Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America - Hardcover

Anania, Katie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300272235 ISBN 13: 9780300272239

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2024

Synopsis

A dynamic look at how artists used paper to radically redefine the relationship between the body and its surroundings, and to propose new conceptions of ecology
 
From sketches created inside pants pockets to paper-strewn performances that took cues from protests and riots, the work on paper in the 1960s acted as a mobile, flexible connective tissue between the body and the world around it. In this book, Katie Anania reveals how artists Carolee Schneemann, William Anastasi, Richard Tuttle, Robert Morris, and Charles White harnessed this historically intimate medium during a period in which Americans were becoming urgently concerned with identity, consumer culture, the overreach of state power, and the rapidly deteriorating natural world. Her reexamination of drawing shows how the omnipresence of paper facilitated artists’ critiques of dominant systems, from modern throwaway culture to bureaucracy to colonial violence.
 
Engaging a wide range of actions—such as recycling, recording, cutting, planning, and erasing—Anania offers fresh insights into paper’s role not merely as a preparatory medium but one essential to the histories of performance, minimalist, conceptual, and land art. Out of Paper uses materiality studies, social history, and feminist art historical methods to situate paper as a major conduit for thought in the postwar United States.

About this title

About the Author

Katie Anania is assistant professor of art history at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300272235
• ISBN 13: 9780300272239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256