by Jon Lackman | 18 December 2007 | Photography, Theory
In the October 2007 Text and Performance Quarterly, Ruth Laurion Bowman, Melanie Kitchens, and Linda Shkreli contribute “FEMAture Evacuation: A Parade“:
On February 25, 2006, the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana (SPLL) hosted the twenty-sixth Annual Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade in downtown Baton Rouge … The 2006 theme, FEMAture Evacuation, took direct aim at FEMA and other governmental agencies and their bungled response to Hurricanes Katrina and also Rita … In this essay … we chose to accentuate our viewing of the parade by ciphering it through the technical and conceptual apparatus of photography. Situating ourselves at separate locales along the parade route, we experienced the festivities through the view finders of our cameras, understanding that the artifice of making photographs would remind us of the constraints and possibilities of viewing; of finding (or, just as likely, stumbling upon) an image, framing and focusing it while always leaving something out. We chose, then, to be aware of making culture through our little optical boxes. Afterwards, the thousand plus photographs served as our primary source for asking how the parade performed its stories and, more precisely, how our photographs performed the parade. To discover answers to those questions, we wrote in photographic terms, guided first by the technical discourse and operations of photography and then, as they arose in the process of writing, theories and concepts too. While there is little doubt that our experiences and predilections enter and exceed the field of vision we write here, we tried to adhere to the challenge of writing about the parade through photography; it determined what we wrote about and how.
by Jon Lackman | 17 December 2007 | Theory
In the Fall 2007 issue of Symbolic Interaction, Carol Rambo writes:
It was 1979. Ms. Marie Miranda, my ninth-grade art teacher, was a short, plump, leprechaun of a woman with yellow-blonde hair stacked in a lacquered, pin curl tower. Typically encased in a floral-print sheath dress, the curvature of her spine positioned her head in front of, rather than on top of, her body. Though she was odd, her presence was fierce and commanding. No one dared make fun of her. She let us know, with great pride, that she had “worked for the CIA under George Bush,” when he was the director in 1976. Behind her back other teachers claimed, with a shudder, that she had been an informant against communists during the McCarthy era … I loved her. Everyday, as soon as the lunch bell rang, I ran through the halls to the cafeteria to be the first in line so I could eat fast and get back to Ms. Miranda’s class. She opened the classroom door during lunch for the few of us who were “serious about art” …
I present here a few vignettes from my experiences as an art student, coupled with post-structuralist theory and symbolic interaction, as an opportunity to demonstrate “autoethnographic sketching.” According to Dunning (1991:333), “The abiding awareness of pluralist realities—multiple points of view—makes us question the completeness if not the veracity, of any world that can be fully depicted from a single viewpoint.” By presenting multiple points of view on a subject, even if they are seemingly contradictory, a picture of the subject can emerge through the layers of interpretive impressions left by the vignettes … A sketch is an incomplete study, by definition. Information is left out or suggested, and the mind’s eye is invited to fill in the details.
by Jon Lackman | 14 December 2007 | Modern
The latest issue (n. 73) of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas is devoted to Brazil. Editor Nicolau Sevcenko writes that “Brazil is changing at a very fast pace … One of the best resources to face these turbulent new times and challenge their entropic trends is represented by the newly-expanded field of cultural interaction … The four authors [published in this issue] are by now widely acclaimed in Brazil, although still hardly known in the U.S.A. … [they] strive to assess the most significant threads of change that have occurred in Brazilian culture within the last fifty years …”
In “Scaling Down the Monumental: How Public Art Came to Inspire Community Action in Rio de Janeiro,” Paulo Knauss writes:
The craze of erecting statues became a tradition immediately in the context of the construction of the Nation-State, after Brazil’s independence in 1822 … monumental public sculpture was constructed according to a visually-elaborated narrative and complemented by a peculiar ritualization that promoted the secular cult of the nation … [it] helped mobilize an effective base capable of forging social ties that helped to build the discipline of civic pride and was capable of promoting the symbolic institution of society and defining the nation as a central subject in history.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, this tradition of civic sculpture in Brazil lost relevance with the renovation of political order, the affirmation of democracy, and the recognition of social diversity … One can say that the role of urban images was being redefined in such a way that public art came to demarcate city territories and affirm identities, local government, and community powers. At that point, public art could be identified with the valorization of the diversity of urban experiences.
