I recently received three striking publications that consider the intersection of word and image from a French perspective. My personal favorite is Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. Don’t let the cover’s drab reproduction of a Henri Cueco painting fool you — this book crackles visually, lavishly reproducing the fascinating French artists [...]
23 November 2010 | Theory
Various art historians owe a debt to Jacques Lacan. Did he himself owe one to Russian-icon theorist Pavel Florensky? In the latest issue of Word & Image (Jan-Mar 2010), Joseph Masheck makes the suggestion: [W]hat is most Florenskian, or most conspicuously Florenskian, in Lacan is precisely the sense of an image as but a special [...]
1 November 2010 | Books, Theory
Recently published: the well illustrated volume Art, Word and Image: 2000 Years of Visual / Textual Interaction, edited by John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris. In their overview essays, Hunt surveys the pre-1900 period, Lomas 1900-45, and Corris post-1945. Hunt also contributes a general introduction. He’s uniquely well qualified for the task, having [...]
7 October 2010 | Books, Renaissance, Theory
Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have recently published Anachronic Renaissance, an expansion of their 2005 Art Bulletin “intervention” (pdf), a “reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance”: While a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication … it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it [...]
18 September 2010 | Africa, Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
Recently in the papers: Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National) On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan [...]
17 September 2010 | Books, Theory
In the September 2010 Art Bulletin, Karen Beckman reviews a new book by Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh: … For Silverman, Lacan shows us how, in response to humanism’s “impossible-to-satisfy demand” that each of us be an “individual,” we turn other beings into “rivals and enemies”: it is this transformation that blocks analogical thinking. [...]
12 August 2010 | Books, Theory
Christopher Kul-Want has just assembled a new anthology Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists that includes: Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh’s shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature [...]
5 August 2010 | Museums, Renaissance, Teaching, Theory
A show at the Yale University Art Museum points to an issues that many graduate programs seems to be addressing in one way or another. Laurence Kanter says: “Original works of art have been forgotten. They’re being used as data, without any sense of whether they’re good, bad or indifferent.” He added: “No one wants [...]
13 July 2010 | Architecture, Books, Theory
In his new book What is Architectural History? Andrew Leach surveys the history and current state of the discipline. His book is written for students and professionals, and assumes a certain familiarity with architecture. There is considerable new material for him to synthesize — architectural history and historiography have both been expanding. He argues that [...]
7 July 2010 | Conferences, Theory
The theme for this year’s Stone Summer Theory Institute is “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic”: This year’s event addresses one of the central puzzles of contemporary art practice: the choice between continuations of modernism (with its aesthetic values) and the many kinds of postmodernism (which privilege politics, gender, identity, and many issues outside of [...]
6 July 2010 | Theory
In an article titled “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence” in the March 2010 PMLA, Tim Dean writes: Leo Bersani’s contributions to queer theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”) Bersani’s writing on [...]
25 June 2010 | Theory
Bruno Latour is currently hosting Selon/Salon at the Centre Pompidou, a series of conferences with contemporary artists, filmmakers, curators and intellectuals. The French theorist has taken up the themes of Eloquence and Demonstration in an effort to gauge their roles within the arts, the sciences, and politics, and to forge a path for a new [...]
25 June 2010 | Theory
A propos of our recent discussion of Ruskin, I recently discovered a new article on Ruskin’s views of art and morality in the Jan 2010 Modern Language Review (105:1) by Jeremy Tambling. He contrasts Ruskin with Nietzsche: Ruskin wishes to believe that art reveals morality, or that morality shows itself in art; in other words, [...]
According to the Guardian: Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been [...]
22 June 2010 | Contemporary, Theory
In an article in the Dec. ’09 journal of visual culture (8:3), “Apart from Sex,” Adrian Rifkin writes: “[Andres] Serrano’s dildo picture reminds of Butler’s Derridian theses of the origin-like quality of the copy, insofar as it is quite impossible to figure the boy’s penis without his a priori penetration by the rubber or silicone [...]
17 May 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Journals, Theory
The latest (March-June 2010) Art Bulletin just arrived here. This one comes with another “Intervention”; in this recurring feature, a number of scholars are invited to respond to a provocative essay. The author completes the exercise by responding to the respondents, and the whole thing is published across many pages. I’m curious — do people [...]
12 May 2010 | Books, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
I am fascinated by the systems through which art is deemed legitimate, and I taught a course on fakes and frauds this past January. The premise was that we can learn about how art is produced, controlled, and valued by focusing on taboo objects. Sometimes such scrutiny will result in a reattribution, such as the one [...]
6 May 2010 | Architecture, Theory
Robert Hewison’s Ruskin on Venice has been reviewed by Steve Donoghue, Jonathan Glancey, Jonathan Wright, and Kevin Jackson. The productive tension between Ruskin’s Protestant moral sense, and his sensual affection for the visual arts, resulted in a distinctive prose variously termed “idiosyncratic,” “incomparable,” “magnificent,” and “gorgeous, insanely overwrought.”
30 April 2010 | Conferences, Theory
From Idearte: The third annual Glasgow Colloquium on Art Historiography will be held in the Institute for Art History of the University of Glasgow 25th – 27th November 2010. Papers lasting 20 minutes are invited on formative moments, movements, institutions and individuals in accordance with the mission statement of the Journal of Art Historiography.
16 April 2010 | Career, Conferences, Museums, Theory
Symposium: November 12–14, 2010 Banff International Curatorial Institute The Banff Centre Deadline: April 23, 2010 For information: http://bit.ly/c8d3b2
