NB Art

01/07/2022

With I AM JUGOSLOVENKA!: Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester University Press), Jasmina Tumbas examines forms of feminist political and artistic engagement in Yugoslavia and its successor nations. By bringing together a wide range of materials—from performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, le***an activism, and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars—this study reveals that performative representations of women’s emancipation were crucial for the rise of gender equality in the socialist project. Covering celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, I AM JUGOSLOVENKA! offers a unique insight into the struggles and ambitions of Yugoslav women through the intersection of feminism, socialism, and nationalism in visual culture.

Jasmina Tumbas joins us on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/i-am-jugoslovenka

01/07/2022

Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded at-hoc in discrete, time- and output-bound chunks.

This is the logic of projects. The workforce no longer dedicates itself to the making of a singular commodity, as it was the case with Smith, but bids for discrete pieces of work when those are in demand. In some industries, for example, in the art world, the workforce is also charged with building the demand for their work by initiating the project which would then employ them.

THE ABC of the PROJECTARIAT: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World ( Manchester University Press) by Kuba Szreder contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in contemporary art. It is both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. Kuba Szreder speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the artistic project, and the effects of projectarisation on workers’ solidarity, communal governance, and the precarity of artistic activity. Tune in 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-abc-of-the-projectariat

22/06/2022

One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism.

To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, amatory as well as bellicose. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman ho******ic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the ho******ic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the ho******ics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today.

A contribution to studies in visual culture as well as literary and social history, THE HOMOEROTICS of ORIENTALISM (Columbia UP) draws on primary sources ranging from untranslated Middle Eastern manuscripts and European belles-lettres to miniature paintings and photographic erotica that are presented here for the first time. Delve deeper on the podcast ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-ho******ics-of-orientalism

10/06/2022

We are living in an era of unprecedented access to popular culture: contemporary digital infrastructure provides anyone with an internet connection access to a dizzying array of cultural objects past and present, which mingle and connect in fascinating, bizarre and sometimes troubling ways.

In BLACK EPHEMERA: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (NYU Press), Mark Anthony Neal considers the opportunities and challenges that this vast archive represents for Black American culture, with a particular focus on music and sound. Neal’s explorations have a wide historical scope and operate simultaneously in microscopic and conjunctural registers. The book includes analyses of legendary Memphis record label Stax, the place of Aretha Franklin and Mavin Gaye’s overlooked early recordings in/as the Great American Songbook, the use of musical citation to try and combat the erasure of Black women’s experience from the historical archive, and the significance of archival ephemera to Black mourning practices from Pattie LaBelle to Kendrick Lamar. Author-interview podcast link ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/black-ephemera

10/06/2022

Yi Gu's CHINESE WAYS OF SEEING and OPEN-AIR PAINTING (Harvard University Press) examines the rise of open-air painting in 20th-century China, showing how this emphatically new form of landscape painting precipitated and participated in an ocular turn. In its urgent embrace of Cartesian optics and its interrelationship with new technologies like photography, open-air painting taught Chinese artists (and citizens) new, modern "ways of seeing." Gu traces the birth of the form in the early 20th century, showing readers the rise of this new perceptual mode not only through close analysis of painting, but also through her rich archive of sources like textbooks and art treatises that demonstrate the urgency and importance of the open-air movement to Chinese modernity. Delve deeper as Gu joins us on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/chinese-ways-of-seeing-and-open-air-painting

10/06/2022

Art forms have rules, usually implicit, that govern the experiences that artists want their audiences to have: for example, a representational painting should be hung right-side-up, the same sort of paint medium should be used in restoration, and the painting should not be touched.