by Jon Lackman | 13 December 2007 | Books, Modern
In the Summer 2007 issue of the Slavic and East European Journal, Douglas Greenfield reviews Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, while Vlad Strukov reviews Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Greenfield writes:
In her closely argued, challenging study, Maria Gough proposes to read Moscow Constructivism “against the grain,” complicating standard accounts, which, she shows, insufficiently contextualize the movement within the complexity of the Soviet 1920s, or miss important theoretical differences among its members. Gough tells a compelling new story … In particular, Gough revises the narrative of the shift from studio investigations into industrial interventions — the artists’ various attempts to enter production, to shape and organize the stuff of everyday life … Gough argues that [some] sought to instantiate productivism not in the design of everyday objects … but rather in the design of the production process itself, its machines and methods.
Strukov writes:
Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions is a much celebrated … study of the Russian Constructivism of the early 1920s … The evoked anti-religious, anti-nationalistic and anti-conventional intent of the song [referenced by the book's title] perfectly conveys the utopian and nihilistic spirit of Russian Constructivists … The overarching radiance of the book is in its brilliant display of the the artistic practices and the cultural and ideological imperatives of the era … The cornerstones of Kiaer’s scholarly edifice are Marxist philosophy and Soviet ideology, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and the pivotal locations of byt and bytie in Russian culture … In its essence, Kiaer’s scholarship belongs to media archaeology. Kiaer’s work is, therefore, of great significance due to its engagement with issues related to medium, production, and art. She masterfully shows how a mass-produced object of everyday life is transformed by the process of production … she provides us with a study of great relevance in contemporary debates on digital means of production and the dissemination of art and commodities. In fact, she writes in opposition to the current international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicity with the globalized, mediated image … another hit from the MIT Press.
by Jon Lackman | 12 December 2007 | Teaching
According to this article in Spiegel Online, German students are enrolling in art-history programs in record numbers, spurred on in part by the booming art market. However, students aren’t always finding the jobs of their dreams waiting for them on the other side — some settle for a part-time gig or even an unpaid internship.
by Jon Lackman | 11 December 2007 | Conferences
Coming this April: “Framing the Other: 30 Years after Orientalism,” a one-day conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London:
This one-day conference will focus on the impact of Said’s legacy to analyse visual culture as a crucial component of Orientalism’s (and more generally imperialism’s) political self-justification, in the discursive construction of the Orient. Not only exploring the framework through which ‘otherness’ is constructed and re-presented, we wish to examine how, by ‘clothing in art’ the prejudices of colonial and post-colonial discourses, the fundamental motives of imperialism can be masked.
We welcome papers stemming from the nineteenth century, when imperialism was produced by the development of racial thinking and the rise of European nationalism, to the present period. Addressing the vision of a ‘plural’ West, we invite speakers to take up the issues raised by both obvious and surprising ‘Others’, from the indolent and submissive odalisque to the fierce and dehumanised suicide bomber.
This week the Université du Québec à Montréal will host a colloquium on “Fictions et images du 11 septembre.” Papers include “L’image du ‘falling man’ et l’iconologie de la chute” and “La mort le 11 septembre 2001 : distance et représentation dans la bande dessinée.”
by Jon Lackman | 10 December 2007 | Books, Photography
Writing in Le Monde des livres, Michel Guerrin recently panned the new 620-page survey L’Art de la photographie, edited by André Gunthert and Michel Poivert. The editors respond:
Michel Guerrin has published … a methodical assassination of L’Art de la photographie. Everything gets it. From the “chilling” price to the deceitful cover. “Grand masters” are absent, while “failures,” “apprentices,” and “dozens of obscure names make the cut.” The texts … form an incoherent whole, barely tied together by a “Marxist atmosphere.” The article ends with this cry … “the authors put forth their analyses but have they looked at the images? Consider the great Eugène Atget and his work in Paris — why was it singled out for glory, the editors ask themselves, at a time when ‘every city in the world had embarked on a campaign of patrimonial documentation’? The answer is simple: because he was better than the others.”
Art-history researchers, university professors and museum curators, the eleven writers who co-authored this text are not strangers. Meeting for more than a dozen years at the Société française de photographie, they have worked patiently to advance scholarship … L’Art de la photographie offers the first grand synthesis of this long and unparalled collaboration …
Over the past quarter-century, [this field] has undergone an unprecedented expansion … Essential discoveries, hundreds of archives and unknown collections have been brought to light, profoundly changing the way we understand the the medium’s historical role … magnificent exhibitions have accompanied this revolution in knowledge, stunning the public at large … Specialists the world over have observed with interest if not envy France’s productivity, which has been regularly documented in publications — including three major histories of photography and as many research journals in a little over twenty years. What developed country could pretend to boast such a track record?
