Pictures and the Past

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A fresh take on the legacy of the group of artists known as the Pictures Generation, reinterpreting their work as haunted by the history of fascism and the threat of its return. The artists of the Pictures Generation, converging on New York City in the late 1970s, indelibly changed the shape of American art. It has long been thought that this group's main contribution was to rebel against abstraction by bringing back figural techniques and borrowing liberally from the aesthetics of mass media. In Pictures and the Past, however, art critic and historian Alexander Bigman presents us with a bold new interpretation of the artists' most significant work, in particular its recurring evocations of fascist iconography. Challenging conventional narratives, Bigman argues that these artists--especially Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and Gretchen Bender--posed pressing questions about what it means to perceive the world historically in a society saturated by images. He argues that their traumatic references represent not only a coded form of political commentary about the 1980s, but also a pioneering reflection on the inherently political nature of collective memory writ large. Throughout, Bigman situates their work within a larger cultural context comprising developments in music, fashion, cinema, and literature. Pictures and the Past probes the shifting relationships between art, popular culture, and memory in the 1970s and '80s, examining how the specter of fascism loomed for artists then--and the ways it still looms for us today.