into the system's resources, pass information to all, survive . Or one can fade out, escape, survive . The editor does provide this feeling in his anthology, which took him 5 years to complete. THE BIRTH OF ARTISTIC INTEGRITY: THE ARTIST'S SELF-ANALYSIS OF DYNAMIC THOUGHT POTENTIAL by Yeo V. Sintzov. "Fan" Publishing House, Kazan, Russia, 1995.228 pp. (In Russian) Reviewed by V. V. Bazoo, Volgogradskaya 2254 , Kazan 420040, Russia. The book is devoted to an analysis of the potential of an artist's creative thinking that is not fully realized in the artist's final artwork. The author's goal is to prove the active role of this potential in creating artistic integrity, which tends to be dynamic, changeable and chaos-like in nature. There is another thesis that incorporates the aforementioned : the unrealized potential stimulates the so-called "self motivation" of the artist's thought (or "unbalanced identity," to use Hegel's term-or the concept of causa sui). Bohr's principle of complementarity was used to solve such complex problems as the reconstruction of aspects of the artist's thought process that were not fully expressed, or not fully realized, in the work itself. The author theorizes that there are two models of artistic thought processes, basing his theory on his analysis of completed artworks. The first model is...