Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, author Tim Ridlem shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.

Tim Ridlen is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Tampa in the department of Film, Animation, and New Media. This will be his first book.

“Tim Ridlen’s important study examines the broad sweep of art education in the U.S. during the post-WWII period, from MIT, to Rutgers, to Finch College to Cal Arts. This is a groundbreaking work that dramatically expands the new field of research launched by Howard Singerman in Art Subjects almost 25 years ago.”— Grant Kester, Professor of Art History and founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism