An examination of the interplay between cultural context and artistic practice in the work of Robert Smithson. Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of Smithson's working life—magazines, postcards from other artists, notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library—from which she reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited. Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson's art-making, thinking about art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of artistic practice of the time. A central focus of Reynolds's analysis is Smithson's fascination with the blind spots at the center of established ways of seeing and thinking about culture. For Smithson, New Jersey was such a blind spot, and he returned there again and again—alone and with fellow artists—to make art that, through its location alone, undermined assumptions about what and, more important, where, art should be. For those who guarded the integrity of the established art world, New Jersey was "elsewhere"; but for Smithson, "elsewheres" were the defining, if often forgotten, locations on the map of contemporary culture.

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp. While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene. Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre–World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan’s modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This work corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics. By excavating several generations of early modern Japan’s eccentric artists, it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. Indeed, Edo society fetishized various marginal personae—the recluse, the loser, the depraved, the outsider, the saint, the mad genius—as local heroes and paragons of moral virtue. This book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society. A study of impressive historical and disciplinary breadth, The Aesthetics of Strangeness also makes extensive use of primary sources, many previously overlooked in existing English scholarship. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy. By wedding art history to intellectual history, literature, aesthetics, and cultural practice, W. Puck Brecher strives for a broadly interdisciplinary perspective on this topic. Readers will discover that the individuals that form the backbone of his study lend credence to a new interpretation of Edo-period culture: a growing valuation of eccentricity within artistic and intellectual circles that exerted indelible impacts on mainstream society. The Aesthetics of Strangeness demystifies this emergent paradigm by illuminating the conditions and tensions under which certain rubrics of strangeness— ki and kyō particularly—were appointed as aesthetic criteria. Its revision of early modern Japanese culture constitutes an important contribution to the field.

What if we ascribe significance to aesthetic and social divergences rather than waving them aside as anomalous? What if we look closely at what does not appear central, or appears peripherally, or does not appear at all, viewing ellipses, outliers, absences, and outtakes as significant? Eccentric Modernisms places queer demands on art history, tracing the relational networks connecting cosmopolitan eccentrics who cultivated discrepant strains of modernism in America during the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the author’s earlier studies of Gertrude Stein and other lesbians who participated in transatlantic cultural exchanges between the world wars, this book moves in a different direction, focusing primarily on the gay men who formed Stein’s support network and whose careers, in turn, she helped to launch, including the neo-romantic painters Pavel Tchelitchew and writer-editor Charles Henri Ford. Eccentric Modernisms shows how these “eccentric modernists” bucked trends by working collectively, reveling in disciplinary promiscuity and sustaining creative affiliations across national and cultural boundaries.

An artist and writer whose charming and inventive works are at once modest and ambitious, Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard worked in a variety of forms, from New York School–aligned poetry to Pop Art–adjacent artworks, including wild riffs on the comic strip character Nancy. His art drew on the everyday and popular culture, exuding a sense of amiability, wit, and generosity. Love, Joe presents a selection of Brainard’s letters stretching from 1959 to 1993, offering an intimate view of his personal and artistic life. They allow readers to witness an extraordinarily fertile moment in New York’s history, when literary and visual arts intersected with happenings, proto-punk and psychedelic rock concerts, and experimental music and dance performances. Brainard’s letters to his partner, Kenward Elmslie, and others also open a window onto the transformations of queer life during this period. His correspondents include poet and artist friends such as John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Fairfield Porter, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol, as well as lovers, patrons, high school friends, and fans. At once an insider’s view of the art and literary worlds and a revelation of Brainard’s creative process, these letters invite readers to share in his radical but gentle candor, his open-mindedness, and a sophisticated naiveté that helped him erase the conventional barriers between art and life.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.