Pictures and the Past

“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 *