![]() Americana by Don DeLilloĭeLillo's first novel, published in 1971, shows a deep understanding of visual culture and the logic of advertising, which has everything to do with the gestures and ideas of the artists who came to preeminence in that decade. In no particular order, then, here are 10 favourites: 1. In trying to narrate a novel through the eyes of a very young woman encountering the world of downtown New York in 1975, I looked, and then looked again, to see with freshness, what my narrator might have seen of a freer, grittier, uniquely inspired era in downtown New York City, when Gordon Matta-Clark sawed a house in half, Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock on the hour every hour 24 hours a day for a year, and Lee Lozano stopped speaking to women as a minor art project that ended up lasting the rest of her life. The 1970s were a time of freewheeling ideas but also conceptual rigour: art outside the studio, in the form of a dance, a dare, a gesture, a practical joke. They were books I'd collected over the last two decades or so and had looked at many, many times, read many times (some of them collections of essays, others, full colour-plate monographs). ![]() ![]() ![]() I have selected 10 of the many incredible books about art in the 1970s that were piled around my desk like a miniature city as I wrote my most recent novel, The Flamethrowers. ![]()
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