Images on rocks depicting birds, serpents, deer, and other designs are haunting reminders of prehistoric peoples. This book documents Missouri's rich array of petroglyphs and pictographs, analyzing the many aspects of these rock carvings and paintings to show how such representations of ritual activities can enhance our understanding of Native American culture.
Missouri is a particularly important site for rock art because it straddles the Plains, the Ozarks, and the Southeast. Carol Diaz-Granados and James Duncan have established a model for analyzing this rock art as archaeological data and have mapped the patterning of fifty-eight major motifs across the state. Of particular importance is their analysis of motifs from Mississippi River Valley sites, including Cahokia.The authors include interpretive discussions on iconography and ideology, drawing on years of research in the ethnographic records and literature of Native Americans linguistically related to earlier peoples. Their distribution maps show how motifs provide clues to patterns of movement among prehistoric peoples and to the range of belief systems. Rock art is an aspect of the archaeological record that has received little attention, and the art is particularly subject to the ravages of time. By documenting these fragile images, this book makes a major contribution to rock art research in North America.
The Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia began in 1984 as a summer youth program with modest support from city government. Under the guidance of Jane Golden, however, it gradually grew into one of the largest and most successful public art organizations in the country, garnering support from local corporations, foundations, and individuals to extend the reach and effectiveness of its innovative programs.
Now three decades later, the Mural Arts Program has created more than 3,800 murals and public art projects that have made lasting imprints in every Philadelphia neighborhood. In the process, Mural Arts has engaged thousands of people of all ages from across the city, helped hundreds of ex-offenders train for new jobs, transformed the face of struggling commercial corridors, and developed funding partners in both public and private sectors.
While the Mural Arts Program has significantly changed the appearance of the city, it has also demonstrated how participatory public art can empower individuals and promote communal healing around difficult issues. Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 is a celebration of and guide to the program's success. Unlike Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell and its sequel, More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell, Philadelphia Murals @ 30 showcases the results of 21 projects completed since 2009 and features essays by policy makers, curators, scholars, and educators that offer valuable lessons for artists, activists, and communities to emulate.
Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 traces the program's history and evolution, acknowledging the challenges and rewards of growth and change while maintaining a core commitment to social, personal, and community transformation.
Contributors include: Dr. Arthur C. Evans, Jr., Arlene Goldbard, Thora Jacobson, Rick Lowe, Dr. Samantha L. Matlin, Paulette Moore, Jeremy Nowak, Maureen H. O'Connell, Elisabeth Perez Luna, Robin Rice, Dr. Jacob Kraemer Tebes, Elizabeth Thomas, Cynthia Weiss, Howard Zehr, and the editors.
Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.
Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.
Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.
Artful descriptions.
This volume presents kindred works important for evidence relating to late Greek art. They are attributed to two men each known as Philostratus and to a third man called Callistratus, otherwise unknown. To an elder Philostratus, the Lemnian, born ca. AD 190, junior kinsman of the Philostratus who wrote the Life of Apollonius of Tyana and Lives of the Sophists, is attributed the series of sixty-five Eikones or Imagines, descriptions (in two books) ostensibly of paintings in a gallery at Naples. A younger Philostratus, apparently his grandson, is credited with seventeen similar descriptions. The fourteen Ekphraseis attributed to Callistratus are descriptions of statues in stone or bronze, written probably in the fourth century AD. It is not known to what extent the descriptions are of real works of art, but they show how artists treated their subjects, and are written with some artistic knowledge. Yet rhetorical skill dominates: these pieces were written to display the writers’ powers of description.
The Hebrew Bible contains a prohibition against divine images (Exod 20:2-5a). Explanations for this command are legion, usually focusing on the unique status of Israel's deity within the context of the broader Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. Doak explores whether or not Israel was truly alone in its severe stance against idols. This book focuses on one particular aspect of this iconographic context in Israel's Iron Age world: that of the Phoenicians. The question of whether Phoenicians employed aniconic (as opposed to iconic) representational techniques has significance not only for the many poorly understood aspects of Phoenician religion generally, but also for the question of whether aniconism can be considered a broader trend among the Semitic populations of the ancient Near East.
Features:
Photography has a unique relationship to chance. Anyone who has wielded a camera has taken a picture ruined by an ill-timed blink or enhanced by an unexpected gesture or expression. Although this proneness to chance may amuse the casual photographer, Robin Kelsey points out that historically it has been a mixed blessing for those seeking to make photographic art. On the one hand, it has weakened the bond between maker and picture, calling into question what a photograph can be said to say. On the other hand, it has given photography an extraordinary capacity to represent the unpredictable dynamism of modern life. By delving into these matters, Photography and the Art of Chance transforms our understanding of photography and the work of some of its most brilliant practitioners.
