Documents of Doubt

“Pushing against the long-ingrained ‘dematerialization’ thesis, Heather Diack’s Documents of Doubt forces readers to engage with conceptual art in all of its material and political specificity. She brilliantly situates Bochner, Nauman, Huebler, and Baldessari at an intersection where art, the politics of protest, and mass media photography overlap. Her patient and lively readings of what initially seem to be affectless artworks reveal deep social and artistic concerns hiding in plain sight. Diack’s rigorous and open-eyed brand of art history is a welcome and necessary addition to the scholarship on conceptual art.”-John J. Curley, author of A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War

“Heather Diack’s new book links the ‘post-truth’ scenario of contemporary politics to the ‘credibility gap’ that emerged in the 1960s, a recognition of the space of doubt between representation and the real.”-Art History

Heather Diack is assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of Miami.