Mining for Gold Selected Writings, 1979-1996

More than any artist-writer of his generation, Thomas Lawson has the makeup of a true journalist. He is an embedded correspondent, a polemical editorialist, sending his first-person dispatches from the front lines. He knows the terrain from many vantage points: He is an artist, publisher, occasional curator and academic (current dean at CalArts) in addition to being a writer. Reacting to the ambient hegemony of late modernism and its avant-garde myths, Lawson is determined to take sides, to make critical distinctions, attempting along the way to enunciate a progressive position from the very heart of an increasingly reactionary milieu. This collection of essays focuses on the emergence of appropriation and includes such seminal texts as "Last Exit: Painting." Mining for Goldprovides a comprehensive narrative of some of the most trenchant ideological quarrels to have surfaced from within the art world of the 1980s.Lawson, Thomas is the author of 'Mining for Gold Selected Writings, 1979-1996', published 2005 under ISBN 9782940271221 and ISBN 2940271224.