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King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in
New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some
of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been
riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in
visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book,
Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George
III—and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue’s
destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and
material violence—and tracing its resurrection through pictures
and performances—Bellion advances a history of American art that
looks beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite spectators
to encompass a riotous cast of public sculptures and liberty poles,
impassioned crowds and street protests, performative smashings and
yearning re-creations. Bellion argues that iconoclasm mobilized a
central paradox of the national imaginary: it was at once a
destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their
independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued
to enact British cultural identities. Persuasive and engaging,
Iconoclasm in New York demonstrates how British monuments gave rise
to an American creation story. This fascinating cultural history
will captivate art historians, specialists in iconoclasm, and
general readers interested in American history and New York City.
In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration
of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion
investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual
deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their
understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity
between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale
family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other
Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered
in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art
exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, ""Invisible
Ladies,"" and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs
the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared
and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of
citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by
the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception
signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with
Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses,
Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions
functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion
reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic,
mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising
links between early American art, culture, and citizenship. |In the
first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early
United States, Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with
material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with
illusory art shaped citizens' understanding of knowledge,
representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825.
Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects
transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances.
While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century
experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations
that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the
world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena,
Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond
Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural
nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel
leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book
examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance
in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this
volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of
objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an
era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten
essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to
chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging
from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of
the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations
within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made
things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects
catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern
period.
The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question:
how do we study material culture when the objects of study are
transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist
the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and
archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful
collections. What holds these disparate things together here are
the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of
its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive
archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each
author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an
archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor. This
book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered,
arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by
“discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they
came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the
traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are
varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and
conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate
for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a
new way to think about material culture.
King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in
New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some
of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been
riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in
visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book,
Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George
III-and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue's
destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and
material violence-and tracing its resurrection through pictures and
performances-Bellion advances a history of American art that looks
beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite spectators to
encompass a riotous cast of public sculptures and liberty poles,
impassioned crowds and street protests, performative smashings and
yearning re-creations. Bellion argues that iconoclasm mobilized a
central paradox of the national imaginary: it was at once a
destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their
independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued
to enact British cultural identities. Persuasive and engaging,
Iconoclasm in New York demonstrates how British monuments gave rise
to an American creation story. This fascinating cultural history
will captivate art historians, specialists in iconoclasm, and
general readers interested in American history and New York City.
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R398
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