Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop by Leffingwell, Edward and Karen Marta (Editors) - 1988

New York: The Institute for Contemporary Art, 1988. Hardcover. Good, clean and tight but art school ex-lib. with usual marks, a few spots to front cover, and upper outer back corner bumped.. Black buckram/gilt lettering. Missing dj. 191 pp. with color and bw images throughout. Catalogue from the series of exhibitions held between October 1987 and June 1988 at various venues. With works by Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Judith Barry, Leo Castelli, John Coplans, Tom Finkelpearl, Kenneth Frampton, Howard Halle, Richard Hamilton, Dick Hebdige, Alanna Heiss, Betsey Johnson, Thomas Lawson, Edward Leffingwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Patricia Phillips, Alison and Peter Smithson, Eugenie Tsai, Brian Wallis, Glenn Weiss, and Graham Whitham. Modern Dreams explores the distinction between the theoretical and sociological production of London in the fifties and conceptually related work of New York in the eighties. The art objects and theoretical strategies presented by the artists, architects, and writers included in this book engage in a continuing, questioning struggle with the means and ends of presentation and representation, focusing in particular on the effects of media images in photographs and on television. Modern Dreams pursues the transformation of images of popular culture into meaningful icons of contemporary society on four fronts. It begins by investigating the Independent Group's landmark exhibition This is Tomorrow Today held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1956 as proto-Pop; examines the utilization of art related technology and imagery as a kind of agit-Pop of the streets; explores the theoretical ramifications, qualified accomplishments, and possibilities of archi-Pop; and discusses the self referential, picture oriented production of post-Pop. A conversation among the Americans who were instrumental in defining Pop interprets the impact, of the British proto-Pop group on emerging American Pop artists, and provides a revealing look at some of the issues at stake, in the mass media environment that informs the work of artists of the 1980s. Distributed for the P.S. 1 Museum, The Institute for Art and Urban Resources.