Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held November 29 - December 20, 1975. Organized and with an essay by Jeffrey Deitch. The pages in the catalogue were prepared by the artists themselves or according to instructions given to Deitch by the artists. Pages of deceased artists designed by Deitch. There is no page for On Kawara. Artists include Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, John Jack Baylin, Lynda Benglis, Terry Berkowitz, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Jonathan Borofsky, Chris Burden, Scott Burton, Colette, Chris D'Arcangelo, Fernando de Filippi, Agnes Denes, Howard Fried, Gilbert & George, Peter Gordon, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Douglas Huebler, Ray Johnson, On Kawara, Nancy Kitchel, Bruce Kurtz, Les Levine, Anna Link, Marc Miller, Dennis Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Marcia Resnick, Salvo, Joanne Seltzer, Willoughby Sharp, Alan Sondheim, Alan Sonfist, Eve Sonneman, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Roger Welch, and Hannah Wilke.
"Aside from the John Weber Gallery Invitational, a group show he curated in the summer of 1975, Lives was Jeffrey Deitch's first curatorial project. The theme of Lives was artists who deal with peoples' lives (including their own) as the subject and/or medium of their work. In more simplified terms (the subtitle of the exhibition): artists who use life as their medium. Much of the most exciting new art in the mid-1970s was performative. Lives was one of the first exhibitions to bring together the new generation of artists who fused life and art with artists like Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol who inspired this new direction.
The exhibition took place in an abandoned office building on the corner of Franklin and Hudson Streets in New York City. All of the artists were invited to create pages for the xeroxed catalogue which is now a collectors item. The following excerpt from the catalogue text amplifies the theme of the show:
For the "Post-Conceptual" artists in the Lives exhibition, the most fertile area of art activity has become the investigation of the artist and his environment, and as an extension, the study of people in general in their confrontation with the creative decision-making process. The forces in peoples' lives that cause art to be created, and the questions about the relationship between art and life have always been of great importance to artists, but now they have a special meaning in terms of the esthetic progression beyond Formalism and the Formalist bias of the Minimal and Conceptual movements. The most interesting recent work refers not to the object itself, but to the forces that shape creative activity. As Dennis Oppenheim sings in the song that accompanies the spastic dance of his self-portrait marionette in the Lives show, "It ain't what you make, it's what makes you do it!"" -- from Jeffrey Deitch Curatorial Projects website.
Includes Piper's "Six Conditions on Art Production."
