W. J. T. Mitchell

William John Thomas Mitchell

This text considers landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of national and social identities. This edition adds a new preface and five new essays.

Landscape and Power, Second Edition

This anthology of wide-ranging essays by leading critics and artists addresses recent controversies in American public art. Prevailing issues focus on historical, symbolic, political, legal, and cultural concerns.

Art and the Public Sphere

Susan Stewart

Anthony Vidler

Antony Gormley

Anthony Gormley is widely recognised as one of the most imaginative and original artists working in the UK today. This illustrated book accompanies the exhibition Anthony Gormley: Blind Light at The Hayward, the artist's first major showing in London in over 25 years. Since the 1980s Gormley has focused consistently on the human figure, often using his own body as the starting point for works that explore our perception of space, architecture, and bodily presence. Alongside specially commissioned photography of Gormley's major new projects, the book includes an original visual essay by the artist that elaborates his aesthetic preoccupations with images selected from his own photographic archive. Essays from leading writers and scholars Anthony Vidler, Susan Stewart and W. J. T. Mitchell provide a context in which to understand Gormley's new work, while an in-depth interview with The Hayward Director Ralph Rugoff and co-curator Jacky Klein reconsiders Gormley's place within contemporary culture and the history of art.

Blind Light

The phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies. Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.

William John Thomas Mitchell

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