The effort to make photographic art has involved a call and response across generations. From the introduction of photography in 1839 to the end of the analog era, practitioners such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari built upon and critiqued one another’s work in their struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration and mechanical process. The root problem was the technology’s indifference, its insistence on giving a bucket the same attention as a bishop and capturing whatever wandered before the lens. Could such an automatic mechanism accommodate imagination? Could it make art? Photography and the Art of Chance reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography to create art for a modern world.
The Middle East played a critical role in the development of photography as a new technology and an art form. Likewise, photography was instrumental in cultivating and maintaining Europe’s distinctively Orientalist vision of the Middle East. As new advances enhanced the versatility of the medium, nineteenth-century photographers were able to mass-produce images to incite and satisfy the demands of the region’s burgeoning tourist industry and the appetites of armchair travelers in Europe. In this way, the evolution of modern photography fueled an interest in visual contact with the rest of the world.
Photography’s Orientalism offers the first in-depth cultural study of the works of European and non- European photographers active in the Middle East and India, focusing on the relationship between photographic, literary, and historical representations of this region and beyond. The essays explore the relationship between art and politics by considering the connection between the European presence there and aesthetic representations produced by traveling and resident photographers, thereby contributing to how the history of photography is understood.
In the dark, bitter days of winter, when the ground lies frozen and snow-covered, it can be hard to believe that mere months before, gardens and window boxes were bursting forth with fragrant, colorful blossoms. Today on the frosty walk home, at least we can pick up cut flowers at the store to remind us of the spring to come. But before the technological miracles of hothouses and refrigeration, flowers could only be captured for the winter months by artists and painters. Some of the finest flower-pieces ever painted were by Dutch and Flemish artists in the seventeenth century, which depict flowers in vases of metal and porcelain, sometimes with insects and butterflies nestling in petals or clinging to stalks. From these flower-pieces we can see what Europeans of the time considered desirable flowers: the rose, iris, carnation, lily, snowdrop, violet, fritillary, narcissus, tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth—many of which are still our favorites today.
Alongside lush color botanical illustrations, Pick of the Bunch presents the social history of these flora—how they arrived in our gardens; how they were bought, acquired and displayed; and who were their devotees and cultivators. The book delves into their symbolic associations in classical and Christian traditions and examines the complex language of flowers employed by the Victorians. Beautiful to behold and engagingly written, Pick of the Bunch is a wonderful gift for any garden lover and will be a warm, much needed glimpse of spring and summer throughout the cold, barren months.
The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres—illustration and narrative painting—that blurred the line between the visual and textual.
Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.
Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.
The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.
Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.
A fresh take on the group of artists known as the Pictures Generation, reinterpreting their work as haunted by the history of fascism, the threat of its return, and the effects of its recurring representation in postwar American culture.
The artists of the Pictures Generation, converging on New York City in the late 1970s, indelibly changed the shape of American art. Rebelling against abstraction, they borrowed liberally from the aesthetics of mass media and sometimes the work of other artists. It has long been thought that the group’s main contribution was to upend received conceptions of authorial originality. In Pictures and the Past, however, art critic and historian Alexander Bigman shows that there is more to this moment than just the advent of appropriation art. He presents us with a bold new interpretation of the Pictures group’s most significant work, in particular its recurring evocations of fascist iconography.
In the wake of the original Pictures show, curated by Douglas Crimp in 1977, artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and Gretchen Bender raised pressing questions about what it means to perceive the world historically in a society saturated by images. Bigman argues that their references to past cataclysms—to the violence wrought by authoritarianism and totalitarianism—represent not only a coded form of political commentary about the 1980s but also a piercing reflection on the nature of collective memory. Throughout, Bigman situates their work within a larger cultural context including parallel trends in music, fashion, cinema, and literature. Pictures and the Past probes the shifting relationships between art, popular culture, memory, and politics in the 1970s and ’80s, examining how the specter of fascism loomed for artists then—and the ways it still looms for us today.
For more than forty years Bruce Jackson has been documenting—in books, photographs, audio recording, and film—inmates’ lives in American prisons. In November, 1975, he acquired a collection of old ID photos while he was visiting the Cummins Unit, a state prison farm in Arkansas. They are published together for the first time in this remarkable book.
The 121 images that appear here were likely taken between 1915 and 1940. As Jackson describes in an absorbing introduction, the function of these photos was not portraiture—their function was to “fold a person into the controlled space of a dossier.” Here, freed from their prison “jackets,” and printed at sizes far larger than their originals, these one-time ID photos have now become portraits. Jackson’s restoration transforms what were small bureaucratic artifacts into moving images of real men and women.