In IMMATERIAL: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press), Sherri Irvin argues that contemporary conceptual art is constituted by custom rules as well as by their physical medium: the artist may specify that the work is intended to be handled, eaten, made out of anything, or even installed however the gallery or museum wants to. On Irvin’s view, such rules are essential for expressing a work’s meaning, even though they can also make that meaning difficult for audiences to grasp. In this illustrated volume, Irvin considers a wide range of contemporary works to present, elaborate, and address challenges to her view. Give her NBN interview a listen 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/immaterial

09/06/2022

08/06/2022

The movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural thought is that fans ought to give up the artworks of immoral artists, but according to Mary Beth Willard, it’s hard to find good reasons to do so. In WHY IT'S OKAY TO ENJOY THE WORK OF IMMORAL ARTISTS (Routledge Creative Media & the Arts), she contends that because most boycotts of artists won’t succeed, there’s no ethical reason to do so most of the time. She then argues that canceling artists is ethically risky because it encourages moral grandstanding.

In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Mary Beth Willard about the differences between enjoyment and engagement when it comes to immoral artists, as well as whether we should enjoy artworks that have immoral outlooks and behaviors embedded in them. Their conversation ranges from the problems associated with collective versus individual actions, the positive effects that giving up the work of immoral artists may have for shifting cultural norms, and the distinction between public and private enjoyment. Tune in 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/why-its-ok-to-enjoy-the-work-of-immoral-artists

23/05/2022

Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. In WOMEN in the PICTURE: What Culture Does with Female Bodies (W. W. Norton & Company), Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art—think Titian, Botticelli, and Millais—and the image-saturated world of fashion photographs, advertisements, and social media, and boldly counters these depictions by turning to the work of women artists like Morisot, Ringgold, Lacy, and Walker, who offer alternative images for exploring women’s identity, sexuality, race, and power in more complex ways. Give her NBN interview a listen 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/women-in-the-picture

20/05/2022

Alice Dailey’s HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DEAD PEOPLE: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press) is an exploration of Shakespeare’s chronicle plays through the theoretical rubric of modern technology. Dailey's book explores representational strategies of the porous boundary between past and present, and dead and undead, in Shakespeare’s history plays. Drawing on Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Lee Edelman, Peggy Phelan, and Derrida, Dailey creates new space for how we might think about the unruly interrelationships of the present, the past, and the future, including how 20th-century technology can reanimate our engagement with early modern theories of kingship, ableism, and reproductive futurity. Give the author's NBN interview a listen 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/how-to-do-things-with-dead-people

26/04/2022

According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition "Surrealism Without Borders," Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description.

For many artists, however, the practice of Surrealist art took on an explicitly political and therefore practical dimensions. In SURREALIST SABOTAGE and the WAR on WORK (Manchester University Press), art historian Abigail Susik argues that many Surrealists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. Listen in as Susik speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Oscar Domínguez on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/surrealist-sabotage-and-the-war-on-work

21/04/2022

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen's MODERN ART and the REMAKING of HUMAN DISPOSITION (University of Chicago Press) brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era’s canonical works. Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky— replete with new archival discoveries, Butterfield-Rosen's book combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses. Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/modern-art-and-the-remaking-of-human-disposition

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, "Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

21/04/2022

THE VISUAL CULTURE of MEIJI JAPAN: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (Routledge) examines the visual culture of Japan's transition to modernity, from 1868 to the first decades of the 20th century. Through this important moment in Japanese history, contributors reflect on Japan's transcultural artistic imagination vis-a-vis the discernment, negotiation, assimilation, and assemblage of diverse aesthetic concepts and visual pursuits. The collected chapters show how new cultural notions were partially modified and integrated to become the artistic methods of modern Japan, based on the hybridization of major ideologies, visualities, technologies, productions, formulations, and modes of representation. Learn more about the volume on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-visual-culture-of-meiji-japan

20/04/2022

In MEDIA PRIMITIVISM: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press), Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Give Collier's NBN interview a listen ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/media-primitivism-2

