Awards
2007 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Peter Selz, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond
Peter Selz
Peter Selz’s politically courageous book, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, in association with San Jose Art Museum, 2006), is the most recent work in an important body of art-historical and critical writing by a distinguished scholar. This latest book reflects Selz’s lifetime of knowledge, experience, and profound personal engagement with his subjects. During his early years, he witnessed both the subjugation of culture to ideology and the vilification of modern art as “degenerate” in Nazi Germany. From his work on German Expressionism in the mid-1950s to the present book, Selz has placed art in a social and political context. He has never accepted the limitations of formalism or stylistic “isms” as the only means of analyzing art.
Art of Engagement spans more than sixty years, from the 1940s to the present, and considers social and political changes well beyond the boundaries of California. The book presents a complex yet remarkably clear and inclusive survey of the work of more than three hundred artists. In an impressive feat of organization, Selz provides a chronological survey while also arranging his material thematically under four broad chapter titles: “Against War and Violence,” “Countercultural Trends,” “On Racism, Discrimination, and Identity Politics,” and “Toward a Sustainable Earth.” He discusses a tremendous variety of socially engaged art, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, murals, printmaking, posters, and performance. Stunning for its breadth and inclusiveness, the book is also elegantly written, weaving together biography, politics, and analysis in a compelling and seamless whole, provocative in its content yet presented with objectivity. The reader is guided through a multifaceted and meticulously constructed picture of contemporary art, combining convincing art-historical scholarship with lucid art criticism, historical analysis, current theory, artists’ voices, and diverse perspectives. While admitting his “progressive” political persuasion, the author treats the art and the history in a judicious, evenhanded manner.
Peter Selz, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (2006)
Art of Engagement is an inspiring example of historical and critical writing that is inclusive, engaged, and exciting. The author provides a distinguished model for an integrated and compelling art history—cogent, committed, timely, accessible. Art of Engagement is a landmark achievement and will long remain a valuable survey of the intersections of the art and politics of a tumultuous era. Above all, it crowns Selz’s lifelong commitment to the importance of understanding the relationship between art and the context in which it is made.
Jury: William E. Wallace, Washington University in St. Louis, chair; Carol Mattusch, George Mason University; D. Fairchild Ruggles, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Susan Platt, independent scholar, Seattle.
