Domesticating the Invisible: Form and Environmental Anxiety in Postwar America, University of California Press, January 2021
Domesticating the Invisible
Domesticating the Invisible examines how postwar notions of form developed in response to newly perceived environmental threats, in turn inspiring artists to model plastic composition on natural systems often invisible to the human eye. Melissa S. Ragain focuses on the history of art education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to understand how an environmental approach to form inspired new art programs at Harvard and MIT. As they embraced scientistic theories of composition, these institutions also cultivated young artists as environmental agents who could influence urban design and contribute to an ecologically sensitive public sphere. Ragain combines institutional and intellectual histories to map how the emergency of environmental crisis altered foundational modernist assumptions about form, transforming questions about aesthetic judgment into questions about an ethical relationship to the environment.
“Domesticating the Invisible is a substantial contribution to the scholarship of 1960s and 1970s environmental art in the United States and prompts many intriguing avenues for future research.” - Ila Nicole Sheren, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art
Dissolve into Comprehension:Writings and Interviews, 1964-2004, By Jack Burnham, Edited by Melissa Ragain, MIT Press 2015
Dissolve into Comprehension
Jack Burnham is one of the few critics and theorists alive today who can claim to have radically altered the way we think about works of art. Burnham's use of the term “system” (borrowed from theoretical biology) in his 1968 essay “System Aesthetics” announced the relational character of conceptual art and newer research-based projects. Trained as an art historian, Burnham was also a sculptor. His first book, Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), established him as a leading commentator on art and technology. A postformalist pioneer, an influential figure in new media art history, an early champion of conceptual and ecological art, and the curator of the first exhibition of digital art, Burnham is long overdue for reevaluation. This book offers that opportunity by collecting a substantial and varied selection of his hard-to-find texts, some published here for the first time.
“Burnham was a fighter on the front lines of massive shifts in art and life in the postwar period. By bringing together both his famed and esoteric writings, this volume reveals the startling range and diversity of Burnham's thought. His watershed introduction of the concept of 'systems' into the sphere of aesthetics—an attempt to understand the transformation of the discrete art object in a universe of vast new interconnections between people, machines, and capital—still reads like a salvo. And yet Burnham's texts are not naïve paeans to technology. They are filled with doubt—anxious meditations on subjects and objects, networks and artworks, functionalism and formalism, synergy and breakdown. He saw not only the flexibility and intelligence of systems but their fragility, our 'technological house of cards.' In heralding the rise of information technologies in an art world preternaturally suspicious of such epochal changes, Burnham's investigations of materiality, anthropomorphism, catastrophe, and critique in another historical moment are so prescient as to continue to shape our own.” — Michelle Kuo, Editor in Chief, Artforum International