Terra Foundation Essays – serie

The history of American art is a history of objects, but it is also a history of ideas about how we create and consume these objects. As Picturing convincingly shows, the critical tradition in American art has given rise to profound thinking about the nature and capacity of images and formed responses to some of most pressing problems of picturing: What is an image, and why make one? What do images do?            The first volume in a new series on critical concerns in the history of American art, Picturing brings together essays by a distinguished international group of scholars who discuss the creation and consumption of images from the early modern period through the end of the twentieth century. Some of the contributions focus on art critical texts, like Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Cézanne, while others have as their point of departure particular artworks, from a portrait of Benjamin Franklin to Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographs of the California Coast. Works that addressed images and image making were not confined to the academy; they spilled out into poetry, literature, theater, and philosophy, and the essays’ considerations likewise range freely, from painting to natural history illustrations, travel narratives, and popular fiction. Together, the contributions demonstrate a rich deliberation that thoroughly debunks the notion that American art is merely derivative of a European tradition.With a wealth of new research and full-color illustrations, Picturing significantly expands the terrain of scholarship on American art.

As a category in art history, circulation is rooted in the contemporary context of Internet culture and the digital image. Yet circulation, as a broader concept for the movement of art across time and space in vastly different cultural and media contexts, has been a factor in the history of the arts in the United States since at least the eighteenth century. The third volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Circulation brings together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Thierry Gervais, Tom Gunning, J. M. Mancini, Frank Mehring, and Hela ne Valance, who map the multiple planes where artistic meaning has been produced by the circulation of art from the eighteenth century to the present. The book looks at both broad historical trends and the successes and failures of particular works of art from a wide variety of artists and styles. Together, the contributions significantly expand the conceptual and methodological terrain of scholarship on American art.

In his noteworthy theoretical essay "Experience," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that humans by nature cannot fully grasp life as lived. If this is so, how capable are we of expressing our experiences in works of art? Despite this formidable challenge, for the past thirty years, scholarship in American art has assumed that works of art are coded and has analyzed them accordingly, often with constructive results. The fourth volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Experience considers the possibility of immediacy, or the idea that we can directly relate to the past by way of an artifact or work of art. Without discounting the matrix of codes involved in both the production and reception of art, contributors to Experience emphasize the sensibility of the interpreter; the techniques of art historical writing, including its affinity with fiction and its powers of description; the emotional charge the punctum that certain representations can deliver. These and other topics are examined through seven essays, addressing different periods in American art.

The history of innovative intermedia art practices in America.  In 1965, American artist and Fluxus cofounder Dick Higgins stated that much of the best art being made at the time fell between media. He linked the dismantling of divisions among media to decompartmentalization in society and the impending dawn of a “classless” society. After high art, he wrote, came the deluge brought on by Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, and Alan Kaprow’s happenings. Intermedia, the term Higgins selected to describe this trend, referred to works of art that fuse different, often nontraditional, media. In intermedia, boundaries between mediums dissolve and new mediums emerge. Never a prescriptive term, intermedia remains fluid, both as an artistic practice and an art historical category.  The essays in this volume consider a range of subjects from nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture, exploring instances of intermedia within specific cultural, social, and historical contexts and in relation to theories of media, image-making, and materiality. They present a rich account of American artistic practice as an open system of medial interrelation and exchange, highlighting experimental cross-pollinations and mutations among artistic forms.