ISSN: 2471-6839 Cite this article: Ila Nicole Sheren, review of Domesticating the Invisible: Form and Environmental Anxiety in Postwar America, by Melissa Ragain, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 2 (Fall 2021), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.12866. journalpanorama.org • journalpanorama@gmail.com • ahaaonline.org Domesticating the Invisible: Form and Environmental Anxiety in Postwar America by Melissa S. Ragain Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 264 pp.; 37 color illus.; 50 b/w illus. Hardcover: $65.00 (ISBN: 9780520343825) Reviewed by: Ila Nicole Sheren, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis About two-thirds of the way through her recent book, Domesticating the Invisible: Form and Environmental Anxiety in Postwar America, author Melissa S. Ragain describes the Richard Budelis installation Eel Track. Featured in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts’ 1972 Elements of Art exhibition, Eel Track “required initial conditioning of the eels by handlers . . . and frequent upkeep by Budelis during the show to make sure there was a constant flow of oxygen . . . Too many eels, too little oxygen, or the wrong kind of food would unsettle the delicate balance of the installation and lead to the death of the ichthyic participants” (156). Eel Track provides an apt metaphor for the condition of “environmental anxiety” and its aesthetic encoding that undergirds the period and site of Ragain’s study—the 1960s and 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts. While “environmental anxiety” is a precursor to the conditions of the present period of climate crisis, concern for the environment in the earlier period was largely due to the looming specter of radiation, chemical toxicity, urban disaffection and its coordinated social ills, and a capitalist culture of disposability. Against all these overlapping forces, however, artists, architects, and others in the visual field touted the promise of good design and its potential to affect society for the better. Much like the “delicate balance” of Eel Track, in which the handlers and their elaborate technological apparatus ensured the safety of the eels and their environment, prevailing design wisdom of the day advocated for an ethical symbiosis between humans and their environment. Domesticating the Invisible presents readers with an alternate history of the postwar period, countering both the dominant narrative of the New York art world and the “Hippie Modernist” paradigm of techno-utopianism. The latter has received focused attention in recent years due to the work of scholars such as James Nisbet, Felicity D. Scott, and Fred