It’s not clear that readers of Le Monde have been informed of this glorious effervescence with all the objectivity that one might hope for. For a long time now, rather than rejoice in these happy events, Michel Guerrin has growled, stamped and fulminated … Some will say that we accord too much importance to the moods of a journalist. But can we observe without concern the arbitrary treatment of our specialty in the columns of the chief cultural outlet in France? … despite its quirks, this book is nonetheless the best history of photography published to date.
by Jon Lackman | 7 December 2007 | Books, Modern
Hans-Peter Riese reviews Andrei Nakov’s new four-volume study Kasimir Malewicz le peintre absolu:
… On the other hand, [this book,] the result of Nakov’s decades-long research, can scarcely be overrated, and it finally moves this artist … to his rightful place among 20th-century artists, which is indisputably alongside Picasso, Kandinsky and Mondrian. In addition, Nakov has established himself as the leading Malevich researcher.
by Jon Lackman | 6 December 2007 | Modern, Theory
The recently published book L’Œil-cerveau, written by Éric Alliez with the help of Jean-Clet Martin, seeks to understand modern painting in terms of “hallucination,” “a central notion for the nineteenth century that links artistic creation to ‘psychophysiological’ research”. “[Through close examination] of those works and statements constituting modern painting and the idea of modern art from Delacroix to Cezanne, including Manet, Seurat and Gauguin, we trace … the [changing] relationship between the Eye and the Brain.” which complicated “common philosophical notions of subject and object.”
The book is prefaced by an unusual explanation for its relative paucity of illustrations:
The prohibitive cost of photographic reproduction rights isn’t the only reason for their absence … [We left them out also] to contest the proper role of description in art history and to subvert the relegation, by philosophers of art, of artworks to illustrations. The writing here seeks primarily to explore and map in detail, sometimes in the most minute detail, not so much images but rather the range of an artistic thought in practice (that of the painters we’re studying).
by Jon Lackman | 5 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Jacques Ranciere’s essay collection Le destin des images has been translated into English, as The Future of the Image. In the title essay, he writes:
… Does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art? … What is being spoken about, and what precisely are we being told, when it is said that there is no longer any reality, but only images? Or, conversely, that there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itself? These two discourses seem to be opposed. Yet we know that they are forever being converted into one another in the name of a rudimentary argument: if there is now nothing but images, there is nothing other than the image. And if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the image becomes devoid of content. Several contemporary authors thus contrast the Image, which refers to an Other, and the Visual, which refers to nothing but itself. This simple line of argument already prompts a question. That the Same is the opposite of the Other is readily intelligible. Understanding what this Other is is less straightforward.
In the essay “Painting in the Text,” he writes:
“Too many words”: the diagnosis is repeated whenever the crisis of art, or its subservience to aesthetic discourse, is denounced. Too many words about painting; too many words that comment on its practice and devour it; that clothe and transfigure the “anything goes” it has become or replace it in books, catalogues and official reports — to the point of spreading to the very surfaces where it is exhibited and where, in its stead, we find the pure affirmation of its concept, the self-denunciation of its imposture, or the registration of its end … I would like to turn the game upside down and move from polemical denunciation of the words that encumber painting to a theoretical understanding of the articulation between words and visual forms that defines a regime of art.
by Jon Lackman | 4 December 2007 | Uncategorized
According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, art historian Martina Baleva aroused controversy in Bulgaria after researching a painting of an event central to Bulgarian national identity:
Early this year, Martina Baleva and Ulf Brunnbauer, academics at the Institute for Eastern European Studies of the Free University Berlin, planned an exhibition and a conference on a picture by the Polish painter Antoni Piotrowski from the year 1892 entitled “The Massacre of Batak.” The painting is based on a historical event – the murder of Christian Bulgarians at the hands of their Muslim neighbors in the city of Batak in the year 1876 … [What in the painting] is fact and what is legend? Why has Batak, of all places, become a site of pilgrimage? This is what Baleva and Brunnbauer wanted to discuss, but their plans were thwarted. In May, just before the exhibition in Bulgaria, both were hit by a wave of hate … Nonetheless, [Baleva] is determined to see something good arising from all the trouble. “Today, eight million Bulgarians know that the term ‘legend’ can refer to two different concepts – to a fairy tale and to a construction based on a historical event.” And even if not all eight million are up on the finer points of post-modern historical theory, the wider public has experienced a lesson in the political misuse of history. For this alone, says Baleva, “I am grateful to the bloodhounds and defamers.”
