• The Invention of the American Desert
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The Invention of the American Desert

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Long viewed as a tabula rasa, the deserts of the American West have played a distinct role in the projection of American cultural identities. Historically represented through fantasies of individua...
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Long viewed as a tabula rasa, the deserts of the American West have played a distinct role in the projection of American cultural identities. Historically represented through fantasies of individualism, frontier ruggedness, and land acquisition, the desert is also the site of extreme social and environmental violence. The Invention of the American Desert brings together a wide-ranging group of interdisciplinary essays that explore, through diverse perspectives, dialectical problems posed by an environment that has served as a testing ground for modernist experimentation in art and architecture, military-industrial incursions, and ecological disasters throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In light of the urgent climate crisis and the planet’s increasing desertification, this volume reflects on the nature and legacy of the desert as a crucible for competing visions of land, environment, and art.
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Price: $75.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 02 November 2021
Trim Size: 10.00 X 7.00 in
ISBN: 9780520306691
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

Lyle Massey is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective and the editor of The Treatise on Perspective: Published and Unpublished.

James Nisbet is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Lyle Massey and James Nisbet

PART ONE: CONTAMINATION
1. Desolate Dreams 
Joseph Masco

2. Air, Wind, Breath, Life: Desertification and Will Wilson’s AIR (Auto-Immune Response)
Jessica L. Horton

PART TWO: FABRICATION
3. Notes from Bioteknika 
Albert Narath

4. Troglodyte Modernists 
Lyle Massey

5. Explosive Modernism: Hiram Hudson Benedict's Bouldereign and Zabriskie Point at Fifty
Edward Dimendberg

PART THREE: INVISIBILITY
6. Point Omega / Omega Point: Desert in Three Parts 
Stefanie Sobelle

7. The Desert in Fine Grain
Emily Eliza Scott

PART FOUR: DYSTOPIA
8. The Desert as Black Mythology 
Bridget R. Cooks

9. On the Recalcitrance of the Desert Island, by way of Andrea Zittel's A–Z West
James Nisbet

CODA
10. Four Theses for the Coming Deserts 
Hans Baumann and Karen Pinkus

List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Index