Conversations Before the End of Time

Suzi Gablik's Conversations Before the End of Time is a collection of interviews with artists and others about the human caused ecological crisis currently taking place on this planet and in particular the reaction in the art and intellectual world to this crisis. It is not easy to talk about this subject, and some may find this book disturbing for that reason. Contemplating our own individual mortality is difficult enough, and that is done in a cultural context that supports the process and imbues it with meaning. A good deal of the meaning in personal mortality comes from the fact that there will be posterity. The End of Time postulated in Gablik's book is unthinkable because it precludes this meaning. The format of the book and Gablik's choice of subjects for her interviews carry out the purpose of the book beautifully. I found the interview with Christopher Manes on Homo-centrism of art to be particularly enlightening. How can we appreciate the magnitude of our destructive actions if all we talk about is ourselves?

I found her choices of who she interviewed to well-round her theme (Leo Castelli, The Guerrilla Girls, those who study human behavior, environmentalists, etc.) Leo Catelli developed his fame with avant-garde artists. Artists which could be labeled as aesthetic artists. Castelli discusses the 1993 Whitney Biennial as a change of guard between aesthetic art and a more social art. Sure there are gray areas. What is avant-garde today? Does it exist today? Are we borrowing from those before us more than ever? In this book, thoughtful people explore questions that the comfortable and apathetic will not. Questions about squeezing everything out of everything.....art, the environment, community.... She brings out how most art is for only a select and priviledged few due to the way Western Cilvilization exists now. Some of the views might seem a bit extreme, but after all, it is the extremists on both sides who shape the future. Suzi Gablik interjects that the strongest(industrial/polluting/rich) extremists might be winning today. I think this book suggests that some artists are saying we should care about each other by connecting more closely to each other and the resources we live with. Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, the Bauhaus school and many other thinkers stated these similar things some 90 years ago.This book restates this modified theme today. This is a very important book.