Pictures and the Past

Book excerpt: "The group of artists known as the "Pictures Generation" are usually thought to have rebelled against abstract and minimalist art by bringing back figural techniques and borrowing liberally from the aesthetics of mass media and advertising. Challenging conventional interpretations of this group, Alexander Bigman argues that these artists-especially Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Gretchen Bender, and Troy Brauntuch-deployed totalitarian and fascist iconography to pose new, politically loaded questions about what it means to perceive the world historically in a society saturated by images. Throughout, he also situates their work in the context of other developments taking place in New York City at the time, including music, fashion, cinema, and literature. This is a book about art, popular culture, and memory, and especially about how the specter of fascism loomed for these artists in the 1970s and 1980s, and the ways it still looms for us today"--