by Jon Lackman | 19 November 2007 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the most recent issue (40:5) of the provocative art-science journal Leonardo (Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology), Jan Baetens reviews Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, edited by Patricia Johnson:
This collection of essays is great reading … [it] opens new ground for the study of a subject that seems slightly out of date given the innumerable discussions in the 1970s and 1980s on what was seen as one of the major characteristics of postmodern culture. Yet what Seeing High and Low achieves is nothing less than a challenging redefinition of the scope of this topic … [its first] shift is to withdraw the discussion of high and low from the mere field of art and to tackle it as a basic feature of any modern, i.e. technologically mediated, society … [its second shift] is to analyze the relationships of high and low not from the viewpoint of the high as it is contested, challenged, renewed, transformed or revolutionized by its clash with the low, but from the viewpoint of the mutual shaping and the inevitable overlap of both categories … Thirdly, Johnston comes back to what is, or should be, at stake when we study this interaction of the high and the low. The aim of such a study is not to produce a better insight into the evolution of art-historical categories or shifts in taste and manners but to get a sharper understanding of the historical conditions in which art is being produced.
by Jon Lackman | 16 November 2007 | Architecture
In the July 2007 issue of Material Religion, Jeanne Halgren Kilde writes
In recent years, the critical study of sacred space has stake a new and prominent claim on the landscape of religious studies … Critical approaches to the study of religious space vary widely: hermeneutical analyses informed by the neo-Eliadean perspective of Lindsay Jones; explorations of the meanings associated with place that build upon the work of human geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan; examinations of the function of power informed by the work of Michel Foucault; discussions of the constitutive role of religious space in the construction of gender, racial, and ethnic identities and strategies within hegemonic contexts; examinations of the cultural embeddedness of religious space informed by the work of Henri Lefebvre and Edward W. Soja; and explorations of the function of space and place in the construction of the collective memories that lend coherence and endurance to social communities informed by the work of Maurice Halbwachs are merely a few examples …
To foster conversations among the diverse scholars who study religious space and place, a group of individuals successfully proposed a new program unit to the [American Academy of Religion], the Space, Place and Religious Meaning Consultation, which will offer its inaugural session at the 2007 Annual Meeting to be held in San Diego.
That meeting is this weekend, November 17-20.
by Jon Lackman | 15 November 2007 | Photography
German art historian Siegfried Wichmann has found evidence that “Mad King” Ludwig II of Bavaria died not of suicide but of murder. From the Independent:
He was gay, wildly eccentric and built fairytale castles that today rate as Germany’s leading tourist attractions – but more than a century ago “Mad King” Ludwig II of Bavaria was declared insane, deposed and three days later his corpse was found floating in a lake south of Munich. The real cause of King Ludwig’s death has been a mystery ever since his body, together with that of his psychiatrist, was dragged from Lake Starnberg on 13 June, 1886. But the official version, which holds that he committed suicide by drowning, has never been completely refuted. Now, 111 years after the king’s death, new evidence has surfaced …
Wichmann, a Bavarian art historian and specialist in 19th-century painting, who published a hitherto unseen photograph of a portrait of the king painted only hours after his death. The portrait shows what Mr Wichmann says is blood oozing from the corner of Ludwig’s mouth. “King Ludwig cannot have drowned. This is blood from the lungs and there is no water in it,” Mr Wichmann insisted on Wednesday.
by Jon Lackman | 15 November 2007 | Renaissance
From the Times of London:
They are among the most prized treasures held by the Royal Collection, the British Museum and the Ashmolean in Oxford. But drawings that are said to give an unparalleled insight into the creative process of Michelangelo should no longer be attributed to him, according to new research.
Three academics from the Universities of Leipzig and Hamburg have written a five-volume study that casts doubt on the works held in Britain, which are among up to 40 per cent of the world’s Michelangelos that they believe should be dismissed as copies. The three academics argue that hundreds of drawings by Michelangelo cannot be circulating worldwide when contemporary accounts refer to the artist burning most of them. The three are also publishing a recently discovered contemporary document that explains how so few drawings by Michelangelo survived after his death. Its contents are so dramatic that one journal tried to suppress it, they claim.
