The Midwest is regularly dubbed ‘fly-over territory’: a topographically unspectacular, politically conservative, and aesthetically backward stretch of land separating the East from the West Coast of the United States. In order to counter this stereotype, art historian Jason Weems takes seriously the notion of the Midwest as fly-over territory by analysing the region as one shaped by aeriality. Aeriality to Weems is the visual culture of the view from above, which defines practices and shapes pictures from art and architecture to everyday actions and governmental measures. Following the ways in which the view from above is bound to the image of the Midwest, Weems sketches a cultural history ranging from the European settlement of the region which parcelled out the land in maps and surveys in the late eighteenth century to the rapid modernisation of the 1920s and 1930s documented by aerial photographs taken during Roosevelt’s New Deal campaign. He complements these cultural overviews with detailed analyses of works by painter Grant Wood and architect Frank Lloyd Wright who were both at home in the Midwest. Taken together, the different materials presented in four chapters show a fascinating image of the region as ambivalently modern and deeply implicated by the visual framing of its land. Barnstorming the Prairies thus presents the Midwest as ‘a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian identity with the more abstract forms of modernity’, thereby giving readers an idea of ‘what it meant to be both midwestern and modern’. Weems contributes to a growing interest in the study of rural areas that follows a longstanding focus on urban studies. In the field of art, this interest is demonstrated by exhibitions such as the 2018 Whitney Museum retrospective of Grant Wood, whose paintings are symbols of the Midwest and indicators of American sentiments in times of change and uncertainty. Weems asks ‘what was (and is) the Midwest? What patterns and practices define it as a landscape, a cultural system, and an aesthetic experience? What differentiates prairie land, culture, and identity from other American spaces, and in what ways does it reflect, embody, and influence American values?’ Through his readings, Weems convincingly demonstrates that the Midwestern landscape and identity are distinct and that their mutual constitution and perception are intricately bound to aerial views. The cultural history he outlines tells a story of the Midwest but it also tells a story of American culture as it defines itself through regional identities, technological innovations, and spatial practices. Weems frames his analysis of aerial vision through theorists Paul Virilio, Michel Foucault, and Donna Haraway, who have famously discussed the view from above as a new mode of seeing and representing the world and of the subject’s position within it. While Virilio defines the airplane as a vision machine affording new vistas and binding together flying and filming as well as photographing, Foucault’s and Haraway’s concepts of the panopticon and the ‘god trick’, respectively, connect verticality to the exertion of power and dominance. The latter is the notion most people associate with the bird’s-eye view today, and no doubt ruling, regulating, and subjection all play an important part in Weems’s study. However, he also uncovers an intriguing alternative history of aerial vision that is decisively positive. Weems connects the aerial view to agency and the imagination, because viewing the land from above allowed Midwesterners to grasp the new, unfamiliar landscape and take possession of it. That this once again