Oro Editions This Is Doug Hall: A Memoir

Part autobiography and part historical document, This Is Doug Hall chronicles the creative life of the media artist/photographer Doug Hall, and the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped him and other artists of his generation It is unusual that an artist of Halls stature can make captivating art and at the same time write so eloquently, as he has, about his influences and the climate in which he and others of his generation emerged in the 1960s and 70s This Is Doug Hall is the definitive book about this important American artist and T. R. Uthco (1970-1978), the Bay Area collective he co-founded with Diane Andrews Hall and Jody Procter This Is Doug Hall offers the first full accounting by a member of the media art collective T. R. Uthco and of The Eternal Frame, its infamous video that documents their reenactment of the assassination of JFK in Dallas, considered a landmark in early video art history As an educator at the San Francisco Art Institute for 30 years, Doug Halls insights into the interplay of teaching and learning will be of particular interest and importance to young artists and educators Even if you know Doug Halls work, you dont know this Doug Hall: the little boy afraid of bears in Boston who became the love-smitten art student who grew into a fearless Conceptual artist challenging many of our most beloved assumptions. Although lavishly and beautifully illustrated, this is not a book only to be looked at but one to be thoroughly read and enjoyed. In an account at once intimate and historical, Doug Hall writes eloquently about his development as a person and an artist. He situates his story within the broader conflicts of the latter part of the twentieth century and shows how these often absurd forces influenced a generation of artists to adopt radical art practices video, performance, and installation as a counter to the modernist aesthetics that preceded them. From his hilarious and troubling descriptions of the Altamont Free Concert (1969) and his disorienting confrontation in Berkeley with an LSD-tripping Indian Saddhu to his thoughts about teaching, making art, and the thinking behind some of his most important projects, Halls writing is generous and instructive for all those interested in our humanity and how it is nurtured through the arts.