Western art has long sought to find a perfect method of representing the body. At the same time as we have lost faith in the certainty of the modernist project, the perfect, straight, white body of modernism is now seen as fiction. But what sort of body will take its place? This work explores body images in visual culture, from revolutionary France to contemporary New York. It engages with artists' use of different kinds of body images in painting, sculpture, photography and film, and shows the centrality of the body in the work of artists from da Vinci to Manet, from Paul Strand to Kiki Smith. Also covered are the ways in which concerns about race, gender, sexuality, nation and technology are reflected in representations of the body and the body politic, from the paintings of David to the Vietnam veterans memorial.

- 作者简介 -

尼古拉斯·米尔佐夫（Nicholas Mirzoeff），视觉文化理论家，该研究领域的奠基人之一，纽约大学媒体、文化与传播学教授，著有《视觉文化导论》（An Introduction to Visual Culture）、《观看的权利：视觉性的反历史》（The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality）等书。

- 译者简介 -

萧易，2012年毕业于复旦大学外国语言文学学院，现居澳大利亚。出于爱好，数年来业余从事文学作品和文艺理论的译介，主要关注领域为性别研究、身体史和后现代理论。