New Books In Art

As demographic trends continue to mark the so-called “Latinization” of the U.S., pundits across various media outlets struggle to understand the economic, cultural, and political implications of this reality. In popular discourse, Latinoas/os are often referred to as a monolithic group in terms of cultural practices, voting patterns, and consumer preferences. Of course, Latinas/os are one of the most diverse ethnic groups in the U.S., comprising more than 14 nationalities (including indigenous groups) with variances in language, cultural practices, and political attitudes that mirror their geographic distribution. In Thirteen Ways of Looking At Latino Art (Duke University Press, 2014) the accomplished essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans enters into conversation with the distinguished philosopher Jorge J.E. Gracia around 13 pieces of Latina/o art in order to excavate the underpinnings of Latina/o identity and culture. Each work of art provides the impetus for lively exchanges between Stavans and Gar

While many are familiar with the call for ‘One Love’ from the music of Bob Marley they more than likely know little about the tradition that this message is rooted in. In Rastafari and the Arts: An Introduction (Routledge, 2015), Darren Middleton, Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University, introduces his readers to Rastafari through the creative expressions of its members in literature, art, film, and music. He traces the development of the tradition in Jamaica and abroad, including Ghana, Britain, and Japan, as well as highlighting key narrative, doctrinal, social, and ethical teachings. In our conversation we discussed Haile Selassie, Rastafari and Gender, the literary tradition of insiders and outsiders, the notion of Babylon, the great masters of dub poetry, including Mutabaruka and Benjamin Zephaniah, documentary film, the role of reggae and Rastafari in Japanese culture, ethnographic work in Ghana, British Rastas, Bob Marley, and the commodification of Rastafari. Learn more about your ad choic

Prague, according to Derek Sayer, is the place “in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled.” In this sweeping history of surrealism centered on Prague as both a physical location and the “magic capital” in the imagination of leading surrealists such as Andre Breton and Paul Aluard, Sayer takes the reader on a thematic journey from the beginning of the 20th century to the immediate post-war era. In this interview, Sayer talks about why surrealism – and, more importantly, why Prague – is central to understanding the 20th century and modernism. Through works of literature and works of architecture, Sayer demonstrates how Czech modernists pluralized visions of what modernist art should be. These Czech artists and architects were largely ignored in post-World War II exhibitions and histories of surrealism and modernism. With this book, Derek Sayer returns them to their proper place in the narrative. Prague, Capital of Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, 2013) receiv

Jonathan M. Reynolds‘s new book looks carefully at how photographers, architects, and others wrestled with a postwar identity crisis as they explored and struggled with new meanings of tradition, home, and culture in modern Japan. Building on the work of Walter Benjamin, Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) takes readers into a range of media in which writers and artists engaged with these questions. From photographs of rural inhabitants of the Snow Country of northern Japan to photobooks on Japanese architecture to special structures built to serve young female nomads in Tokyo, the objects of Reynolds’s study all served their makers as spaces for working through problems of identity, Japaneseness, and their transformations. It’s a fascinating study that beautifully integrates images as an integral part of the text, and it is well worth reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino

As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli, it’s a sentence many people might assume was being applied to Coco Chanel, for Chanel looms large as the fashion designer of the last century. But Schiaparelli was, as Secrest reveals, more than a fashion designer: she was an artist. And, through her collaborations with SalvadoreDali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others, she was in the vanguard of surrealism and transformed women’s fashions into an art form. Who was Schiap? It’s hard to know. But then we can never know everything about another person, which iswhat makes reading biography so beguiling: the illusion that we could. It’s a circumstance Secret openly acknowledges. “A great many aspects of Elsa Schiaparelli’s life will probably never be known,” Secrestwrites. “She was not much of a letter writer… If she

Greg Barnhisel‘s new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia UP, 2015) examines how modernism was defanged, re-packaged, and resold during the Cold War. Barnhisel, an Associate Professor at Duquesne University, reveals that–from its incendiary beginnings–modernism was made safe for the bourgeois West thanks to the intervention of unlikely contributors like the CIA, the Department of State, and even major corporations. Barnhisel’s extensive archival research unearths the thinking that went into the repurposing of modernism to support American cold-war ideology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jerzy Grotowsky and Tadeusz Kantor were influential in avant-garde theater in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, receiving high critical regard despite the fact that audiences could not understand the Polish language of the performances. In The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’ (Anthem Press, 2014), Magda Romanska bridges the disciplinary divides between theater studies and Slavic studies, between the history of Poland in the twentieth century and the history of avant-garde theatre, to place these works in a Polish and international context. Romanska asserts that critics and audiences in West, while appreciating the theater productions of Grotowski’s Akropolis and Kantor’s Dead Class, missed the “obscure, difficult, multi-layered, funny-sounding Polish glory, with all of the complex and convoluted contextual and textual details” of these works. She traces the Polish cultural and literary roots and the Jewish history and culture on which Kantor

That games, particularly video games, could be viewed as art should come as no surprise. And yet, a debate exists over what is and should be considered art with respect to games. In his new book, Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art (MIT Press, 2015), John Sharp offers context for the discussion of games and art. To do so, Sharp presents case studies of “Game Art,” “Art Games,” and “Artists’ Games” in an explication of three communities of practice that provide the foundation for the discussion of games and art. Game Art examines the use of games as tools for the creation of art. Sharp, then, examines the Art Game movement that pushes video games into the domain of other humanistic art forms. Finally, Artists’ Games examines the use of video games as an artistic medium that combines the aesthetics of artists and game developers. Sharp also discusses the potential for the the merging of the values of traditional artists and gaming communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a

