Selected Essays: 1981-2001

Peter Halley's SELECTED ESSAYS 1981-2001 combines, in part, texts from Collected Essays 1981-1987, published originally by Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, Zurich, in 1988, and Sonnabend Gallery, New York, in 1991, and from Recent Essays 1990-1996, Edgewise Press, 1997. SELECTED ESSAYS includes such seminal texts as "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave and Robert Smithson," "Against Postmodernism: Reconsidering Ortega," "The Crisis in Geometry," "Frank Stella... and the Simulacrum," "Some Notes on the Computer Landscape," and several previously unpublished essays. Halley writes: "In retrospect, I feel that my essays of the 1980s delighted in the play of ideas; they were intended to be provocative, exaggerated and polemical. For better or worse, this body of work created some small critical position for myself as a writer. Throughout the '90s, I have wrestled with my writing to avoid the entrapment of defending this established position, a prospect that I would find both dull and fruitless." Within the general arc of post-industrial, post-humanist development, Halley addresses the central issues of abstraction, not only in painting but in culture, formalism, modernity, communication and technology, architecture, language, and the role that human affect plays, if any, in society. SELECTED ESSAYS 1981-2001 gives us a picture of art, culture, and history that is uniquely Halley's own - "preeminently analytical, perceptive, balanced, and visionary." 19 black and white illustrations