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.

- 作者簡介 -

尼古拉斯·米爾佐夫（Nicholas Mirzoeff），視覺文化理論傢，該研究領域的奠基人之一，紐約大學媒體、文化與傳播學教授，著有《視覺文化導論》（An Introduction to Visual Culture）、《觀看的權利：視覺性的反曆史》（The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality）等書。

- 譯者簡介 -

蕭易，2012年畢業於復旦大學外國語言文學學院，現居澳大利亞。齣於愛好，數年來業餘從事文學作品和文藝理論的譯介，主要關注領域為性彆研究、身體史和後現代理論。