Joshua Shannon

Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Juddall are iconic names in art history, and each is allowed a chapter's worth of exploration by Shannon (contemporary art history theory, Univ. of Maryland), who manages to surprise us into remembering that these people were grappling with their environment and working to understand the modern urban landscape. See, for example, the photo of Johns and Rauschenberg in Rauschenberg's home. They look like two young men camped out in a cheap flat somewhere in the present day, smoking, having a drink, and talking philosophy. Yet, they were making great strides in using their art, as Shannon argues, to understand how and why "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation," eventually revealing the "inadequacy of language itself." New York City was disappearing all around them, as faceless monoliths of modern glass and steel replaced treasured places where people had lived and died. Theirs was a time of rapid change, and these themes still persist today.Nadine Dalton, Speidel Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City

The Disappearance of Objects

Laura Bieger

Jason Weems

Surveys the representations and constructions of the human being in American art. Humans are organisms, but "the human being" is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

Joshua Shannon

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