(via ArtsJournal)
by Jon Lackman | 13 November 2007 | Conferences
The 2008 College Art Association conference, to be held February 20-23 in Dallas, now has a full website, including a list of all papers to be presented. A session entitled “Cute” will feature the following papers:
The Apotheosis of Cute: The Sacred and Profane in the Work of Mark Ryden
How Cute: eBay’s “Black Americana” Category, Sellers’ Deployment of Cuteness, and the Marketing of Racism
The Girl with a Child in Her Eyes: Cuteness as Hierarchy Solvent in Morrison, Manet, and Ayu
Not So Cute: Kawaii as Critique
The Visual Culture Caucus session is entitled “The Fresh New Look of Sheepherding.” In another session, Annetta Alexandridis will present a paper on “Animal Love: The Iconography of Zoophilia in Greek Art.” Marni Reva Kessler will present on “Antoine Vollon and the Perversion of Butter.”
This year’s Distinguished Scholar Robert L. Herbert will be feted at a session featuring Mark Antliff, S. Hollis Clayson, Michael Leja, and Cécile Whiting.
Art History Newsletter contributor Ben Lima will be co-chairing a two-part session on “Neuroscience and the History of Art.”
Another session is entitled “Video Needs Art History like a TV Set Needs a Plinth.”
by Jon Lackman | 9 November 2007 | Books, Modern
Lea Vergine’s 1997 exhibition catalogue Trash, Quando i rifiuti diventano arte has been translated into English, as When Trash Becomes Art: TRASH rubbish mongo. It considers the use of trash by a wide variety of artists from Picasso, Tatlin and Marinetti to Mimmo Rotella, Louise Nevelson and Christian Boltanski. Vergine writes:
… why did the artists of the last century employ and why do they continue to employ [trash]? … let us reflect on the fact that we ourselves have been discarded or rejected by other human beings; more or less on a daily basis, we are forced to recover, scrape together and reassemble fragments of ourselves … To paraphrase a 1966 text by Giorgio Manganelli, we might say that ‘trash is language.’ It is also the tragic face of consumerism … Tommaso Labranca … perceptively defined trash as an unsuccessful emulation, a failed imitation … The presence of trash in the world is not eliminated with the supposed elimination through the various forms of waste management. Aside from that, we should recognise its reeking presence in the noosphere, that is, in the world of knowledge and understanding, which represents in some sense a parallel existence of trash in the heavens of the spirit, a genuine and full-fledged soul … Trash is indeed an enormous deposit of information of great value … It is possible that choosing to make use of trash is a form of revolt in the sense — as maintained by Julia Kristeva — ‘linked to the etymology of the word, which signifies a return and a shift’ … Trash can be enlightening. Artists scrape away at its skin and use it as a stage setting for Metaphor, the Spirit of the Time and the Weltanschauung. Here is the echo of our years: violence, fragility, nostalgia, lacerations, a bitter heartbreak, an affable deformity, the filthy and the despairing. The artists presented here have done more than merely patiently cultivating the infernal vocation and the heroic vilification. They mingle livid parodies with amorous elegies, civil invectives and ephemeral refinements, dark grace and miracle-working agility. This is not the poetics of undarned socks … As the old Chinese proverb puts it, ‘The darkest point is always directly under the lantern.’
by Jon Lackman | 8 November 2007 | Uncategorized
The August 2007 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture is devoted to “Detritus and the Moving Image.” Caetlin Benson-Allott writes on VCRs, specifically
… a Panasonic 4-Head, Hi-Fi Stereo VHS VCRplus+. Its name appears in gold letters across the VCR’s faceplate, which is otherwise visually dominated by an oblong flap in the middle of its horizontal axis. This lip, which submits easily to the most casual digital penetration, is flanked on either side by two rows of buttons (‘Power,’ ‘VCR/TV,’ ‘STOP,’ ‘REW,’ and the like) that angle up, out, and away from the central orifice in graceful arches materially underscored by a pair of shallow valleys. The faceplate thus resembles Gustave Courbet’s infamous nude, L’origine du monde, which also represents itself to its viewer as a reverential reproduction of the female genitalia and their reproductive capacity …
With its feminized faceplate and technological interdependency, the VCR dismantles the fantasy of the autonomous, masculine apparatus and leaves in its place a new sexual indeterminacy.