marks a colonial endeavour of vertical sovereignty receives little mention in Barnstorming the Prairies. Weems focuses instead on the implications the view from above had for the new inhabitants and the practices through which they domesticated unfamiliar territory, be it the prairie in particular or modernity in general. In the first chapter ‘Pioneering Visions: The Midwestern Grid, the Atlas, and an Aerial Imagination’, Weems turns to the time when the Midwest was the American frontier, a space for open-ended expansion and self-realisation. The Federal Land Ordinance of 1785 divided the land into its by now familiar grid pattern, which served multiple means: it converted ‘the nation’s vast and uncontrolled lands into discrete parcels that could be brokered, by the government or its agents, to the people’ and gave the impression of the frontier ‘as a rational, ordered, and therefore inhabitable space’. This in turn allowed people to see the land for the first time and envision a place for themselves on it – a task that had proved surprisingly difficult, because the Midwestern prairies and plains were hard to understand for European eyes. The open-ended yet confined grid helped in the endeavour as did the various views from above. For the early years of Jeffersonian expansion, Weems identifies mainly three forms of aerial depictions: ‘broadscale maps, focused landownership plats, and bird’s-eye views’. Like the grid, these aerial views assisted in domesticating the land by giving viewers an image of their surroundings and turning an enigmatic new space into a graspable place one could call home. In order to do so, most aerial views combined ‘cadastral fact and

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Barnstorming the Prairies：空中视野如何塑造中西部 Jason Weems。明尼苏达大学出版社，明尼阿波利斯，2015 年。368 页，包含 116 张黑白照片和 16 张彩色版。平装 35.00 美元，ISBN 978-0-816-67751-1

中西部经常被称为“飞越领土”：一块地势平平、政治上保守、审美落后的土地，将美国东部与西海岸分隔开来。为了反驳这种刻板印象，艺术史学家杰森威姆斯通过分析该地区是由空中形成的区域，认真对待中西部作为飞越领土的概念。Aerality to Weems 是从上面看的视觉文化，它定义了从艺术和建筑到日常行为和政府措施的实践和塑造图片。遵循从上到下的视野与中西部形象的联系方式，威姆斯描绘了一段文化历史，从 18 世纪后期在地图和调查中划分土地的欧洲定居点到罗斯福新政期间拍摄的航拍照片记录的 1920 和 1930 年代的快速现代化。他通过详细分析画家格兰特伍德和建筑师弗兰克劳埃德赖特的作品来补充这些文化概述，他们都在中西部的家中。总而言之，四章中呈现的不同材料展示了该地区的迷人形象，该地区具有矛盾的现代感，并深受其土地视觉框架的影响。因此，Barnstorming the Prairies 将中西部地区呈现为“一个充满活力的空间，在那里人们努力将美国农业身份的核心传统与更抽象的现代性形式相协调”，从而让读者了解“中西部和现代意味着什么”。在长期关注城市研究之后，威姆斯对农村地区的研究越来越感兴趣。在艺术领域，这种兴趣体现在 2018 年惠特尼博物馆格兰特伍德回顾展等展览中，他的画作是中西部的象征，也是变化和不确定时期美国情绪的指标。威姆斯问道：“过去（现在是）什么是中西部？什么样的模式和实践将其定义为景观、文化体系和审美体验？草原土地、文化和身份与其他美国空间有何不同，它以何种方式反映、体现和影响美国价值观？通过他的阅读，威姆斯令人信服地证明，中西部的景观和身份是截然不同的，它们的相互构成和感知与鸟瞰图有着错综复杂的联系。他概述的文化历史讲述了中西部的故事，但也讲述了美国文化的故事，因为它通过区域身份、技术创新和空间实践来定义自己。威姆斯通过理论家保罗·维里利奥、米歇尔·福柯和唐娜·哈拉维来构建他对空中视觉的分析，他们著名地讨论了从上面的观点作为观察和代表世界以及主体在其中的位置的新模式。虽然 Virilio 将飞机定义为提供新视野的视觉机器，并将飞行、拍摄和摄影结合在一起，但福柯和哈拉维的全景监狱和“上帝的伎俩”的概念，分别将垂直性与权力和支配地位的发挥联系起来。后者是当今大多数人与鸟瞰图相关联的概念，毫无疑问，统治、规范和服从都在威姆斯的研究中发挥了重要作用。然而，他还揭示了一段有趣的空中视野替代历史，该历史具有决定性的积极意义。Weems 将鸟瞰图与代理和想象联系起来，因为从上面观看土地可以让中西部人掌握新的、陌生的景观并占有它。这再次标志着垂直主权的殖民努力在巴恩风暴大草原中很少提及。相反，威姆斯专注于从上到下的观点对新居民的影响以及他们驯化陌生领土的做法，无论是特别是草原还是一般的现代性。在第一章“开拓性愿景：中西部网格、地图集和空中想象”中，威姆斯转向中西部是美国边境的时代，这是一个开放式扩张和自我实现的空间。1785 年的《联邦土地条例》将土地划分为现在熟悉的网格模式，这有多种用途：它将“国家广袤且不受控制的土地转变为可以由政府或其代理人代理给人民的离散地块”并给人的印象是“作为一个理性的、有序的、因此适合居住的空间”。这反过来又让人们第一次看到这片土地并在上面设想自己的位置——事实证明这是一项非常困难的任务，因为欧洲人很难理解中西部的大草原和平原。开放式但受限的网格有助于努力，从上面的各种观点也是如此。在杰斐逊扩张的早期，威姆斯主要确定了三种形式的空中描绘：“大比例地图、重点土地所有权平台和鸟瞰图”。像网格一样，这些鸟瞰图通过向观众展示周围环境的图像，并将神秘的新空间变成一个可以称之为家的可把握的地方，从而帮助驯化这片土地。为了做到这一点，大多数鸟瞰图结合了“地籍事实和 “大比例地图、重点土地所有权平台和鸟瞰图”。像网格一样，这些鸟瞰图通过向观众展示周围环境的图像，并将神秘的新空间变成一个可以称之为家的可把握的地方，从而帮助驯化这片土地。为了做到这一点，大多数鸟瞰图结合了“地籍事实和 “大比例地图、重点土地所有权平台和鸟瞰图”。像网格一样，这些鸟瞰图通过向观众展示周围环境的图像，并将神秘的新空间变成一个可以称之为家的可把握的地方，从而帮助驯化这片土地。为了做到这一点，大多数鸟瞰图结合了“地籍事实和