Papers by Harmon Siegel
American Art, 2020
In 1970 Melvin Edwards crisscrossed a gallery in the Whitney Museum of American Art with barbed w... more In 1970 Melvin Edwards crisscrossed a gallery in the Whitney Museum of American Art with barbed wire. His work was in reaction to developments in American art, especially Minimalism, but in material that evoked violent racism, raising significant and still potent questions about how abstract art can meaningfully address the politics of race. Recently, Edwards’s long-neglected work has been featured in several major books and high-profile exhibitions. This scholarship, however, has mostly focused on his response to debates on Black Art in the civil rights era, separating his work from the dominant approaches to modern sculpture that Edwards both referenced and reconfigured. Rather than protest the museum from without, he criticized it from within, addressing the art world’s exclusion of African American artists by installing barbed wire and directing the Minimalist emphasis on literal space toward the more specific problem of Black art in the white cube.
Telos, 2019
Carl Schmitt advanced a concept of myth with important implications for our understanding of imag... more Carl Schmitt advanced a concept of myth with important implications for our understanding of images. His mythic images offer an alternative to more prevalent approaches, for they does not conceive them as illusions to be demystified or critiqued, but rather as vital sources of self-knowledge. Focusing on Schmitt’s reception of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, this article details Schmitt’s understanding of images’ mythic power. It demonstrates how Benito Cereno provided Schmitt with meta-images, images about images, which disclosed how they reveal the sovereign and the enemy. By attending to those meta-images in Melville’s novella and their resonances with Schmitt’s broader project, it uncovers new aspects of his political thought.
The Art Bulletin, 2017
Louise Nevelson’s work is today all too often treated as marginal and idiosyncratic. Yet her art ... more Louise Nevelson’s work is today all too often treated as marginal and idiosyncratic. Yet her art remains vital to the broader study of American modernism, for it targeted the modernist myth of autonomy at multiple levels. Adopting strategies from gothic literature, Nevelson exposed what modernism had repressed: the fear that its claims for autonomy are critically unstable. In the dark space of her home, she confronted modernist art with this gothic fear, revealing how the specter of domesticity haunts its theory and practice.
Essays by Harmon Siegel
Margaret Koerner, ed. William Kentridge: Smoke Ashes Fable (Brussels: Merkatorfonds, 2017)., 2017
Translations in French and Dutch.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Elizabeth Rudy, eds. Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2017)., 2017
Responses by Harmon Siegel
H-France Salon, 2017
in Responses to " Questionnaire on Impressionism and the Social History of Art "
Criticism by Harmon Siegel
Reviews by Harmon Siegel
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Papers by Harmon Siegel
Essays by Harmon Siegel
Responses by Harmon Siegel
Criticism by Harmon Siegel
Reviews by Harmon Siegel