by Jon Lackman | 3 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Published recently, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery, “assesses the work of those thinkers (including artists) who have had a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art since the 1960s.” David Carrier writes on Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville on Michael Fried, Mignon Nixon on Melanie Klein, Alex Potts on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Margaret Iversen on Mary Kelly. As the editors note,
Most of the thinkers profiled in this book will already be more or less familiar to readers in the field; though we have also included several we believe are typically overlooked (such as [Albrecht] Wellmer and [Niklas] Luhmann), as well as more recent thinkers (such as [J.M.] Bernstein and [James] Elkins), whose work is only now beginning to gain recognition and influence. In one case we have even included a curator ([Nicolas] Bourriaud) given how widely his writings and exhibitions have been discussed over the last decade.
Particularly notable is the section on
artists as thinkers, that is, artists who have made a major contribution to thought about art since the 1960s through their writings as well as their art. Though one can find many anthologies of artists’ writings, one rarely finds artists treated on an equal footing with theorists, historians and philosophers when it comes to producing knowledge about art.
by Jon Lackman | 30 November 2007 | Books, Theory
In CAA Reviews, Peg Brand considers Alexander Nehamas’ new book Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art:
This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s more predictable audience of philosophers. The scope of the phrase “world of art” is ambitious and extensive: Nehamas is as comfortable assessing ancient Greek art as he is rubbing elbows with the eighteenth-century man of taste, theorizing the gaze of Manet’s Olympia, and judging John Currin’s women to be beautiful bodies in ugly paintings …
Nehamas eloquently explores many familiar philosophical themes: reality versus appearance, the definition of “art” (e.g., in reference to work by Stelarc and Orlan), life experiences as the basis for judgments of taste, a cognitive—versus an emotion-based—approach to art, and the ever-present distinctions between artistic/aesthetic properties and non-artistic/non-aesthetic qualities of art. In a section entitled, “Beauty, Community, Universality,” for instance, Nehamas undertakes a persistent question that “haunts modern aesthetics,” viz., given our subjective responses to art, can there be universal judgments of beauty (79)? Here’s where a thoughtful and detail-oriented analytic philosopher shines: a judgment is not (necessarily) the conclusion of an interpretation, or of true and false descriptions; rather, there are no sufficient conditions for beauty. To eliminate differences of opinion would result in a “nightmare” of uniformity where, “Universal aesthetic agreement would mark the end of aesthetics” (86).
In other discussions, however, Nehamas’s thoroughness of thought seems lacking, as in his comparison of the power of art and beauty to that of friendship …
by Jon Lackman | 29 November 2007 | Museums
We read in The Independent:
The city of Brussels is to host the largest showcase of European art that the continent has seen, an exhibition that aims to prove how “joined up” its artistic heritage really is.
The Grand Atelier: Pathways of Art in Europe from the 5th to the 18th Centuries brings together 350 masterpieces from 150 museums for the first time in the biggest collaborative exhibition in the history of Europe.
The show aims to trace the artistic cross-fertilisation in European culture from the end of the Roman Empire until the French Revolution, and it is staged to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome which led to the formation of the European Union.
La Tribune de l’Art interviews curator Roland Recht.
Other interviews here.
by Jon Lackman | 28 November 2007 | Books
Alexandra Mangel recently reviewed for Deutschlandradio art historian Alessandro Nova‘s “Das Buch des Windes” (“The Book of Winds”), an historical survey of the visual depiction of wind:
… a convincing combination of excitingly told history and basic course in method. This results essentially from his clever choice of subject: Because the wind itself is invisible, its representations allow the cultural techniques of an age to be all the more clearly recognized. And: the wind blows into one’s own face every day. Thus unfolds the delightful capability of the art historian to enrich perception through knowledge.