(Just as writing on trash need not itself be garbage, writing on boredom need not be boring. In the latest Journal of Ritual Studies (21:1), Charles W. Nuckolls writes on “Boring Rituals.” “Boredom functions as a defense against the eruption of destructive impulses caused by ambivalence over the simultaneous desire for and rejection of new ways.” Contemplate that at your next boring faculty meeting.)
by Jon Lackman | 7 November 2007 | Americas, Modern
In the July 2007 Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Andrea Pappas argues that, although abstract expressionism was marketed as an art of “timeless, ‘universal’ themes and subjects,” at least one of its artists had other things on his mind:
The standard view of Rothko presents him as an artist who eschewed the particular, the local and the political in favour of the timeless and universal. Read in this way, the paintings remain largely unintelligible or legible only in general terms. Yet, when read through the lens of Jewishnewss, iconographical investigations into Rothko’s early works yield new insights into his working process and the relationships between those “mythic” paintings and contemporary events. Some new possible meanings that can be uncovered in the early works also help to explain his repeated insistence that his work — even his abstract work — did have subject matter.
by Jon Lackman | 6 November 2007 | Books, Modern, Teaching
In CAA Reviews, Juliet Bellow has published an essay, “Surveying the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’: A Review of Art-History Textbooks in the Field,” that evaluates the following texts: 19th-Century Art by Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson (2005); 19th Century European Painting: David to Cézanne by Lorenz Eitner (2002); Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History by Stephen Eisenman et al. (2007); and Nineteenth-Century European Art by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (2006):
The good news is that these texts demonstrate there are as many histories of nineteenth-century art as there are definitions of the period. A wide variety of methodologies are represented, allowing scholars of varying orientations to find a text that corresponds with their preferred style in the classroom. In what follows I will argue that the textbooks under review exemplify, loosely speaking, four interpretive tendencies — formalist, biographical, political, and contextual — each with its own unique strengths and drawbacks.
And in case you believe, pace Stanley Fish, that a book can be judged by its first line, we offer you below the first lines of the four texts:
In 1776, that landmark year in transatlantic history, an astute visitor to the Royal Academy exhibition in London might well have noticed how frequently new ideas began to appear in, at first, familiar guises. [Rosenblum and Janson]
The current of thought, known as the Enlightenment, that was to transform the political and intellectual life of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century began in an effort to reform society by subjecting its customs and institutions to a rational examination: the objective truth, once established, would infallibly lead to improvement. [Eitner]
The art, architecture and design discussed in this book was made in Europe and North America during a period of rapid and profound social and political modernization. [Eisenman et al.]
The death of Louis XIV (fig. 1-1) in 1715 marked the end of an era in France. [Chu]
by Jon Lackman | 5 November 2007 | Uncategorized
In the September 2007 Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Pamela Turton-Turner has contributed an article, “The Role of Ridicule in Naked Charity Calendars.” According to the author, there appeared at least 556 naked fundraising calendars between 1996 and 2007. One produced by “elderly women in a small Tasmanian village in 2002″ generated $100,000 in sales. The most successful one has so far pulled in over $2,000,000.
Why is it that small-time charity workers in remote regions around the world, rouse big-time publicity in their fundraising activities … and, in many instances, handsome financial rewards for causes through extraordinary fundraising success[?] … What is the logic of signification underpinning naked charity calendars? … I draw upon Kristeva’s (1982) psychoanalytic concept of abjection and Eco’s (1984) semiological theory of humour … to propose that interest is aroused in naked charity by the carnivalesque nature of the spectacle and cathartic effect. By that I mean that naked charity is both the object of curiosity and sanctioned as acceptable by the public, if non-classic (abjected) bodies present as strategic jokes within an erotic frame of reference … According to the philosopher Georges Bataille: ‘The Middle Ages gave eroticism its place in painting, but relegated it to hell’ … Bodies in naked charity calendars are sanctioned by conformity to several strictly defined criteria. They need to conform to rules which ridicule the body; ensure sanitization of abject topology of the body; demonstrate sacrificial logic; and present as sexually passive to reiterate objectified form.
The wages of transgression are steep: after unsuccessfully retailing their own naked charity calendar, “the East Grinstead Spinner and Weavers Guild [was] left reeling with a &15,000 debt, and 9,000 calendars for pulping … [U]nhappily for them … they displayed their nipples.”
by Jon Lackman | 2 November 2007 | Modern
Yes, there is an entire journal devoted to La Celestina, the 15th century Spanish play attributed to Fernando de Rojas. It’s called Celestinesca and a recent issue (30) has an article by Carol Salus on “Some Early Celestina Drawings by Picasso.” The artist took an interest in the play at a time when it “was still in no way considered one of Spanish literature’s uncontested masterpieces,” an interest he maintained throughout his life.
by Jon Lackman | 1 November 2007 | Uncategorized
In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Karin Hellwig tells the story of the 36-year correspondence between art historians Carl Justi and Wilhelm Bode. (Rough Google translation here.)
