Conversations Before the End of Time [Paperback]

Suzi Gablik (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0500278385 | ISBN-13: 978-0500278383 | Publication Date: August 1997

As we head towards the 21st century, as we try to confront and adapt to deepening global ecological and social problems, what meaning can art have, and can it survive as we know it? This book addresses these and other questions, exploring through dialogue, rather than from a position of authority, the role and meaning of art in our culture. A series of 18 conversations with artists, writers, philosophers and critics provides the basis of thoughts and points of view. The answers that emerge all seem to point the same way. They indicate the need for a new direction in art - a move away from the isolationist, individualistic ideals of modernism towards a more "collective" view, an art with wider parameters embracing a revitalized sense of community and an enlarged ecological perspective.

Product Details

• Paperback: 478 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500278385
• ISBN-13: 978-0500278383
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #260,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenges "tight" artworld; criticism of Western lifestyles, March 21, 2002

By 

Todd Applegate (Cataula, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Conversations Before the End of Time (Paperback)

I found her choices of who she interviewed to well-round her theme (Leo Castelli, The Guerrilla Girls, those who study human behavior, environmentalists, etc.) Leo Catelli developed his fame with avant-garde artists. Artists which could be labeled as aesthetic artists. Castelli discusses the 1993 Whitney Biennial as a change of guard between aesthetic art and a more social art. Sure there are gray areas. What is avant-garde today? Does it exist today? Are we borrowing from those before us more than ever?
In this book, thoughtful people explore questions that the comfortable and apathetic will not. Questions about squeezing everything out of everything.....art, the environment, community.... She brings out how most art is for only a select and priviledged few due to the way Western Cilvilization exists now.
Some of the views might seem a bit extreme, but after all, it is the extremists on both sides who shape the future. Suzi Gablik interjects that the strongest(industrial/polluting/rich) extremists might be winning today. I think this book suggests that some artists are saying we should care about each other by connecting more closely to each other and the resources we live with.
Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, the Bauhaus school and many other thinkers stated these similar things some 90 years ago.
This book restates this modified theme today. This is a very important book.

36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A promising collection of art dialogues disappoints...
, March 31, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Conversations Before the End of Time (Paperback)

Suzi Gablik promises a thoughtful collection of discussions with various artists and critics regarding the relationship of art with life and spirituality. Unfortunately, in each section (the book is written in dialogue form) she directs the conversation towards her own personal extreme apocolyptic environmental worldview.

In those dialogues where the participant agrees with her viewpoint, they happily conclude that a highly politicized, non-traditional art world is the desired aim. But in those conversations where the participant doesn't happen to see the Earth on the verge of environmental breakdown, the conversation seems to break down. Gablik seems so entrenched within this worldview that she is unable to understand other views.

In one instance, a critic used as an example the changes that we have undergone in the development from a society of hunter-gatherers to our present modern society. He made the seemingly obvious point that today our immediate survival is not as at risk now as it was when each day's food depended on that day's hunt.

Gablik seemed shocked that he did not see the Earth on the verge of an environmental apocalypse, meaning that she feels that our immediate survival is very much at risk.

This is not even a the classic liberal versus conservative argument regarding the role of art and aesthetics. That dialogue would have been productive. Rather, the author consistantly focuses on her own personal biases, leading to disappointing results.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Art and Ecology, July 22, 2006

By 

Annabel Ascher (Santa Rosa CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Conversations Before the End of Time (Paperback)

Suzi Gablik's Conversations Before the End of Time is a collection of interviews with artists and others about the human caused ecological crisis currently taking place on this planet and in particular the reaction in the art and intellectual world to this crisis. It is not easy to talk about this subject, and some may find this book disturbing for that reason. Contemplating our own individual mortality is difficult enough, and that is done in a cultural context that supports the process and imbues it with meaning. A good deal of the meaning in personal mortality comes from the fact that there will be posterity. The End of Time postulated in Gablik's book is unthinkable because it precludes this meaning. The format of the book and Gablik's choice of subjects for her interviews carry out the purpose of the book beautifully. I found the interview with Christopher Manes on Homo-centrism of art to be particularly enlightening. How can we appreciate the magnitude of our destructive actions if all we talk about is ourselves?