All posts tagged: Book review

Cover of Jones' book featuring an image of a computer memory board of some kind inside a clear glass or plastic box, beneath which the title is printed.

Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics

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Reviewed by Chelsea Wenzhu Xu, George Mason University David Houston Jones. Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics. London: Routledge, 2022. Questions of evidence and ethics in photography have been taken up by many theorists, as photography’s role as truth-preserving or ideological imposition has been a point of contention since its inception. We ask, do photographs have a special tie to reality because of the mechanical ways they are made? Can they reveal any kind of truth? Do they perform any kind of political work? Building upon Walter Benjamin, Allan Sekula, and Jacques Rancière, and responding to Eyal Weizman’s call to explore the rhetorical constructions of the forensic, David Houston Jones’ book Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics joins the conversation by investigating the entanglement of contemporary artistic practice with visual traditions and discursive constellations of forensic photography. This “forensic aesthetic” in art, Jones argues, opens up interrogations of who is speaking, to whom, and on what epistemological and ethical grounds (Jones, 3). Jones engages in critical dialogues of forensic conduct and …

Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic

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Reviewed by Hsin-Yun Cheng, University of Rochester Hentyle Yapp. Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 288 Pages. At first glance, the title of the book, Minor China, seems to counterintuitively belie China’s dominance in the global economic and political order. However, Hentyle Yapp temporarily suspends the political condition of China and returns China to a minor epistemological position in order to trenchantly challenge the proper noun “China,” which has been bracketed and seen as the Other or counterpart to the West. By reorienting readers’ attention to affective and molecular movements (proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), minor methods rescue Chinese contemporary art from being assimilated by the global art markets, either in discourses or international exhibitions. Yapp uses the term “minor,” which resonates with Marxist ideas of social structuration, to reflect on theoretical assumptions entrenched in ideologies of liberalism, inclusion, and racialization (5-6). For him, “minor” is a strategy to undo the overdetermined Western frameworks that presuppose universal ideas and liberal languages in gauging minor subjects and non-Western …

Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

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Reviewed by Luke Jarzyna, University of Rochester Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal, eds. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. 248 Pages. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination (hereafter SPBI) brings together an exciting mix of texts, scholars, and critical apertures to identify the post-black valences in representations of slavery across different mediums. Editors Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal, along with other scholars, understand post-blackness as indicative of a set of aesthetic criteria as well as a post-civil rights movement generational feeling. Distinct from “post-racial,” a concept ill-favored by the editors that suggests society has moved past race, Saal and Ashe understand post-blackness in visual artists Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon’s coinage of the term as a “shorthand for resisting narrow definitions of African American identity and for expressing a profound interest in ‘redefining complex notions of blackness’” (6). SPBI engages well the spirit of evolution and multiplicity at the heart of post-blackness as the contributing authors explore texts that abscond from historical or accepted mythologies, depart into the grotesque, …

Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form Since 1968

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Reviewed by Malaika Sutter, University of Bern James Voorhies, Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form Since 1968. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017. 288 pages. In James Voorhies’ first monograph, Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form Since 1968, the curator and art historian of modern and contemporary art examines the critical potential of the exhibition from the second half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Voorhies focuses on artworks and exhibitions that capture a spectator’s attention and involve them without explicitly inviting them to participate, their critique manifesting itself through an extensive apprehension and implication of the spectator. Carsten Höller’s exhibition Experience (2011-12, New Museum), which includes his work Untitled (Slide), a stainless steel slide that carries the spectator through two levels of the museum, marks the starting point of Voorhies’ study. Through its potential to confuse, surprise, and engage the spectator via multiple senses as well as through its unique temporal and spatial aspects, the slide, according to Voorhies, figures as a fruitful approach in engaging …

Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981

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Reviewed by Stella Gatto, Independent Researcher Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019. 480 pages. The theory of “Six Degrees of Separation” (or perhaps more humorously known in pop culture as “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”) contends that humans are all connected to each other by six or fewer acquaintances.1 The theory-turned-parlour game was introduced in 1929 by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in his short story Chain-Links. Karinthy posited that with growing communication and travel, friendship networks would expand regardless of the distance between humans; the result being that via this growing network, social distance would also shrink.2 Working within this anecdotal theory as a method of analysis, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981 highlights how experimental artists in the Soviet bloc during the 1960s–1970s engaged with artists and movements both inside and outside Soviet satellite nations (2). Through extensive research and well-documented archival materials ranging from artist testimonies and letters to press releases and images, author Klara Kemp-Welch offers an insightful and …

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

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Reviewed by Luke Urbain, University of Wisconsin-Madison Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso Books, 2019. 656 pages. With the urgency of a manifesto and the volume of a brick, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism foregrounds and rejects structural, sustained imperialisms as the basis for a shared world and asks readers to begin the ongoing project of actively challenging imperialism’s alleged inevitability.1 Such a turn to history might seem strange to those attentive to the recent nostalgia politics around the globe or those who fear that unlearning imperialism means an annulment of its inventory of traumas. Just as much anti- and ante-imperialism, Azoulay is clear to distinguish her call from selective nostalgia or amnesia. Unlearning Imperialism means, instead, to reject a temporality that consigns violences to a remote past; to see resistance and contestation present at every step of imperialism’s longue durée; and to amplify dormant potentialities crushed in imperialism’s forward drive. Azoulay can be a challenging photographic theorist, largely because photographs for her are not strictly essential to …

Fray: Art and Textile Politics

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Reviewed By Jayme Collins Julia Bryan-Wilson. Fray: Art and Textile Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 326 pages. We are all experts on textiles, Julia Bryan-Wilson compels us to remember in her groundbreaking Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017). We trace the properties of textiles daily as we select fabrics, as we watch the material of a favorite item fray over time, as we select new clothing, as we adopt a parent’s or close friend’s castaways. Threading through our lives, these daily scenes of textile endearment constitute for Bryan-Wilson the componentry of what she calls “textile politics,” indicating both a way of understanding materials as implicated in political agendas and a “procedure of making politics material” (7). If these personal scenes of tactility form the basis for a politics, they also, for Bryan-Wilson, form the impetus for a nuanced and expansive reading methodology that virtuosically traces how the personal intersects with global economies, with histories of female- and slave-labor, with the art market, with queer community, with national politics, with political regimes and revolutions, …

Unconsolable Contemporary: Observing Gerhard Richter

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Reviewed by Stella Gatto, independent researcher Paul Rabinow. Unconsolable Contemporary: Observing Gerhard Richter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 176 pages.  Given the insurmountable number of publications already in circulation, contributing an innovative piece of writing to the existing literature on German artist Gerhard Richter (b. 1931) is no small feat. Richter’s website—which is carefully managed by his personal archivist—provides up-to-date accounts of the over 200 monographs, 186 articles, 178 solo exhibition catalogues and over 1300 group exhibition catalogues published since the beginning of the artist’s career in 1962. Albeit outside art historical, critical, and curatorial disciplines, Paul Rabinow’s Unconsolable Contemporary: Observing Gerhard Richter provides new insight into the work of one of the world’s most extensively exhibited and written-about artists. A Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, Rabinow is most well-known for developing an “anthropology of the contemporary.” As outlined in the introduction of his seminal book Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2007), Rabinow defines “the contemporary” as “a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and …

Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

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Reviewed by Hanna E. Morris, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Arturo Escobar. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. 2018. 312 pages. “The notion of oww [One-World World] signals the predominant idea in the West that we all live within a single world, made up of one underlying reality (one nature) and many cultures. This imperialistic notion supposes the West’s ability to arrogate for itself the right to be ‘the world,’ and to subject all other worlds to its rules, to diminish them to secondary status or to nonexistence, often figuratively and materially. It is a very seductive notion […]” (Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 86). It is only fitting to begin this essay with a provocative quote—as the author of the book under review, Arturo Escobar, chooses to begin each chapter of Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018). Escobar, professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of several, groundbreaking works such …

Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States

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Reviewed by Christian Rossipal, NYU Tisch School of the Arts Adam Fish. Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017. 225 pages. Following the March release of the Trump administration’s “skinny budget,” and its proposed elimination of virtually all federal funding for public broadcasting—as well as for arts and humanities initiatives1 —Adam Fish’s Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States comes as a timely volume, examining television as a democratic tool in the struggle for and of participatory public spheres in the media. Informed by the author’s own ethnographic research, the framework is a political-economical historiography, ranging from late 20th century corporate liberalism-regulated television to the unregulated Internet of contemporary neoliberalism. In this contested and overdetermined field, Fish situates the notion of technoliberalism as a designation of certain discourses on technology—most often coupled with deregulation—which seeks to invalidate the need for participatory politics. Fish outlines how these discourses are mobilized to “mitigate the contradictions of liberalism” itself.2 By connecting American television history to recent Internet conglomeration and …

Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945

Published by IVC Author

Reviewed by Elizabeth Eikmann, Saint Louis University Isadora Helfgott. Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 326 pages. 21 color plates. The culture wars of the years surrounding the 1930s are known for the many and well-fought domestic battles over high art, popular culture, and consumerism. During this era, the barriers between high and popular art upheld by centuries of tradition came crumbling down as leftist American artists worked to redefine the relationship between art and the greater society. Mass circulation of visual media gave 1930s Americans unprecedented access to art and, as scholars such as Michael Denning have argued, it would be during this decade that art gained a new power to create, challenge, and reinforce ideas about national politics, economy, and identity. While numerous scholars have focused their work on the art produced during this time, Isadora Helfgott’s Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945 flips the focus onto the figures behind and beyond the …

Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience

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Reviewed by Ryan Watson W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt, and Michael Taussig. Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Paperback. 152 pp. How does one properly theorize and historicize a movement like Occupy that is inherently shape-shifting, leaderless, intimately tied to specific contexts and places, and still evolving? In Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience, three scholars from different disciplines, Bernard Harcourt (Law/Political Science), W.J.T. Mitchell (Visual Studies), and Michael Taussig (Anthropology), contribute to an emerging discourse about the role that Occupy might play as both a tactic and metonym for an inchoate type of political refusal—a form of “disobedience” that signals a new way of challenging entrenched forms of power. The text, comprising three interlinked essays, is what Mitchell refers to as a “stab at a second draft” of history that moves from the specificity of events in Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011 to more general thoughts on the concept of occupation and the possibilities of revolutionary change. Mitchell’s thoughtful introduction elucidates some of the productive tensions that emerge from …