This volume gathers together all Fox's known writings, with full explanatory notes and an introduction which explains who he was and how he believed he could reconcile his apparently incompatible beliefs.
Road trips to Las Vegas are the occasion for this entertaining meditation on the quintessentially American experience of driving across the desert. William Fox, successively exiled from California, Nevada, and New Mexico, has spent more time than most of us driving to Las Vegas--and he has taken notes on three recent trips, his own way of bringing cohesion to the vast and mind-numbing aspects of the freeway. Approaching the most postmodern city on the planet from three directions, he examines the landscape and what we do to it while also trying to figure out who he is, what that means, and the nature of the transformations of land into landscape through art and architecture, landscape design, and advertising. Fox's history of the region, both natural and cultural, highlights the creep of the urban supergrid across the most extensively traveled desert in the world. This is a profoundly personal, even idiosyncratic book about the most public of subjects--living in the postmodern West at the end of the millennium and what the cities, the freeways, the open spaces, and the billboards tell us about ourselves.
Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.
This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In “The Void,” he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. “The Grid” leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. “The Sign” wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.
When we think of the desert, we almost never associate it with water. Rather we define it by the very absence of water. Yet the desert was carved by water-canyons, arroyos, ravines, chasms, washes-and water, in any amount, is the desert's most precious and mysterious commodity. Small creeks flow at night, but dry up and disappear during daylight hours, only to return when the sun goes down. And after torrential rains, entire rivers can form with small fish appearing out of what had been only a dusty streambed. Small springs can support a variety of wildlife as well as pinyon, juniper trees, and yuccas. These hydro-miracles are chronicled in this new full-color book by landscape photographer MARK LISK and author WILLIAM FOX. In his fascinating essay, Fox examines water and its role in the North American desert, covering rivers, trapped water pockets, oases, freshwater lakes, salt and alkali lakes, and lake beds left by ancient floods in the five major desert regions in North America: the Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran, Colorado Plateau, and Chihuahuan. Five deserts, four seasons, and informative text and captions give the reader a deeper understanding of the western deserts of North America. Plant are named with both common and scientific names. Photo notes provide useful information to the striking images in the book.
William Fayette Fox (1836-1909) was an American author and professor. He was born in King William County, Virginia. He was educated in the old field schools of Virginia, in Rumford Academy, King William County, Richmond College, Richmond, Virginia, and the University of Virginia. From 1859 until 1860 he was a teacher in Columbia, Virginia then he continued teaching in private school near Marion, Alabama, and in private schools of King William County, Virginia, Essex County, Virginia, and in Richmond, Virginia. In 1871 he accepted a position as principal in the public schools of Richmond until he was made a superintendent in 1889. In 1904 he published Civil Government of Virginia.
Schaaf, an independent photohistorian and research professor at the University of Glasgow and the director of the Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project, discusses approximately fifty of Talbot's images in the collection of the Getty Museum."--BOOK JACKET.
William Fox's writing for the last several years has been focused on how we construct aerial views, either physically (by flying) or in our imaginations. In Aereality, he flies over earthworks in Nevada and Utah, soars through the world's largest open pit mine, and surveys Los Angeles, circumnavigating large swaths of true American urban sprawl. On the East Coast, he examines the elevated art of the Hudson River Valley and New York City. And finally, in Australia, Fox examines the history and current practice of both Euro–Australian and Aboriginal aerial views, and searches for the cognitive roots of our aerial imagination. Accompanying Fox throughout his travels is a rolling cast of enlightened fliers: geographers, museum curators, landscape photographers, anthropologists, and artists. He traverses the sky in prop planes, helicopters, and hot air balloons, all with the ultimate goal of knowing and experiencing the earth from the air.
This is the only complete package for introductory social statistics. The third edition of the textbook is accompanied by a powerful version of Student MicroCase, research-quality data sets, a comprehensive set of workbook exercises, and hundreds of other enhancements. The textbook is a friendly introduction to social statistics. William Fox explains topics in a clear and simple manner, and he prepares students to use social statistics.
The most comprehensive account available of Michael Heizer's art by a writer and curator who has critical experience with the artist and his work. Michael Heizer is among the greatest, and often least accessible, American artists. As one of the last living figures who launched the Land Art movement, his legacy of works that are literally and metaphorically monumental has an incalculable influence on the world of sculpture and environmental art. But his seclusion in the remote Nevada desert, as well as his notorious obduracy, have resulted in significant gaps in our critical understanding. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments spans the breadth of Heizer's career, uniquely combining fieldwork, personal narrative, and biographical research to create the first major assessment in years of this titan of American art. Author William L. Fox, founding director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, has alternately been a sponsor, advocate, and critic of Heizer's work for decades. Fox's understanding of the artist's history and connection to landscape, his time spent with Heizer at the remote ranch where Heizer is finishing his magnum opus--the mile-long sculpture City--and his access to some of Heizer's key associates give him a unique position from which to discuss the artist's work. Fox has also made numerous site visits to Heizer's work--including early pieces in the Nevada desert now largely lost to the elements--to correct the often inconsistent accounts of their locations. Last, Fox imparts a crucial new understanding of Heizer's work by elaborating on the artist's bond with his father, the famed archaeologist and cultural ecologist Robert Heizer, who enlisted his son on important digs in Mexico and Peru, providing the young man with an appreciation of site, landscape, and geology that would thoroughly inform his work. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments is a long overdue addition to the critical and biographical literature of this major figure in American art.
This book brings together for the first time high-quality reproductions representing the full sweep of Talbot's work. These beautiful images are not only records of scientific triumphs but also the evidence of the first steps in shaping a totally new type of vision. Talbot became the first artist to be trained by the very art that he had invented." "Drawn from public and private collections throughout the world, the one hundred color plates are reproduced in the actual size of the originals and in all the subtle hues that comprised Talbot's early work. While a number of Talbot's most famous images are included, many of the photographs are little known and are reproduced in this volume for the first time. They range from Talbot's Lilliputian pre-1839 negatives (made in "mouse trap" cameras) through botanical photograms to mid-1840s calotypes that demonstrate a sure command of the new art. Each plate is discussed in detail, drawing on important new research the author has conducted in preparation for a catalogue raisonne of Talbot's life's work in photography."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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