Art Tribes

After the avant garde of the 50s and 60s shattered the canon of art styles into numerous and often amorphous groups of artists, ''tribes'' now seems the only identity system that can describe these shape shifting contemporary art movements. Modern art tribes can gather around a temporary common identity or social-political issue without defining the individual artist: it is the best ''structure'' an artist could imagine. The tribes collected here represent a wide view of established and contemporary categories of performance and exhibition art creating a concise map of the ''territories'' of the avant garde for the art explorer, the curious, and the completely baffled. The book is divided according to art tribe, which includes: Fluxus and Events, Happenings, Monoha, the Factory, Actionism, Techno, Situationism-and then the truly anarchic, the ''chiefs without tribes.'' The appendices includes a section devoted to video art, a medium not tied to a particular tribe, and a section dedicated to historic art tribes. This neo avant garde compilation of masterpieces is a must for art collectors, dealers, students and modern art aficionados.