Stephen Petersen

Biographic Data

ID5889624
NAMEStephen Petersen
GIVEN NAMESStephen
FAMILY NAMEPetersen
SIGNATUREPETERSEN S
AFFILIATIONSEmail: .
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS0
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2004
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX0

  • Tricks of the Light

    Stephen PetersenARTICLELeonardo2024

    The arresting cover design for this volume of twenty-five essays on art and visual culture features a work not actually discussed in the book itself: Media Burn (1975), the satirical performance by the San Francisco collective Ant Farm. The jacket photograph shows the climactic moment when the “Phantom Dream Car,” a 1959 Cadillac retrofitted to resemble a jet plane, crashes through a pyramidal wall of burning television sets. The image appears wi…

  • The Night Albums

    Stephen Petersen, Stephen D PetersenARTICLELeonardo2023

    Studying the early history of photography, one at some point comes to a poignant realization: For several decades, prior to John Herschel’s 1839 application of hyposulphite of soda as a photographic fixing agent, light-based images were being made but could not be preserved unless they were kept out of sight, literally in the dark. For them to be seen required exposing them to light, which paradoxically had the effect of rendering them progressiv…

  • Light on Fire

    Stephen PetersenARTICLELeonardo2022

    With its vibrant splashes of color on dazzling white fields, the art of Sam Francis (1923–1994) seems to combine Monet’s sumptuous water lily canvases and a psychedelic light show with some Zen ink painting thrown in the mix. It turns out that that is exactly the capacious terrain occupied by Francis during his lifetime and reflected in his art. The sense of neither-nor that his art can provoke (neither American nor European, abstract expressioni…

  • The Birth of the Idea of Photography

    Stephen PetersenARTICLELeonardo2021

    June 02 2021 The Birth of the Idea of Photography The Birth of the Idea of Photography. By François Brunet; translated by Shane B. Lillis. (Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.: MIT Press; Toronto, Canada: RIC Books, 2019. First published as Le naissance de l'idée de photographie, 2000. 304 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-0262043267.) Stephen Petersen Stephen Petersen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information…

  • Brutal Aesthetics

    Stephen PetersenARTICLELeonardo2021

    This book is full of contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguous oppositions, starting with its title, which suggests at once the uncivilized and the cultured, the destructive and the creative. Originally a series of lectures delivered in lofty circumstances (the 2018 A.W Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.), the subject of these chapters is the act of art making taken to its base level. The broad questi…

  • The Man Who Walked in Color

    Stephen PetersenARTICLELeonardo2019

    April 01 2019 The Man Who Walked in Color The Man Who Walked in Color by GeorgesDidi-Huberman; translated by Drew S.Burk. Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis, 2017. 82 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 978-19454140-5. Stephen Petersen Stephen Petersen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Stephen Petersen Online Issn: 1530-9282 Print Issn: 0024-094X ©2019 ISAST2019ISAST Leonardo (2019) 52 (2): 207–2…

  • Sculpture in Space

    Stephen PetersenARTICLELeonardo2018

    The idea of sculpture with no visible contact with the earth, hovering in space without the usual vertical and horizontal orientation, arose in contemporary art practice during the postwar decades, amid the Cold War race for space. In Milan, Paris, Düsseldorf and New York, an array of floating art projects were attempted both inside—and outside—the art gallery. These artistic experiments offered a counterpoint to the first satellites and manned s…

  • The Experience Machine

    Stephen PetersenARTICLELeonardo2016

    October 01 2016 The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema by GloriaSutton, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2015. 257 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-262-02849-3. Stephen Petersen Stephen Petersen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Stephen Petersen Online Issn: 1530-9282 Print…

  • Marketing the Moon

    Stephen Petersen, Stephen D PetersenARTICLELeonardo2015References: 1

    April 01 2015 Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program by David MeermanScott and RichardJurek. The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 2013. 130 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-0-262-02696-3. Stephen Petersen Stephen Petersen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Stephen Petersen Online ISSN: 1530-9282 Print ISSN: 0024-094X ©…

  • Explosive Propositions

    Open AccessStephen PetersenARTICLEScience in Context2004

    Argument “How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time , “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestura…