The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300187274)

A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact

This refreshing and erudite book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968. Author Joshua Shannon reveals an oddly stringent realism in the period, tracing artists' rejection of essential truths in favor of surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates not only the Cold War's preoccupation with data but also the rise of a pervasive culture of fact.

Focusing on the United States and West Germany, where photodocumentary traditions intersected with 1960s politics, Shannon investigates a broad variety of art, ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. He looks closely at art by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Douglas Huebler, Gerhard Richter, and others. These artists explored fact's role as a modern paradigm for talking, thinking, and knowing. Their art, Shannon concludes, helps to explain both the ambivalent anti-humanism of today's avant-garde art and our own culture of fact.

Author: Joshua Shannon
ISBN-10: 0300187270
ISBN-13: 9780300187274
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/11/2017
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.00lbs
Size: 10.20h x 7.30w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2018