Books by Christopher P. Heuer
Ecologies, Agents, Terrains (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)
by Rebecca Zorach, Christopher P. Heuer
The newest volume in the acclaimed Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, this collection of essays explores the intrinsic connection between art and the environment. The romance and rejection of “nature” have always occupied places at the heart of art making and art history, and the resulting practices and discourses have had significant impact on public imagination and perception of ecological crises. The essays in this volume discuss many topics at the intersection of art and ecology, including literal convergences of art and earth, such as 1960s Land Art; social ecologies, like legislative art; rhetorical discourses of environmental interconnectedness or estrangement, such as large-scale agriculture; and performative landscape/body situations, including site-based ceremonies. Ultimately, the essays here provoke us to rethink art and ecology in material-practical terms, looking for alternatives to tropes of “landscape” and “place.”
Distributed for the Clark Art Institute
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Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture
by Stephanie Smith, Robert Bird, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Christopher P. Heuer, Tumelo Mosaka
In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interracial togetherness was still only a vague rumor on Madison Avenue.
Vision and Communism presents a series of interconnected essays devoted to Viktor Koretsky's art and the social worlds that it hoped to transform. Produced collectively by its five editors, this writing also considers the visual art, film, and music included in the exhibition Vision and Communism, opening at the Smart Museum of Art in September 2011.
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Into the White The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image
European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North – a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination – offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “nonsite,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts – and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art’s very legitimacy.
Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth – long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.
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