by Jon Lackman | 27 November 2007 | Uncategorized
In the November issue of CAA News, we read that caa.reviews has five new field editors:
18th Century European Art: Laura Auricchio (Parsons)
Pre-Columbian / Colonial Latin American Art: Charlene Villaseñor Black (UCLA)
American Art: Cécile Whiting (UC-Irvine)
Modern/Contemporary Art Exhibitions in New England: Patricia Hills (BU)
Modern/Contemporary Art Exhibitions in New York / Abroad: Margaret Sundell
We also read that Robert Herbert has abandoned writing art history. “He has discovered a passionate interest during the past several years in the life and work of a mid-nineteenth-century female botanist and illustrator named Orra White Hitchcock … ‘It’s a new world for me, and I have no regrets at giving up French art history!’”
by Jon Lackman | 26 November 2007 | Photography, Theory
The summer 2007 issue of new formations is devoted to Siegfried Kracauer. Edtior Jan Campbell writes that his “contribution to twentieth century thought is undeniable. Yet he is difficult to define in relation to any particular tradition or discipline of knowledge.” Some of Kracauer’s writings concern photography:
In his famous Photography essay Kracauer reveals how photography is different from history in that it preserves spatial rather than temporal continuity. The camera’s spatial reproduction has a negative role, ‘the go-for-broke game of history’ deconstructing the memory image, revealing a ‘nature devoid of meaning.’ And it is this void, the impossibility of photography re-capturing or representing the significance of either individuals or history that provides recognition of alienation … [later] Kracauer saw photography as a ‘gamble’ of history that could possibly redeem historical catastrophe through its negative revelation of what lay masked or hidden …
[In this issue, contributor Elena] Gualtieri reveals a crucial shift between Kracauer’s early view of photography as a material technology of social realityi and its later role in redeeming physical reality (and our homelessness) from the intellectual abstraction of technological capitalism … Gualtieri argues for a third reading of the role of photography, not as negative alienation from physical reality, but as a Utopian exile from the flow of time and certainty, found in the extra-territorial and immaterial state of flux, existing between ideologies, so subverting any certain grasp of the real.
by Jon Lackman | 21 November 2007 | Uncategorized
The Art History Newsletter will next publish on Monday, November 26.
by Jon Lackman | 21 November 2007 | Architecture, Journals, Theory
In the latest issue of New German Critique (99), editor Andreas Huyssen writes:
Since the waning of the debate about “postmodernism” and the rise of “globalization” as master signifier of our time, the discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s provocative quip that any work of art has to be postmodern before it can become genuinely modern has come true in ways he could hardly have foreseen. There is much talk these days of modernity at large, second modernity, liquid modernity, alternative modernity, countermodernity, and whatnot. Modernity and its complex and conflicted relationship to modernism are being reassessed in architecture and urban studies as they are in literature, the visual arts, music, anthropology, and postcolonial studies …
Th[is] issue leads with three essays on architecture. Architectural discourse was both central and symptomatic in the rise of postmodernism, and it remains so as we reflect back on what earlier accounts of modernist architecture have left out …
by Jon Lackman | 20 November 2007 | Ancient, Books
In the most recent issue of Mouseion (VI:2), Kelly Olson reviews John R. Clarke’s Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C. – A.D. 315:
When I first received this book for review, I admit I was quite skeptical. Could we really identify “ordinary” Romans? Could one determine what non-élite viewers “thought” of art when no literary record of this exists? Was it possible to know what role “art” therefore played in their lives? Could we actually isolate any criteria for identifying non-élite works of art? I was suspicious: wasn’t the whole project somewhat reminiscent of the faintly supercilious study of “plebeian” art in the late 1960s, when “real” Roman art was the art of the élite?
By the end of the book, I was convinced that the answers to the above questions were yes, yes, yes, yes, and no. John Clarke, with the meticulous yet innovative scholarship that made Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C. – A.D. 250 such a must-read for historians of Roman sexual mentalité, has produced another original and provocative book … Clarke admits that there is scant literary evidence for ordinary viewers’ reactions to art, and thus feels entitled to utilize a healthy dose of historical imagination. (This may seem problematic to traditional scholars, but this is in fact essential: done prudently, such hypothesizing is invaluable in the study of ancient mentalité, as it can illuminate primary materials and enhance the understanding of historical processes.) …
To my mind, the most fascinating chapter is Chapter 6 (“Laughter and Subversion in the Tavern: Image, Text and Context”) … [in one tavern picture] the unknown artist attributed advice concerning bowel-movement techniques to the Seven Sages: likely, as Clarke states, a hilarious send-up of élite culture.
