The first part of this chapter compares three paintings of racing cyclist produced across Europe in quick succession during 1912–13. The works are by the expressionist Lyonel Feininger, the cubist Jean Metzinger and the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni. The second half of the chapter looks at responses to motor-racing from Germany, Italy and France. Starting with the futurist F. T. Marinetti’s notorious infatuation with the motorcar, the chapter then considers the importance of the automobile to the purist project of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. The chapter concludes by looking at a pair of articles that Werner Graeff wrote for the journal G. Although there are many similarities between Graeff’s attitude and those of the purists, it is Graeff who is most uncompromising in his vision of a modern artist-engineer.

The artwork of Adrian Piper demands an encounter with language. Many viewers responded to Piper's textual address and produced enough inscriptions to fill seven notebooks. It is an early and significant articulation of the textual address animating art practices by women in the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper draws on Kant's work to explain how racism, sexism, and xenophobia function and then provides alternatives for encountering difference in less defensive ways. Piper's resistance to subjective revelation is evident throughout Concrete Documentation. The most compelling aspect of Concrete Documentation is the movement between Piper's written diary entries and her photographs. This chapter analyses three performances by Piper: Catalysis, Food for the Spirit, and Mythic Being. It traces how they align with the insights of Mama's Baby and underscoring how deeply Piper's artwork contributes to the project of rewriting the conditions in which black women are allowed to appear.

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This chapter analyses how Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen use texts and images of writing in Riddles to create a film that transforms pre-Oedipal pleasures into a site for feminist collaboration. Mulvey and Wollen place the title of the film over the first page of Le Mythe de la Femme. Mulvey returns to the image of Garbo's face superimposed upon the Sphinx, and focuses on the Sphinx's forgotten place in the myth of Oedipus, which is significant for the film's rewriting of maternal femininity. At the centre of Riddles is 'Louise's Story Told in 13 Shots,' the sequence in which the primary narrative of the film unfolds. The fragment leads into the first of the film's 360-degree pans, which circles Louise's kitchen. The Sphinx poses a series of questions that bring feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis together, creating an inquiry into the material conditions of motherhood in London in the 1970s.

This analysis of two of Jeff Wall's most important early photographic transparencies highlights the fact that his subject matter can be understood as a male artist's control of what is imagined as female-gendered physical and theoretical space. The initiation and subsequent extension of this operation in European and American critical discourse about his work is discussed in relationship to anthropological research on settler colonial societies’ territorial conflicts; specifically settlers’ need to develop cultural narratives that rationalize their control over other populations within a given geographic area. Such an approach contrasts with the prevailing commentaries by other critics, some of which are discussed at length (Donald Kuspit, Arielle Pélenc, Kaja Silverman and Michael Fried). These critics’ analyses of Wall’s work downplay or ignore the feminist subject matter in the work in favour of discussing the images' relationship to the avant-garde potential of technical reproduction or to the history of modern painting.

Chapter 4 recounts the emergence of the theory and practice of a “Defeatured Landscape,” the name given in 1970 to a new urban semiotic that would constitute photo-conceptual artists self-defined counter tradition to those cultural practices deemed uncritical, expressionist, and mythical that were explored in Chapter 3. NETCO’s Ruins (1968) and Portfolio of Piles (1968) are examined as important precursors to the defeatured landscape. Dennis Wheeler, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and Christos Dikeakos’ art and writing are discussed as examples of defeatured landscapes in relation to their influences: American conceptual artist peers like Dan Graham; Concrete Poetry; awareness of the vehicular landscape; and Surrealism and its legacy in the psycho-geography and dérives of the Situationist International. This history is set against two contrasting examples: the real political conflicts of land development and associated financial speculation going on at the same time in the city; and an accounting of the erotic female bodies who often populate the otherwise defeatured landscapes of the photo-conceptualists. These examples show how the social politics of public space in Vancouver are left out of avant-garde representations of the city through the discursive framing of a landscape not so defeatured after-all.

The conclusion begins by looking at the treatment of sport in Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant’s purist journal L’Esprit Nouveau. The eclectic and episodic fragments on sport are contrasted with the three-part essay by their associate Pierre Winter. Winter, later the founder of the French Revolutionary Fascist Party, concentrates of a regime of physical exercise and bodily training, in which it is argued an emphasis on competitive elite sport is incidental. But fascism could also demonstrate a keen interest in competitive sport, never more so than when Benito Mussolini instigated a National Exhibition of Sport in Milan in 1935, with exhibition halls designed by some of the most prominent figures of Italian rationalist architecture.

The central argument of the book is introduced; that the counter-tradition Jeff Wall helped develop with other artists in Vancouver has included a gendered bifurcation of space since its earliest incarnation in 1970 as the "defeatured landscape." The introduction contains brief descriptions of Wall and his peers’ early work in relation to Wall’s international position as leader of the Vancouver School of Photo-Conceptualism; a brief discussion of existing theory about the development of avant-garde movements; and the necessity of understanding the avant-garde in the context of wider social contests of power, in particular settler colonial control over land and male control over women’s bodies and representations of them. The introduction also summarizes the need to intervene in current histories of avant-garde practice, dominant narratives that continue to frame male artists achievements in formal terms divested of the power dynamics that engender them or result from them.