Books by Alexander Bigman
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The artists of the Pictures Generation, converging on New York City in the late 1970s, indelibly ... more The artists of the Pictures Generation, converging on New York City in the late 1970s, indelibly changed the shape of American art. Rebelling against abstraction, they borrowed liberally from the aesthetics of mass media and sometimes the work of other artists. It has long been thought that the group’s main contribution was to upend received conceptions of authorial originality. In Pictures and the Past, however, art critic and historian Alexander Bigman shows that there is more to this moment than just the advent of appropriation art. He presents us with a bold new interpretation of the Pictures group’s most significant work, in particular its recurring evocations of fascist iconography.
In the wake of the original Pictures show, curated by Douglas Crimp in 1977, artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and Gretchen Bender raised pressing questions about what it means to perceive the world historically in a society saturated by images. Bigman argues that their references to past cataclysms—to the violence wrought by authoritarianism and totalitarianism—represent not only a coded form of political commentary about the 1980s but also a piercing reflection on the nature of collective memory. Throughout, Bigman situates their work within a larger cultural context including parallel trends in music, fashion, cinema, and literature. Pictures and the Past probes the shifting relationships between art, popular culture, memory, and politics in the 1970s and ’80s, examining how the specter of fascism loomed for artists then—and the ways it still looms for us today.
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Peer Reviewed Papers by Alexander Bigman
Representations, 2023
In this essay I address the emotive charge of James Welling’s photographic abstractions from the ... more In this essay I address the emotive charge of James Welling’s photographic abstractions from the early 1980s, described by the artist as “images about the act of feeling.” Welling’s endeavor to stage this “act,” I argue, places his work within a wider effort by peers like Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and David Salle to reassess what it meant for art to be “expressive.” At a moment when modernist models of this concept had lost their credibility and “expressionism” as a genre had come to appear politically toxic, such an inquiry took on new urgency, raising questions that remain central to ongoing debates about the relationship between art, affect, and the social.
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The Art Bulletin, 2022
Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills (1980), a series of monumentally enlarged newspaper photographs depic... more Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills (1980), a series of monumentally enlarged newspaper photographs depicting people plummeting from buildings, is commonly framed as a self-reflexive inquiry into the experience of time and mortality occasioned by photography. Based on archival research into Charlesworth’s journalistic source material for Stills and its antecedent, Modern History, this article advances an alternative reading of the works and their memorial-like format in terms of more collective experiences of temporality and history. These concerns, I argue, link Charlesworth’s project to a longer Pop art tradition, complicating established art historical accounts of the so-called Pictures Generation and its political imagination.
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Art History, 2021
With their hallucinatory juxtapositions of medieval English iconography, Imperial-era public stat... more With their hallucinatory juxtapositions of medieval English iconography, Imperial-era public statuary, and allusions to contemporary urban unrest, Gilbert and George’s monumental 1980 Pictures marked what many initial critics perceived as an unsettlingly political turn in the duo’s work—even, some alleged, a gesture of identification with Britain’s ascendant neo-fascist right. In fact, I argue, much of Gilbert and George’s preceding work, including their collages of Edwardian-era picture postcards and their canonical performances as ‘living sculptures’, was similarly oriented toward questions of national identity and belonging in a way that the existing scholarly literature has not adequately addressed. At a moment consumed by racialized discourses on Britain’s state of societal ‘crisis’, the artists used their self-appointed roles to inhabit what they call ‘the gap between a nation and its subjects’, using this liminal position to illuminate the destabilized and affectively charged terrain of cultural memory in a fitfully decolonizing United Kingdom.
