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Pictures and the Past

Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art

Pictures and the Past

Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art

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.

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Art: American Art, Art Criticism, Art--General Studies, Photography

Media Studies

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Reviews

“If you thought that you knew what the postmodern moment in New York art was all about, it turns out that you didn’t. Bigman sees through the theoretical camouflage to discern a more profound reckoning with the cultural moment of the 1980s in terms of what Susan Sontag famously called ‘fascinating fascism.’ His penetrating analysis reveals the artists involved as deeper and better than even their many admirers have been able to recognize.”

Thomas Crow, author of The Artist in the Counterculture

“Pictures and the Past is a necessary and provocative reconsideration of the Pictures Generation. Bigman’s carefully crafted, thoroughly researched account not only makes evident the cultural acuity of these artists but also demonstrates why they are more relevant than ever today. This book will be a touchstone for scholars and artists for many years to come.”

Alexander Dumbadze, author of Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere

“In this illuminating book, Bigman challenges any erroneous misgivings about the Pictures Generation by brilliantly reconsidering the discursive context in which the famous artists worked. There he finds that their art was deeply political at its core, spinning from the collective memory of interwar fascism.”

Andrés Mario Zervigón, author of Photography and Germany

“With impressive erudition and nuance, Bigman shows that the frequent ellipses, obliqueness, and ambivalence of America’s Pictures Generation imagery conjures up not only the vagaries of collective memory but also the reactionary drift of much 1970s and ’80s culture in America. Pictures and the Past offers keen insight into what Europe’s recent fascist past meant to these artists, but it also suggests what it might mean to us in our embattled present.”

Ara H. Merjian, author of Against the Avant-Garde

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Beyond Fascinating
Chapter One: Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History
Chapter Two: Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein
Chapter Three: Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”
Chapter Four: Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire
Chapter Five: Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater
Epilogue: Fascinating Again

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index