Long viewed as a tabula rasa, the deserts of the American West have played a distinct role in the projection of American cultural identities. Historically represented through fantasies of individualism, frontier ruggedness, and land acquisition, the desert is also the site of extreme social and environmental violence. The Invention of the American Desert brings together a wide-ranging group of interdisciplinary essays that explore, through diverse perspectives, dialectical problems posed by an environment that has served as a testing ground for modernist experimentation in art and architecture, military-industrial incursions, and ecological disasters throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In light of the urgent climate crisis and the planet’s increasing desertification, this volume reflects on the nature and legacy of the desert as a crucible for competing visions of land, environment, and art.
Lyle Massey is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective and the editor of The Treatise on Perspective: Published and Unpublished.
James Nisbet is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s.
“A timely and indispensable collection of thoughtful essays exploring contemporary issues of the arid lands of the American West that should be required reading for any serious desert scholar.”—Kim Stringfellow, Project Director, The Mojave Project
"This fascinating volume reveals the strange history of the meanings of the desert in the American imagination, closely examining art, architecture, film, and literature. It offers a multifaceted guide to the desert’s special role as a surface for the play of modern fantasies and fears."—Joshua Shannon, Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Maryland
"The breadth of this volume’s subjects and voices is impressive. From essays on Will Wilson’s meditative photographs about environmental despoliation to declassified films of nuclear tests, passive solar heating systems, and a modernist glass home built around a massive rock, the volume challenges the pernicious myth of the unpopulated desert while also showing how that myth continues to feed cultural production and shape governmental policy."—James Glisson, Curator of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art
256 pp.7 x 10Illus: 74 b/w illustrations
9780520306691$75.00|£63.00Hardcover
Nov 2021