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History of Photography, 2021
Robert Smithson’s photography is commonly associated with conceptual art and its watershed critiq... more Robert Smithson’s photography is commonly associated with conceptual art and its watershed critique of the apparatus’s documentary mode. On this basis, interpreters like Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens and Jeff Wall have all positioned Smithson as a key precedent to the expanded field of lens-based practice, keyed to the complex concept of the ‘picture’ that emerged following the artist’s death in 1973. However, a careful review of the artist’s work and writing reveals that his implicit theory of photography could also be meaningfully described as Minimalist – attuned to this quasi-sculptural movement’s concerns with the clarification and renewal of spatiotemporal perception. Smithson’s 1969 travelogue, ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan’, for instance, sets up a number of pointed equivalences between photography, Minimalist sculpture and select ancient Mesoamerican ritual objects designed – according to Smithson’s understanding – to expand perception onto new planes of space and time. In recent years, scholars such as Walter Benn Michaels have advanced the idea that Minimalism’s problematics offer key insight into late twentieth–century photography’s foremost questions regarding the nature of this technology and its presence effects, in particular those that have long been associated with its indexicality. As this article demonstrates, Smithson’s camera work engaged meaningfully with these same problematics, evincing a decidedly materialist yet radically expansive new conception of photographic picturing.
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Oxford Art Journal, 2017
The American minimalist artist Donald Judd is closely linked to his concept of the ‘specific obje... more The American minimalist artist Donald Judd is closely linked to his concept of the ‘specific object,’ a new form of three-dimensional work defined by its embrace of ‘real space’ and its complete opposition to the humanistic illusionism of what Judd called the ‘European tradition.’ Yet at the crux of his canonical essay ‘Specific Objects,’ Judd compares this new type of work to ‘one of Brunelleschi's windows at the Badia di Fiesole,’ thus aligning it with the inventor of linear perspective and, so it would seem, originator of the very tradition he wished to supersede. This problematic comparison, which has never received sustained analysis, puts pressure on the dominant view of Judd’s work as an outgrowth of modernist painting, instead pointing to the abiding presence of architectural prototypes, especially Renaissance ones, in the artist's work and thought. This paper identifies Judd's Renaissance framework as a veiled form of architectural modernism inherited from his professor of Renaissance architecture, Rudolf Wittkower, and explores its operation in Judd's conceptualization of both ‘specificity’ and ‘space’ itself, as manifested in his writing and in key works from his formative period, 1960-1965. By historically situating Judd's Renaissance imaginary with respect to contemporaneous discourses on art and architecture, the paper seeks to open a new perspective onto the development of minimalism more generally.
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Exhibition Reviews by Alexander Bigman
Art in America, 2022
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Art in America, 2022
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Art in America, 2022
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Art in America, 2021
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Art in America , 2020
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Art in America, 2019
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Art in America, 2019
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Art in America, 2019
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Books by Alexander Bigman
In the wake of the original Pictures show, curated by Douglas Crimp in 1977, artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and Gretchen Bender raised pressing questions about what it means to perceive the world historically in a society saturated by images. Bigman argues that their references to past cataclysms—to the violence wrought by authoritarianism and totalitarianism—represent not only a coded form of political commentary about the 1980s but also a piercing reflection on the nature of collective memory. Throughout, Bigman situates their work within a larger cultural context including parallel trends in music, fashion, cinema, and literature. Pictures and the Past probes the shifting relationships between art, popular culture, memory, and politics in the 1970s and ’80s, examining how the specter of fascism loomed for artists then—and the ways it still looms for us today.
Peer Reviewed Papers by Alexander Bigman
Exhibition Reviews by Alexander Bigman
In the wake of the original Pictures show, curated by Douglas Crimp in 1977, artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and Gretchen Bender raised pressing questions about what it means to perceive the world historically in a society saturated by images. Bigman argues that their references to past cataclysms—to the violence wrought by authoritarianism and totalitarianism—represent not only a coded form of political commentary about the 1980s but also a piercing reflection on the nature of collective memory. Throughout, Bigman situates their work within a larger cultural context including parallel trends in music, fashion, cinema, and literature. Pictures and the Past probes the shifting relationships between art, popular culture, memory, and politics in the 1970s and ’80s, examining how the specter of fascism loomed for artists then—and the ways it still looms for us today.