by Jon Lackman | 31 October 2007 | Photography, Theory
Also in the Spring 2007 Biography is an essay by Susan Bruce on author Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical writings:
[I] advance the argument that the advent of photography changes our perception of ourselves in time … its most fundamental and melancholy legacy. The advent of photography ushers in an age in which we are at once closer to our younger selves than ever we could have been before, and also, perhaps, more alienated from them. In the act of seeing ourselves as children or adolescents, we recognize a shared identity with those past selves, but must simultaneously acknowledge that distance, and the act of looking, objectifies the object of our gaze, turning our past selves into others … Perhaps that is why Sassoon, talking of himself in the closing paragraph of his autobiography, chooses, unusually, to switch to the third person. “In a moment of clairvoyance he realized that he had come to the end of the journey on which he had set out when he enlisted in the army six years before,” Sassoon concludes:
And though he wasn’t clearly conscious of it, time has proved that there was nothing for him to do but begin all over again. To that occupation let us leave him. Picturing him in the clear afternoon light, in his New York straw hat, with the National Gallery in the background, I can almost believe that I have been looking at a faded photograph.
by Jon Lackman | 30 October 2007 | Books, Theory
In the Spring 2007 issue of Biography, Udi E. Greenberg writes on biographies of Walter Benjamin:
Since it is Benjamin’s eccentric personality and the figure of Benjamin himself, not just his thoughts and ideas, which stand at the center of [academia's] attention, it is hardly surprising that his private life has given birth to a long line of biographical texts, many of them best-sellers … it was not [the] texts of the seventies, interesting as they are, that generated what was to become “the Benjamin cult.” Benjamin gained his enormous popularity only in the mid eighties and nineties, and not by coincidence. Indeed, the new Benjamin biographies of the eighties, such as Bernd Witte’s, framed an alternative perspective that glorified Benjamin, in contrast to his revolutionary friends, mainly for his lack of political commitment … Benajmin’s life is no longer presented as a failure, as the defeat of the thinker who failed to choose the correct political path. Rather, the failure lies in the behavior of society, which rejected his desperate calls for criticism. Benjamin’s thought suddenly acquires a heretofore unobserved homogeneity, and his intellectual life is not a series of twists and turns, but rather a long, smooth growth, with one purpose — true spiritual freedom … In the last two decades, an era in which it seems that there is no relevant or essential criticism of the capitalist-democratic system, despite its faults and the unease felt among major parts of the intelligentsia, it is easy to identify with a critic who does not present a clear alternative system … Indeed, after the collapse of the radical left in the West and the Soviet Union in the East, it seems that every radical Marxist thinker of the period has gone through a form of reconsideration and even “rehabilitation” in order to survive and remain relevant, as shown in the debates around the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin and Bertolt Brecht. In the case of Benjamin, however, the biographical writing not only “saved” his writing from oblivion, it also successfully “liberated” the thinker from his historical context. By going back to traditional models of narration, it made him into an a-historical model for later generations, and by so doing, gave birth to a myth.
See also “Benjamin as Historian,” a review of Walter Benjamin and History and Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” in the Summer 2007 issue of Clio.
by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2007 | Ancient, Books
If you don’t specialize in the art of the Ancient Near East, but need to teach it in surveys, you know how hard it is to find good general histories of the period. In a recent issue of East and West (55:1-4), Nicola Laneri reviews Marc van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC:
How is it possible to write about [this subject] without creating a book that is a simple list of names and historical events? Marc van De Mieroop has been able to overcome such a challenge, evident in this magnificent volume which includes all the historical events that took place in the Ancient Near East … the language used in the book is very clear and simple, but without becoming a banal analysis and interpretation … Van De Mieroop’s knowledge of ancient languages as well as anthropological approaches to the analysis and interpretation of archaeological data furnishes the book with a deep and broad vision.
Laneri also notes that
as a result of political unrest in Iraq dating back to the first Gulf War in 1990, no new archaeological excavations have been underway since that time in the state that holds the greatest number of Ancient Mesopotamian sites; subsequently, van De Mieroop’s book is based on archaeological data from the fundamental Iraqi area that has remained unchanged since before this period.
