But Is It Art: The Spirit of Art as Activism.

The censorship crisis, the multiculturalism controversy, canon revision in the academy, and the contentious battles around public funding for the arts have left pressing but unanswered questions about contemporary artmaking in their fractious wake. When posed seriously, the question "What is art?" hosts a multitude of further debates, each a fulcrum for many important issues: who makes art, say, and for whom, and where, and, most critically, why? But the censorship crisis has reinvented that great question "What is art?" as "Is this art?!?" Multiculturalism, that unfortunate catchall term, at its best should surely have provided options that would encompass difference - difference of issue, ideas, race, and practice. It has been most visible at its worst, however, and has come to represent something extraneous to art proper. Somewhere between, the strictures of absolute formalism and the void of "anything goes," a generation of artists is striving to resolve these problems. Content and formal interests, artmaking and activism, commerce and community - all these are valid and increasingly congruous combinations. Artists whose work was never deemed salable or appropriately exhibitable have found legitimacy in nontraditional arenas: the street, municipal government, a milk carton. With this shift has come the need to shift understanding, to cultivate a multitude of approaches to the myriad cultural practices that challenge conventional notions of art.

The present crop of books explores this fundamental shift, taking disparate approaches to contemporary art practice. through artists, art history, education, and community. Nina Felshin's But Is It Art? is a seminal documentation of art's union with activism (or of art as activism). As editor, Felshin gives context to work often created out of context, a history to those working against such notions: work that is ephemeral, site-specific, public, and not always described as art. Quite often these works have manifested themselves far outside the historicizing and contextualizing structure of the formal exhibition. Felshin also constructs her book perfectly, putting together a group of 12 essays by a varied group of authors who all show a sensitivity to their subjects as well as to the complex of issues surrounding those subjects, work.

While Felshin's subtitle positions art as activism, many of the essays make the case for activism as art. Chronicling both collaborative groups or movements (Gran Fury, the Guerrilla Girts, the Women's Action Coalition [WAC], etc.) and individuals (Peggy Diggs, Suzanne Lacy), But Is It Art allows history to be written by its participants. The book also makes the case for an evolution of our understanding of some of these practices by discussing their artistic and political predecessors. Each essay combines narrative and analysis in varying doses; the best of them (Richard Meyer's on Gran Fur and an Avgikos' on Group Material, for example) are smart enough to leave many issues unresolved. The authors don't struggle for resolution, or insist that their subjects do. One topic that could perhaps have been better explored, however, is the self-combustion of some of these groups and practices, an important issue that is left only marginally explained.

Some of the book's subjects, like the Guerrilla Girls, have documented their activities systematically, and the essays on them are filled with textual and visual data. Other essays rely on first-person narrative and text to reconstruct works or events that left no visual record. Often, then, the story comes to contain many stories, sometimes conflicting ones, which only makes clearer the personal, passionate nature of socially engaged and collaborative practices. In the essays documenting individual artists, the authors appropriate the conventions of biography and retrospective for artists who tend to elude both genres because of the public, site-specific, and ephemeral nature of their work. In this way But Is It Art makes the evidence of a new definition of art practice tangible, and effectively argues its centrality in contemporary art discourse.

Implicit in the idea of the "new art history" is a challenge to the canon, and to the way art is taught and understood. Mary Anne Staniszewski's Believing Is Seeing is an insightful irreverent take on art history. At the heart of her project is a challenge: the question of how we come to understand what art is through the prisms of culture and history. In visual juxtapositions and in her writing, Staniszewski moves through media and across time, bringing works together in unexpected combinations that make perfect sense in the context of her stringent, lucid analyses. Without patronizing, without any simplistic rhetoric of inclusion, she challenges her reader not just to think but to look. This looking is crucial to Staniszewski's project; she pushes all the current theory about cross-cultural interchange, parallel histories, and the abolition of the high/low divide to make visual sense.

Believing Is Seeing is visually rich, textually dense, and moves at high speed. In an engaging, accessible style, Staniszewski moves her readers carefully through her argument, whether or not they know the works she describes. The book is visually rich (albeit entirely in black and white), and is at its most interesting in its discussion of "popular culture" But this is no "alternative" tome seeking simply to renounce and replace. Staniszewski's respect for the histories that she so adeptly challenges is what makes her project so astute. The book has no one governing argument, because Staniszewski tries to move away from that model. Ultimately she makes the case that we must consider culture and history in order to understand art, concluding, "If we accept the fact that everything is shaped by culture, we then acknowledge that we create our reality. We therefore contribute to it and change it."

In Finding Arts Place, Nicholas Paley looks at the experiments in art education advanced by a number of projects outside traditional school settings. Tim Rollins + Kids of Survival, Shooting Back, and Sadie Benning's independent filmmaking all challenge traditional notions of art education. Kids of Survival is an after-school art workshop founded by artist and teacher Rollins in the South Bronx; Shooting Back, conceived by former UPI Photographer Jim Hubbard, involves teaching photograph to children in shelters for the homeless, among other projects. Benning began making videos at 15, creating inventive autobiographical films that explore her emerging identity and personal world; Paley justifies her inclusion by examining art as an integral part of self-exploration for young people. In discussing these projects, Paley brings out the complexities of class, race, gender, sexuality, and authorship in art. In each case, art is a vehicle toward agency for young practitioners; it is a haven, affirming their basic need and desire to define themselves and the intricate worlds they inhabit. As the narratives of Paley's book make dear, however, mostly from their inclusion of the young artists, brilliant voices, art is not a salve for the inequities in these children's fives or in their communities. Both in this book and in projects of this sort generally, the ultimate question of where the art process ends and the domain of social service begins needs to be more critically addressed.

The critical core of Paley's premise is his positioning of the young people he discusses as art practitioners subverts our response to them as students, victims, or simply precocious teens. His introduction situates their projects in a theoretical discourse, consciously removing the trite language of art education from our reception of them. In examining each experiment, Paley uses the voices not only of critics, young practitioners themselves, showing us not only what these children have been taught but, more important, what they've learned.

The notion of "community" in contemporary artmaking poses important questions. Funding sources often privilege the notion of engagement with community, even when that engagement occurs on a trivial or patronizing level. And the notion of the community-based artist is often a coded attempt to distinguish a not necessarily unconventional artist by separating him from the mainstream of contemporary art. Both by living full-time in a certain community and through his working process (making members of this community the subjects of his work, and also involving them as viewers, neighbors, and friends), sculptor John Ahearn has consistently challenged these notions. Jane Kramer's Whose Art Is It? explores the world around Ahearn, a white man who lives and works in the South Bronx.

A journalist rather than an art critic, Kramer seeks to explore both the intricate character of the community Ahearn lives in and his role there as an artist. She discusses the pressing issues of poverty and despair, race and representation, in urban centers, and by describing the controversy around a particular installation of Ahearn's work in a public site, she shows how volatile and mutable these issues can be. Written in an almost fictionlike style, Kramer's book gives the controversy's participants relatively equal space. She goes directly to them to draw out the intense argument around representation that surrounds Ahearn's practice. Expertise and emotion carry equal weight in her telling of these many stories; more interesting (and perhaps more important) than her reportage on the way the controversy played out in city government is her capturing of its effects on the artist and the community. One thing Kramer doesn,' do is provide the work with an art-historical context, but one doesn't miss it, because she makes up for it with the histories of the many and varied characters who are the subject of Ahearn's art.

Of course none of these books ultimately answers the question "What is art?" but that doesn't diminish their value or necessity. They are important documents, works of acuity and insight, and they assist in an understanding of the new directions, issues, processes, and agendas that enrich contemporary art practice.