New Books In Art

Assistant Professor Federica Goffi fills a blind spot in current architectural theory and practice with this book, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s, the Vatican (Routledge, 2013). In proposing a hybrid approach which merges architectural and conservation theory the work offers the reader a counter-viewpoint to common understandings of preservation as singular moment from the past which has been frozen and brought forward to the present. Through a micro-historical study of a Renaissance concept of restoration, a theoretical framework to question the issue of conservation as a creative endeavor arises. It focuses on Tiberio Alfarano’s 1571 ichnography of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, into which a complex body of religious, political, architectural and cultural elements is woven. By merging past and present temple’s plans, Alfarano created a track-drawing questioning the design pursued after Michelangelo’s death (1564),

Proof: Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family by Byrd Williams, with text by Byrd Williams IV, forward by Roy Flukinger and afterword by Anne Wilkes Tucker, is published by the University of North Texas Press, (2016). 224 pages. The Byrd Williams Collection at the University of North Texas contains more than 10,000 prints and 300,000 negatives, accumulated by four generations of Texas photographers, all named Byrd Moore Williams. Beginning in the 1880s in Gainesville, the four Byrds photographed customers in their studios, urban landscapes, crime scenes, Pancho Villa’s soldiers, televangelists, and whatever aroused their unpredictable and wide-ranging curiosity. When Byrd IV sat down to choose a selection from this dizzying array, he came face to face with the nature of mortality and memory, his own and his family’s. In some cases, these photos are the only evidence remaining that someone lived and breathed on this earth. The 193 photos selected here are organized into thematic sections such as

The value of the arts is a constant and vital question in contemporary culture. In Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Intellect Books, 2016) Kirsty Sedgman, British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, approaches this question from the point of view of the audience. The book offers an introduction to the question of what an audience is, as well as thinking through the best methods to study the audience, before turning to the story of National Theatre Wales (NTW). The book discusses the tensions between aesthetics and participation, using places and performances from NTW to illustrate the range of responses, and the range of value, that different types of audience can derive from theatre. An engaging and accessible introduction to both the theoretical and practical questions surrounding cultural value, measurement, audiences, and theatre, the book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Paul C. Taylor examines primary themes in racialism from the perspective of aesthetic culture. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and at Penn State University, considers such issues as black invisibility, expressive culture and politics, and the problem of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He also lays the foundation for analytic philosophical tools to be brought more widely to bear on scholarly discussion of issues related to race and racialism. Learn more about your ad choices.

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Robert Brain’s The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015) unveils a fascinating world of exchange between artistic studios and physiology laboratories concealed by such pithy aphorisms. Brain argues that the influence and stature of physiological aesthetics have been overlooked in accounts of modernism in science and art, and seeks to recover experimental systems that were incredibly influential and fertile in their cultural situation. Brain first sets himself to chart the development of physiological recording in the sciences, first as experimental technique, then as ontology, in a fascinating chapter on the protoplasm theory of life and on to its application to the human qua human problems of linguisti

Sister Mary Corita, IHM (1918-1986), was a beloved artist and teacher whose role as the rebel nun continues to inspire contemporary audiences. Corita joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 when she was just eighteen years old, and soon after became an initially reluctant Art teacher at Immaculate Heart College. Corita remained part of the community on Franklin and Western Avenues in Hollywood until 1968 when Los Angeles archbishop Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, and other conservatives, targeted the orders reformist ways. Corita’s Pop Art styled prints celebrating the presence of God in the most ordinary of everyday subjects (Mary is the juiciest tomato of all) drew the ire of McIntyre in particular. At age fifty, she took one of many unconventional steps and left the order to start life anew as an independent woman. In Corita Kent: Art and Soul: The Biography (Angel City Press, 2015), April Dammann traces Corita’s path as an artist and religious woman who participated in the heady scen

Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color images. Volume 2: 144 pages, 120 color images. Piksa Niugini records noted Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s most important cultural and historical zones – the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city Port Moresby. The project is contained in two volumes in a slipcase one of portraits of local people, and the second of personal diaries. This remarkable body of work captures one of the world’s last truly wild and unique frontiers. Stephen’s work for this book was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The first volume of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone and 4 color; the second is an eclectic collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of The Composition of Movements to Come (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Stevphen Shukaitis, a senior lecturer in work and organisation at the University of Essex, approaches these issues from an Autonomist Marxist perspective, thinking through a diverse range of issues, for example cultural labour, and practices, for example the art strike. The book also uses a range of artistic examples, including a detailed engagement with Neue Slowenische Kunst to think through the composition of movements to come. The podcast discusses a forthcoming exhibition of the work of Gee Vaucher at Firstsite in Essex, UK. The book will be of interest to critical theorists, as well as scholars from art, politics and social movement studies. Learn

The New Yorkers by Robert Herman, with an introduction by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the City Museum of New York, is published by Proof Positive Press (2015). Robert Herman is a photographer and author of two books of his work, The New Yorkers and The Phone Book (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2015). Robert has been a street photographer since his days he started using his father’s Nikon F and a 50mm lens, and began by exploring the city as a means to connect with the people in his neighborhood and learn the craft of making images. Robert has a BFA in filmmaking from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and he received a masters degree in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Art. With his love of light and color, and a joy of making images that find the transcendent in the seemingly mundane, Robert’s images tell another story – that of his battle with bipolar disorder. Through the process of creating the work for The New Yorkers, Robert sought physical representat

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embrac

Since 2007, American photographer Jade Doskow has been documenting the remains of World’s Fair sites, once iconic global attractions that have often been repurposed for less noble aspirations or neglected and fallen into decay. Lost Utopias (Black Dog Publishing, 2016) brings together the substantial body of work that Doskow has completed over the past decade, including iconic monuments such as the Seattle Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower, Brussels Palais des Expositions and New York’s Unisphere. Doskow’s large-scale colorphotographs poignantly illustrate the utopian architecture and art that has surrounded the Worlds Fairs, across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Presented in a large-scale hardback book, Doskow’s work carries a unique sense of both grandeur and dreaminess, whilst also reflecting upon the often temporary purposes that these structures once held. Jade Doskow is an award-winning photographer based in Peekskill, New York. She holds a BA in Philosophy of Art and Music from New York Univ

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line (Prometheus Books, 2016) goes considerably beyond what its modest title would suggest. The circle has played a pivotal role–that’s “role” with an ‘e,’ but its ability to “roll” with an ‘l’–has helped produce our industrial civilization. Moreover, the circle appears in our art, our literature, and our culture as well. This delightful book will not only reacquaint readers with the pleasures of the geometry they once knew, but will show how the circle continues to enchant mathematicians today, who continue to discover new and surprising properties about this most fundamental of shapes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, an internationally recognized award given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to a photographer who has demonstrated great originality working in the documentary vein. Through images created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observers gaze under conditions of occupation. These photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state– and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of bein

Stephen Lee Naish first became aware of Dennis Hopper watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, jumpstarting what would become a long examination of Hopper’s ambitions and creative output as an actor, filmmaker, photographer, sculptor, and painter. In his book, Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), Naish places Hopper’s work in its social and political context , showcasing the diverse career of a talented visual artist and pioneer in the American independent film movement.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a long history in philosophy, art and religion of claims about the ineffable from The One in Plotinus to Kant’s noumena or thing-in-itself to Wittgenstein’s famous remark at the end of Tractatus that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But even if the ineffable cannot, in some sense, be expressed, what can we say about what it is to be ineffable? What sorts of things are ineffable and what sense can be made of the claim that these things are ineffable? In her new book, Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Silvia Jonas argues that there is no defensible sense in which there are ineffable objects, properties, propositions, or contents. There are however varieties of ineffable knowledge, and the core of these is the idea of a kind of knowledge based on acquaintance, specifically self-acquaintance. Jonas, who is a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Institute and Visiting Researcher at the Hebrew Unive

Morgan Pitelka’s new book looks closely at the material culture of the Three Unifiers of the late sixteenth century in Japan– Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu–in order to foreground the politics of culture in an age of civil war. The chapters of Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), a beautifully illustrated volume that integrates its images centrally within the narrative, do this by examining the role of sociability in the interactions between warlords and other powerful figures, focusing on cultural practices and rituals like tea ceremony and gift exchange. Pitelka’s book aims to relink war and culture in the historiography of early modern Japan. It accomplishes this goal by helping us see commonalities in unusual places: by pointing to the resonance between the acquisition and exchange of art objects and hostages, between tea caddies and skulls and swords and severed heads, between the ambassadorial powe

Cuban artists have been very productive this past decade, producing stunning and surprising works against a backdrop of political and economic transformation as well as continuing scarcity on the island. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture and the Future of the Island (Verso, 2015), Rachel Price’s thoughtful approach to this cultural scene, pays special attention to conceptual and performance art that moves from the very local to the global. Her focus on artistic vocabularies centered on trees, marabou, and water as well as the symbolic and real significance of time and surveillance brings together a provocative array of artists that have a lot to tell us about the everyday both in Cuba and on our shared planet. This marvelous book acquaints readers with unforgettable artists and their work.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) looks carefully at the phenomenon of ambient subjectivication or, the emergence of self with and through ambient media in modern Japan. Beginning in the 1970s, atmosphere was becoming ambient, according to Roquet, and the emergence and proliferation of new techniques of ambient subjectivication reflected a shift in how the person was understood, away from collective self-understanding and toward a model rooted in a liberal ideal of autonomy and self-determination. Each chapter of the book looks at some specific way that music, film, video, and literature from the 1970s onward have incorporated forms of ambient subjectivication, from the Erik Satie boom and the birth of environmental music of the late 1970s to the music of artists like Hatakeyama Chihei (whose 2006 Minima Moralia I highly recommend!), to films like

In Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Diana L. Linden, an art historian of American art based in Claremont, California, explores the colorful–and political–murals of the leftist artist Ben Shahn during the New Deal. Born in Lithuania and raised in New York, Shahn distinguished himself in the 1930s as an artist with a keen eye for expressing the social and political events of his day and the history of Jews in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The struggle for representation within the art museum is the focus of a timely and important new book by Susan Cahan, Associate Dean for the Arts at Yale College. Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2016) charts a pivotal moment for the American Art Museum and reflects on the progress, or lack thereof, for African American Art’s place within the US museum system. Focusing on 4 key institutions and range of exhibitions beginning in the late 1960s, the book offers a rich and detailed reading of the institutional context, the aesthetic practices, and the historical lineages that explain both the period and the current museum settlement. The book is replete with illustrations and is accessible, readable and interesting, representing an important and urgent intervention to how we understand the role of the museum today. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative