The Emerson Museum

In 1832, Emerson made his famous decision to pursue wholeness in his life and in his writing. The Emerson Museum shows how this undertaking transformed American literary practice by turning the legacy of European romanticism into a writing project answerable to American urgencies.

Illustrated by classic American paintings and photographs, and accompanied with a prescient new appraisal, this stunning publication on Emerson’s seminal 1836 essay is at once a meditation on the ways artists influence each other and a timely cri de coeur to cherish and preserve America’s landscape. Widely considered to be the foundational text of the American landscape tradition, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature urges Americans to value and immerse themselves in their country’s landscape, to build American culture from America's nature. Nearly two centuries after the original publication of the essay Nature by Emerson, this captivating book by critic and historian Tyler Green brings together a selection of artistic works in dialog with Emerson’s text for the first time. Green also offers his own fascinating take on Nature through new research into how the essay was informed by Emerson’s experiences of art and, in turn, how it informed American art well into the twentieth century. The result is a unique melding of essay, art, and ideas that will draw new readers to Emerson’s writings, while also introducing a fresh perspective on a critical contribution to the American canon and showing what impact Emerson's text still has for the US to this day.

"This ground-breaking book draws on the collections of the Royal Photographic Society at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, as well as other collections to provide a unique account of Emerson's position in the history of photography. John Taylor's essays discuss Emerson's radical approach to photography, his historical and social context, his relationship to his contemporaries, as well as to debates and to technical innovations. He examines in depth several of Emerson's iconic images, and introduces an unrecorded, newly discovered albumen print (Tidal Creek and Old Warehouses south of Southwold, Suffolk)."--Rabat de la jaquette.

Hito Steyerl is rightly considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion. 0Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, this book gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl's films from the past ten years. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills. This publication is a charged slideshow of the artist’s extraordinary investigations into the status, circulation, and materiality of images.

Accompanying the artist's acclaimed inaugural exhibition at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, Jim Shaw: The Wig Museum highlights Shaw's more than thirty-year engagement with America's social, political and spiritual histories through the nation's vernacular and fringe cultures. One of Los Angeles's most idiosyncratic and beloved artists, Shaw was invited to consider the enigmatic artifacts found during the transformation of the former Scottish Rite Masonic Temple-furniture, stage sets, robes, costumes, wigs and regalia left behind by the Freemasons, a worldwide fraternal order dating back to the 18th century. The Wig Museum was specifically conceived for the site and, according to the artist, can be understood as a metaphor for the wig-wearing masonic and judiciary Anglo-Saxon power that is coming to an end.

While previous collections of Emerson essays have tended to be a sort of 'stock-taking' or 'retrospective' look at Emerson scholarship, this collection follows a more 'prospective' trajectory for Emerson studies based on the recent increase in global perspectives in nearly all fields of humanistic studies.

"Comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism that traces the links between German idealism, British Romanticism (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle), and American Transcendentalism. Focuses on Emerson's development and use of the concept of intuitive Reason, which became the intellectual and emotional foundation of American Transcendentalism"--Provided by publisher.