Before he concerned himself with Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, there were Brillo boxes and Life magazine editorials. As a boy, art critic Bernard Cooper (Maps to Anywhere) found art on a supermarket shelf. In My Avant-Garde Education, Cooper chronicles his coming-of-age as a member of the new guard and a student at CalArts in its infancy.
In its subject matter and its presentation--numbered sections that form a chronological pastiche akin to a Richard Hamilton collage--Cooper's memoir is solidly "pop." Raised in suburban Los Angeles, he learns to see the local Safeway as a gallery space, and he imparts a similar wonderment to the reader; in Cooper's prose there's an infectious enthusiasm, as if we, too, are on the cusp of a revolution. It's fitting, then, that the most charming parts of the memoir are his descriptions of performances, professors and kooky goings-on that are novel even today: a nude swimming pool on campus, a "happening" in which participants lick strawberry jam off a car, eccentric personas bred in the art world microcosm. His avant-garde education extended beyond the canvas, shaping his identity in galleries, on night drives and beneath the sheets.
At the end of the memoir are several essays. In "Uses of the Ghoulish," Cooper writes that, on his first assignment as a critic for Los Angeles magazine, he was "already torn between the memoirist's impulse to sift through the meanings of subjective experience and the critic's impulse to at least give the impression of objectivity." My Avant-Garde Education's strengths lie at that intersection, the often indistinguishable line between art and self. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer