Author: Robert Slifkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192529
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.
Author: Marisa Anne Bass
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691240051
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
How today’s questions surrounding monuments and the ways we commemorate our past first arose in Rembrandt’s time Monuments occupy a controversial place in nations founded on principles of freedom and self-governance. It is no accident that when we think of monuments, we think of statues modeled on legacies of conquest, domination, and violence. The Monument’s End reveals how the artists, architects, poets, and scholars of the early modern Netherlands contended with the profound disconnect between the public monument and the ideals of republican government. Their experiences offer vital lessons about the making, reception, and destruction of monuments in the present. In the seventeenth century, the newly formed Dutch Republic dominated world trade and colonized vast overseas territories even as it sought to shed the trappings of its imperial past. Marisa Anne Bass describes the frustrated attempts by figures such as Rembrandt van Rijn and playwright and poet Joost van den Vondel to reimagine public memory for their emergent nation. She shows how the most celebrated age of Dutch art was more an age of bronze than of gold, one in which the pursuit of freedom from domination was constantly challenged by the commercial ambitions of empire. Exploring how the artists and intellectuals of this vibrant century asked questions that still resonate today, this beautifully illustrated book discusses works by contemporary artists such as Spencer Finch and Thomas Hirschhorn and offers new perspectives on monuments like the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and events such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Author: Kirk Savage
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271335
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Get Book Here
Book Description
Traces the history of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., discussing its plan and structures, and considering how the concept of memorials and memorial space has changed since the nineteenth century.
Author: Kirk Savage
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691184526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Get Book Here
Book Description
A history of U.S. Civil War monuments that shows how they distort history and perpetuate white supremacy The United States began as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores how the history of slavery and its violent end was told in public spaces—specifically in the sculptural monuments that came to dominate streets, parks, and town squares in nineteenth-century America. Looking at monuments built and unbuilt, Kirk Savage shows how the greatest era of monument building in American history took place amid struggles over race, gender, and collective memory. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves probes a host of fascinating questions and remains the only sustained investigation of post-Civil War monument building as a process of national and racial definition. Featuring a new preface by the author that reflects on recent events surrounding the meaning of these monuments, and new photography and illustrations throughout, this new and expanded edition reveals how monuments exposed the myth of a "united" people, and have only become more controversial with the passage of time.
Author: John Elizabeth Stintzi
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551528029
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book Here
Book Description
Alani Baum, a non-binary photographer and teacher, hasn’t seen their mother since they ran away with their girlfriend when they were seventeen -- almost thirty years ago. But when Alani gets a call from a doctor at the assisted living facility where their mother has been for the last five years, they learn that their mother’s dementia has worsened and appears to have taken away her ability to speak. As a result, Alani suddenly find themselves running away again -- only this time, they’re running back to their mother. Staying at their mother’s empty home, Alani attempts to tie up the loose ends of their mother’s life while grappling with the painful memories that—in the face of their mother’s disease -- they’re terrified to lose. Meanwhile, the memories inhabiting the house slowly grow animate, and the longer Alani is there, the longer they’re forced to confront the fact that any closure they hope to get from this homecoming will have to be manufactured. This beautiful, tenderly written debut novel by Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers winner John Elizabeth Stintzi explores what haunts us most, bearing witness to grief over not only what is lost, but also what remains. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Author: Mitch Landrieu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525559469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
The New Orleans mayor who removed the Confederate statues confronts the racism that shapes us and argues for white America to reckon with its past. A passionate, personal, urgent book from the man who sparked a national debate. "There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it." When Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of New Orleans in May 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve nationally, and his speech has now been heard or seen by millions across the country. In his first book, Mayor Landrieu discusses his personal journey on race as well as the path he took to making the decision to remove the monuments, tackles the broader history of slavery, race and institutional inequities that still bedevil America, and traces his personal relationship to this history. His father, as state legislator and mayor, was a huge force in the integration of New Orleans in the 1960s and 19070s. Landrieu grew up with a progressive education in one of the nation's most racially divided cities, but even he had to relearn Southern history as it really happened. Equal parts unblinking memoir, history, and prescription for finally confronting America's most painful legacy, In the Shadow of Statues contributes strongly to the national conversation about race in the age of Donald Trump, at a time when racism is resurgent with seemingly tacit approval from the highest levels of government and when too many Americans have a misplaced nostalgia for a time and place that never existed.
Author: Erin L. Thompson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
A leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America. An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? Which ones should stay up and which should come down? Who should make these decisions, and how? Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles, brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She lays bare the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, from the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol, to the fervent Klansman fired from sculpting the world’s largest Confederate monument—who went on to carve Mount Rushmore. And she explores the surprising motivations behind contemporary flashpoints, including the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, the question of who should be represented on the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, and the decision by a museum of African American culture to display a Confederate monument removed from a public park. Written with great verve and informed by a keen sense of American history, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental questions for rebuilding not only our public landscape but our nation as a whole: Whose voices must be heard, and whose pain must remain private?
Author: Ernest B. Furgurson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307425959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this luminous portrait of wartime Washington, Ernest B. Furgurson–author of the widely acclaimed Chancellorsville 1863, Ashes of Glory, and Not War but Murder--brings to vivid life the personalities and events that animated the Capital during its most tumultuous time. Here among the sharpsters and prostitutes, slaves and statesmen are detective Allan Pinkerton, tracking down Southern sympathizers; poet Walt Whitman, nursing the wounded; and accused Confederate spy Antonia Ford, romancing her captor, Union Major Joseph Willard. Here are generals George McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant, railroad crew boss Andrew Carnegie, and architect Thomas Walter, striving to finish the Capitol dome. And here is Abraham Lincoln, wrangling with officers, pardoning deserters, and inspiring the nation. Freedom Rising is a gripping account of the era that transformed Washington into the world’s most influential city.
Author: James Frederick McCurdy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 504
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Ryan Andrew Newson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481312189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book Here
Book Description
Confederate monuments figure prominently as epicenters of social conflict. These stone and metal constructs resonate with the tensions of modern America, giving concrete definition to the ideologies that divide us. Confederate monuments alone did not generate these feelings of aggravation, but they are far from innocent. Rather than serving as neutral objects of public remembrance, Confederate monuments articulate a narration of the past that forms the basis for a normative vision of the future. The story, told through the character of a religious mythos, carries implicit sacred convictions; thus, these spires and statues are inherently theological. In Cut in Stone, Ryan Andrew Newson contends that we cannot fully understand or disrupt these statues without attending to the convictions that give them their power. With a careful overview of the historical contexts in which most Confederate monuments were constructed, Newson demonstrates that these "memorials" were part of a revisionary project intended to resist the social changes brought on by Reconstruction while maintaining a romanticized Southern identity. Confederate monuments thus reinforce a theology concerning the nature of sacrifice and the ultimacy of whiteness. Moreover, this underlying theology serves to conceal inherited collective wounds in the present. If Confederate monuments are theologically weighted in their allure, then it stands to reason that they must also be contested at this level--precisely as sacred symbols. Newson responds to these inherently theological objects with suggestions for action that are sensitive to the varying contexts within which monuments reside, showing that while all Confederate monuments must come under scrutiny, some monuments should remain standing, but in redefined contexts. Cut in Stone represents the first detailed theological investigation of Confederate monuments, a resource for the larger collective task of determining how to memorialize problematic pasts and how to shape public space amidst contested memory.
