BOOK / FIELDS OF ACTION 2. Paul Schimmel

ART This volume includes essays by Shinichiro Osaki, Hubert Klocker, and Guy Brett. In The Body and Space: Action in Postwar Japanese Art, Shinichiro Osaki reviews Japanese art of the 1950s and 1960s. In Japanese artistic production of this period, the relationship between the artist and action gained great importance with the Gutai group based in Tokyo and Osaka and with the artist groups resulting from the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibitions held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hubert Klocker, in his text "Expression and the Object: Liberation as Aktion: A European Component of Performance Art," speaks of the ephemerality of action art and its different levels of reception and forms of recording. Klocker also discusses the quality of the work of art as an interaction between communication and the enigma produced by the aesthetic object and its insertion in the context of art history, social history, and politics. The author reviews Russian art of the 1970s, the Collective Action