by Jon Lackman | 26 October 2007 | Asia, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Art India, Beth Citron reports on “Elective Affinities, Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in Asia,” a three-day seminar held in Delhi in March “to motivate dialogue on a potential Delhi Biennale”:
Introductions by Parul Dave Mukherji and Geeta Kapur reflected on Edward Said’s Orientalism, with Mukherji emphasizing the need to critically consider “Asia” as a problematic … Rustom Bharucha’s trenchant remarks suggested that contemporary Asiacentricity or the framing of Asias conceived within the continent could operate like Eurocentrism to perpetuate cultural attitudes. He noted that presenting “Asian art” as a monolith elided inherent hypocrises and socio-political inequalities in the region … Santosh S.’s paper on “minoritarian aesthetics” elucidated the challenge of subalterns to overcome both the dominating Indian and global intelligentsias to participated in mainstream cultural practices … Girish Shahane offered the tension between Bharat (as rural, authentic nation) and India (as newer, urban civilization) to contextualize a changing balance between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism … Roces noted elegantly that Asia is itself a linguistic artifact, an antique passed from collector to collector … Negar Azimi’s polemical engagement with the “ethnic” markers used to identify artists from the Middle East led to the interrogation of the utility of geographical bracketing … Criticisms of the problematics of Asian biennales may have proven too effective, as Geeta Kapur’s valedictory address noted. She said, “We seem to have talked ourselves out of the idea [of a Delhi Biennale].”
(On a related note, recent issues of Heterogénesis (55-56) and Artecubano (11:2) are devoted to discussing the 2006 Havana Biennial and the utility of biennials generally.)
by Jon Lackman | 25 October 2007 | Teaching
In a recent issue (15:1) of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Camille Paglia writes:
For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religion, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts … To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory … Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school — which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude.
by Jon Lackman | 24 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary
More interesting items on contemporary African art. A recent issue (n. 69) of Africultures is entitled “Les cultures africaines sont-elles à vendre? Richesses artistiques et développement économique.” Its contents are drawn largely from the proceedings of an October 2006 symposium “Maintenant l’Afrique!” held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In “Diffusion et marché: l’art africain sur la scène internationale,” Christine Eyene surveys developments of the last two decades, from the formation of the Pigozzi collection to survey exhibitions such as Africa Remix. She argues that it is artists who must decide, through their participation, which patrons and exhibitions are best for their art, their careers and their consciences. All the same, she criticizes museums that do Africa surveys at the expense of integrating African artists into the rest of their exhibition calendar, as well as Pigozzi and his collaborator André Magnin:
Pigozzi and Magnin choose artists together, then Magnin “works” with each of them on an artistic project. Patronage isn’t a new activity in art … But here patronage operates in a prescriptive mode. The work doesn’t emerge from an independent creative process … no longer does the work arrive at the market, but rather the mercantile ambition that creates the work.
The issue also includes an interview with Transcape artistic director Gavin Jantjes.
See also “Venice and Contemporary African Art,” by Chika Okeke-Agulu, in the Autumn 2007 African Arts.
by Jon Lackman | 23 October 2007 | Americas
The latest issue (52: 1) of Amerikastudien / American Studies is devoted to “Transatlantic Perspectives on American Visual Culture.” In their introduction, editors Astrid Böger and Christof Decker write that because American Studies is a relatively new discipline, that may have helped it become
a particularly hospitable place for emerging and hitherto marginalized research agendas. Feminism, queer studies, the study of minority cultures, or popular culture often had their beginnings in the context of American studies which they subsequently left to form their own disciplinary fields, leaving behind the much lamented sense of fragmentation and disciplinary dissolution. But despite this relative openness to new research agendas, the comprehensive and theoretically complex exploration of American visual culture never managed to create its own subcategory within American studies …
As the rapid dissemination of images depicting the burning twin towers or the torture victims at Abu Ghraib demonstrates, the transcultural analysis of iconographies that are related to, or connected with, U.S.-American culture in complex and often confusing ways, is actually one of the most pressing issues … After all, the mediated and globalized public sphere is the crucial arena feeding the imaginary construction of national identities, and a highly contested space for gaining political support and legitimacy for a nation’s actions …
[C]hoosing a comparatist perspective implies comparing and contrasting certain identifiable and unique features. We agree that the concept of a coherent national culture is highly questionable, yet some notion of cultural specificity must be retained in order to make meaningful comparisons. Furthermore … Who decides which cultural objects are representative of a particular culture or subculture and thus worthy of critical attention?
Essays include “The Düsseldorf Academy of Art, Emanuel Leutze, and German-American Transatlantic Exchange in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” by Karsten Fitz, and “The Index and Its Vicissitudes: Hyperrealism from Richard Estes to Andreas Gursky,” by Johannes Völz.
by Jon Lackman | 22 October 2007 | Renaissance
Catching up on an older bit of news we missed … From the Times of London:
A £30 million Leonardo da Vinci painting stolen from a castle four years ago is believed to have been recovered by detectives.
Although the painting has yet to be formally identified, officers from four crime enforcement agencies are confident that it is The Madonna With The Yarnwinder which was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, near Thornhill, in Dumfries and Galloway in 2003.
(via Art History Today)