Reading Winnie Wong's new book on image production in Dafen village will likely change the way you think about copying, China, and the relationship between them. Based on fieldwork that included artist interviews, studio visits, and participant observation alongside local officials, bosses, interpreters, foreign artists, buyers, and traders, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes readers into the production of images in a village in Shenzhen. After establishing what we're talking about when we talk about "copying" and "copies" in this context, Wong guides us through a series of media and spaces that collectively upend several assumptions that are often brought to understanding Dafen and its painters specifically, and copying and creativity in China more broadly. Indeed, understanding what Dafen painters are not is a crucial first step toward understanding what is happening in their work and home lives. Dafen painters, we learn, are not "especially unfree victims"

Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a wonderful piece of visual anthropology by Ritu Gairola Khanduri, which uses the history of cartoons, from colonial to current times, to talk about various aspects of Indian society from the state, to political society to modernity. Through archival material and fascinating discussions with cartoonists, the book reveals the various ways in which cartoons talk in India, past and present.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (Penn State University Press, 2014), Melissa Dabakis takes readers on an unexpected journey from Boston to Rome to discover multiple American women sculptors working in studios, winning public commissions, and earning artistic renown in the mid-19th Century. The book navigates through the worlds of sculpture, feminism, American and Italian politics, slavery and abolition, expatriate circles, Roman culture, and Italian independence struggles. Dabakis illuminates the critical period from 1850 to 1876 when American women sculptors not only forged professional artistic careers but also participated in and impacted feminist and abolitionist movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press, 2015) guides readers into the scenic illusions of the Qing dynasty, focusing on pictorial illusions and the technologies that helped create and contextualize them in high Qing palaces, and especially under the reign of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-95). Imperial Illusions describes and explains a range of visual images and objects that were meant to trick the eye and delight the viewer, from illusionistic murals in tombs and temples, to massive wall- and ceiling-mounted paintings, diagrammed treatises on optics and vision, copperplate engravings, and more. Not only do these illusions help us understand Qianlong – especially when read alongside his poems – but they also inform a broader history of Sino-European artistic and technological exchange and help broaden the

Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can significantly inform how we see its art, literature, medicine, architecture, and more, Tweeting Da Vinci (Da Vinci Press, 2014) takes a deeply interdisciplinary approach to engaging the cultural history of Italy from the Etruscans to Da Vinci and beyond. The chapters explore the significance of volcanic activity, cave geology, lightning, gemstones, the healing powers of amber, underwater cities, and much more as they inform how we understand the histories of painting, religious practice, entombment, and the work of authors including Virgil, Dante, and Leonardo Da Vinci, among others. A pair of chapters focuses particularly closely on demonstrating how analyzing Da Vinci’s art from the perspective of geology and botany has helped to identify and authenticate his work and that of his students. Enjoy! Here’s the webs

Arts and culture are under threat in the age of austerity. This threat is underpinned by the misuse of the idea of participation in contemporary performance. This is one of the central arguments of Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2013) by Professor Jen Harvie. The book considers how arts and culture are changing in the era of neoliberalism, seeking to pinpoint the way that ideologies of individualisation, participation and creativity have, at best, ambivalent effects. The book sets out its argument by exploring the rise of working practices such as delegating and prosumption. The rise of the precarious labourer is linked with the rise of audience and spectator participation. Whilst this can have positive impacts, it is also part of shifting the basis for aesthetic work to the participant. A similar process occurs with the demand that the cultural practitioner become entrepreneurial- whilst this might make the practitioner more attentive to her audience it may also create an individua

Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on “object-oriented ontology” and related issues, it’s also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of “correlationism” or panpsychism, don’t quite understand what all of the recent humanities-wide Whitehead-related fuss is all about, and aren’t sure where to begin. After a helpful introduction that lays out the major terms and stakes of the study, seven chapters each function as stand-alone units (and thus are very assignable in upper-level undergrad or graduate courses) while also progressively building on one another to collectively advance an argument for what Shaviro calls a “speculative aesthetics.”The Universe of Things emphasizes the importance of

I love picking up a historical monograph in which the footnotes count for a quarter or more of the total pages. Most students don’t share this strange love of mine. I’m therefore always trying to figure out ways to bring in other sorts of works that will engage students without giving up anything in terms of historical richness or depth of thought. To this end, I often assign “graphic histories” in my classes (aka comics). One that I recently used in class, and was deeply impressed with, was Gene Luen Yang‘s Boxers & Saints (First Second, 2013). This informative, thought-provoking, and deeply moving graphic history is set during the “Boxer Rebellion” (1898-1900), a massive anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement that rocked northern China. Each of the two volumes of this work focus on a different character, one an anti-Christian and anti-foreign Boxer leader, and the other a Chinese convert to Catholicism. Skillfully weaving these stories together, Gene Luen Yang provides a fascinating meditation on war, the

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms.  The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador Dalí’s

Joan Kee‘s new book is a gorgeous and thoughtful introduction to the history of contemporary art in Korea. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) traces the creation, promotion, reception, and rhetoric of the work produced by a constellation of artists creating large, mostly abstract paintings in neutral colors from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Kee opens up these works for readers by offering close readings of many important paintings and objects. In doing so, she teaches us how to see these works as methods, showing us how to visualize labor and process in an aesthetic product and pointing out ways that tansaekhwa artists were visualizing conceptions of time, space, materiality, and the agency of the viewer. Contemporary Korean Art also considers tansaekhwa in relation to the global circulation and translation of information about the art world beyond Korea, and explores how the postwar Korean art world dealt with the legacies of empire, nationa