Pictures from a Drawer also contains an extraordinary description of everyday life at Cummins prison in the 1950s, written originally by hand and presented to Jackson in 1973 by its author, a long-time inmate.
Tian, or Heaven, had multiple meanings in early China. It had been used since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god, and later came to be regarded as a force driving the movement of the cosmos and as a home to deities and imaginary animals. By the Han dynasty, which saw an outpouring of visual materials depicting Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompassed an immortal realm to which humans could ascend after death.
Using excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han artisans transformed various notions of Heaven—as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky—into pictorial entities. The Han Heaven was not indicated by what the artisans looked at, but rather was suggested by what they looked into. Artisans attained the visibility of Heaven by appropriating and modifying related knowledge of cosmology, mythology, astronomy. Thus the depiction of Heaven in Han China reflected an interface of image and knowledge.
By examining Heaven as depicted in ritual buildings, on household utensils, and in the embellishments of funerary settings, Tseng maintains that visibility can hold up a mirror to visuality; Heaven was culturally constructed and should be culturally reconstructed.
Thomas McGann Memorial Prize, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2017
Runner-up, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018
In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. Picturing the Proletariat examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. Showcasing forgotten works and neglected media, John Lear explores how artists and labor unions participated in a cycle of revolutionary transformation from 1908 through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Lear shows how middle-class artists, radicalized by the revolution and the Communist Party, fortified the legacy of the prerevolutionary print artisan José Guadalupe Posada by incorporating modernist, avant-garde, and nationalist elements in ways that supported and challenged unions and the state. By 1940, the state undermined the autonomy of radical artists and unions, while preserving the image of both as partners of the “institutionalized revolution.”
This interdisciplinary book explores the gendered representations of workers; the interplay of prints, photographs, and murals in journals, in posters, and on walls; the role of labor leaders; and the discursive impact of the Spanish Civil War. It considers “los tres grandes”—Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco—while featuring lesser-known artists and their collectives, including Saturnino Herrán, Leopoldo Méndez, Santos Balmori, and the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR). The result is a new perspective on the art and politics of the revolution.
Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-Shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.
This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart.
Beginning with the pin-up’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas
A remarkable collection of words and illustrations documenting the first year of the pandemic.
In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey raced home to Austin, Texas. The next day, he published on social media a sketch of “A Very Determined Young Man.” The day after, he posted another drawing. One year and one hundred and fifty Tombow B pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.
Carey’s pencil fills the page with the marvelous and intriguing, picturing people, characters, animals, monsters, and his favorite bird to draw, the grackle. He reaches into history and fiction to escape grim reality through flights of vivid imagination—until events demand the drawings “look straight on.”
Breonna Taylor, the Brontë sisters, John Lewis, King Lear, and even the portraits that mark the progress of the year for the Very Determined Young Man combine into a remarkable document of the pandemic and its politics. For Carey, though, trapped inside a home he loves, these portraits are something more, a way to chart time, an artist’s way of creating connection in isolation. With an introduction by Max Porter, this exceptional collection from the acclaimed author of Little marks a year of a man trapped with his pencil, determined to find solace amid uncertainty.
It has been ten years since video game giant Electronic Arts first released The Sims, the best-selling game that allows its players to create a household and then manage every aspect of daily life within it. And since its debut, gamers young and old have found ways to “mod” The Sims, a practice in which gamers manipulate the computer code of a game, and thereby alter it to add new content and scenarios.
In Players Unleashed!—the first study of its kind—Tanja Sihvonen provides a fascinating examination of modding, tracing its evolution and detailing its impact on The Sims and the game industry as a whole. Along the way, Sihvonen shares insights into specific modifications and the cultural contexts from which they emerge.
Winner, Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Award, 2022
More than a thousand years ago on the north coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a large and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. They depicted a diversity of sex organs and sex acts, and an array of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche “sex pots,” as Mary Weismantel calls them, are lively and provocative but also enigmatic creations whose import to their original owners seems impossible to grasp.
In Playing with Things, Weismantel shows that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own inhuman temporality. From a new materialist perspective, she fills the gaps left by other analyses of the sex pots in pre-Columbian studies, where sexuality remains marginalized, and in sexuality studies, where non-Western art is largely absent. Taking a decolonial approach toward an archaeology of sexuality and breaking with long-dominant iconographic traditions, this book explores how the pots "play jokes," "make babies," "give power," and "hold water,” considering the sex pots as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshly bodies, now and in the ancient past. A beautifully written study that will be welcomed by students as well as specialists, Playing with Things is a model for archaeological and art historical engagement with the liberating power of queer theory and Indigenous studies.
Some of the loveliest works of Archaic art were the Athenian korai—sculptures of beautiful young women presenting offerings to the goddess Athena that stood on the Acropolis. Sculpted in the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C., they served as votives until Persians sacked the citadel in 480/79 B.C. Subsequently, they were buried as a group and forgotten for nearly twenty-four centuries, until archaeologists excavated them in the 1880s. Today, they are among the treasures of the Acropolis Museum.
Mary Stieber takes a fresh look at the Attic korai in this book. Challenging the longstanding view that the sculptures are generic female images, she persuasively argues that they are instead highly individualized, mimetically realistic representations of Archaic young women, perhaps even portraits of real people. Marshalling a wide array of visual and literary evidence to support her claims, she shows that while the korai lack the naturalism that characterizes later Classical art, they display a wealth and realism of detail that makes it impossible to view them as generic, idealized images. This iconoclastic interpretation of the Attic korai adds a new dimension to our understanding of Archaic art and to the distinction between realism and naturalism in the art of all periods.
Set to generate discussions in the field for years to come, The Poetics of Poetry Film is an encyclopedic work on the ever-evolving art of the poetry film. Poetry films are a genre of short film usually involving three main elements: the poem as verbal message, the moving film image and diegetic sounds, and additional non-diegetic sounds or music, which create a soundscape. In this book, Sarah Tremlett examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, film poetry, and videopoetry, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time.
Tremlett sets the emergence and history of poetry film in its proper global context, defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners, The Poetics of Poetry Film includes interviews, analysis, and a rigorous investigation of the history of the genre, from its origins to the present. This is an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry, digital media, filmmaking, art, and creative writing, as well as poetry filmmakers.
Throughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticize government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting.
By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions—some transparent, others deliberately concealed. She argues that the coding of messages in seemingly innocuous paintings was an important factor in the growing respect for painting among the educated elite and that the capacity of painting's systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art's vitality and longevity.
Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet’s Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work.
A follow-up to the highly praised Poets Teaching Poets, Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett's Poet's Work, Poet's Play gathers together essays by some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry: Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eleanor Wilner, Dean Young, and the late Larry Levis and Agha Shahid Ali.
Lively, accessible, and erudite, the pieces range from discussions on syntax and the syllable to an exploration of the complexities of canon formation under the shadow of imperialism, race, and history. Exploring the work of John Donne, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Charles Olsen, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, Robert Herrick, Harryette Mullen, and many others, Poet's Work, Poet's Play---like its predecessor volume---will be an invaluable tool for teachers, students, and poets at every level.
"Much more than a set of essays on poetic craft or aesthetic understandings, this collection takes on two of the most prevalent anxieties about writing poetry in our time: the place of subjectivity in poetry, and how to make a significant shape in language while both affirming and interrogating the poetic I's authority. This is a book for anyone who wants to write better poems, who wants to read with greater passion, and who believes that poetry is an independent category of human consciousness that can be as capaciousness as the world, and as nuanced."
---Tom Sleigh, author of Space Walk and Far Side of the Earth
"Gathering together essays by unquestionably important poets, Poet's Work, Poet's Play has immense pedagogical value in the way it demonstrates how to discover in poetry resources of language and structure often overlooked in first, and ensuing, readings of complex texts."
---Laurence Goldstein, Professor of English, University of Michigan, and Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review
"A valuable document illuminating critical aspects of the contemporary American poetry scene."
---John Koethe, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Sally's Hair: Poems
If a river runs through it, somewhere there is bound to be a bridge. Little in the landscape remains untouched by human hands, and every touch, from the simplest ditch to the most intricate monument, reveals a political decision or design. This is how Martin Warnke, one of Germany's leading art historians, looks at landscape in this book, which leads to a new way of seeing nature as we have appropriated, represented, and transformed it over time. Covering nearly a thousand years and most of western Europe, The Political Landscape provides a compelling summary history of modern humanity's ill-fated attempt to master nature.
Warnke finds evidence of the politicized landscape everywhere, on nature's own ground and in art, artifacts, and architecture, in features defined by the demands of conquest and defense, property rights and picturesque improvement, trade, tradition, communication, and commemoration. Whether considering the role of landscape in battle depictions, or investigating monumental figures from the Colossus of Rhodes to Mount Rushmore, or asking why gold backgrounds in paintings gave way to mountains topped with castles, Warnke reconfigures our idea of landscape, its significance, and its representations. The book sharpens our perceptions of nature in art and as art--a nature charged with symbol and meaning as a result of interventions by turns enlightened, insensitive, or, as now, dangerously corrosive.
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