20/04/2022

In THE INVENTION of NORMAN VISUAL CULTURE: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge University Press), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the 11th and 12th-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily. Traditionally, scholars have considered iconic works like the Ca****la Palatina and the Bayeux Embroidery in a geographically piecemeal fashion that prevents us from seeing their full significance. Here, Reilly examines these works individually and within the larger context of a connected Norman world. Just as Rollo founded the Normandy "of different nationalities", the Normans created a visual culture that relied on an assemblage of forms. Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-invention-of-norman-visual-culture

23/02/2022

In DESIGNING MOTHERHOOD: Things that Make and Break Our Births (MIT Press), Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick along with more than 50 contributors consider over 100 designs that have defined the arc of human reproduction. This volume considers a breadth of designs that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century, including the menstrual cup, population policy posters, home pregnancy tests, tie-waist skirts, cesarean birth curtains, birth in film, the Kuddle Up blanket, breast pumps, and car seats. Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/designing-motherhood

23/02/2022

FOLLIES in AMERICA: A History of Garden and Park Architecture (Cornell University Press) examines historicized garden buildings, known as "follies," from the nation's founding through the American centennial celebration in 1876.

In a period of increasing nationalism, follies―such as temples, summerhouses, towers, and ruins―brought a range of European architectural styles to the United States. By imprinting the land with symbols of European culture, landscape gardeners brought their idea of civilization to the American wilderness. Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/follies-in-america

22/02/2022

In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements, and more, MID-CENTURY MODERNISM and the AMERICAN BODY: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design (Princeton University Press) offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers. Tune in 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/mid-century-modernism-and-the-american-body

26/01/2022

Around the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen.

In JEWISH PRIMITIVISM (Stanford University Press), Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized. Learn more on the podcast ↙

https://newbooksnetwork.com/jewish-primitivism

14/01/2022

If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between 'you too are an artist' and 'abandon all hope you who enter here' would be difficult. Despite significant changes in mainstream art education in recent decades, many anglophone art schools have not abandoned the principal tools of the masterclass or stubborn 18th-century ideas and the belief that creativity is the preserve of the artistic genius. Considering these histories can shed light on the role of the art school in the 21st century.

Michael Newall's A PHILOSOPHY of the ART SCHOOL (Routledge Creative Media & the Arts) presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. Listen in as Newall speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the masterclass and the crit, the pervasive idea of the Romantic genius, creative disagreements with Kant, and the lessons for the future that a historical perspective may offer 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/a-philosophy-of-the-art-school

18/11/2020

Pier Paolo Paosolini, a filmmaker who created art in a variety of media, has something approaching a cult following. On this episode Jana Byars talks with Ara Marjian about his newest book, AGAINST the AVANT-GARDE: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press). Merjian not only reconsiders the multifaceted work of Italy's most prominent postwar intellectual, but also the fraught politics of a European neo-avant-garde grappling with a new capitalist hegemony. Listen in 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/against-the-avant-garde

16/11/2020

What is neorealism in the Italian context?

In ITALIAN NEOREALISM: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to weave together diverse cultural strands (literature, the visual arts, drama, journalism, poetry, essays) into a tapestry of historical practice. Give his conversation with Ellen Nerenberg a listen 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/italian-neorealism

16/11/2020

Jingdezhen porcelains are coveted worldwide. In THE CITY of BLUE and WHITE: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press), Anne Gerritsen asks how this kiln complex could manufacture such quality, quantity and variety. She explores how objects tell the story of the past, connecting texts with objects, objects with natural resources, and skilled hands with the shapes and designs they produced. Through the manufacture and consumption of Jingdezhen's porcelains, she argues, China participated in the early modern world. Listen and learn ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-city-of-blue-and-white

16/11/2020

THE ART of PERSISTENCE: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press) examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu’s lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the transwar proletarian movement. Charlotte Eubanks joins the NBN's Victoria Lupascu ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-art-of-persistence

13/11/2020

Drawing on interviews with artists, dealers, and curators, LATINX ART: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Duke University Press) is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Author Arlene Dávila sits down with David-James Gonzales to discuss this new book that emphasizes importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world.👂👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/latinx-art

11/11/2020

Monopoly, Solitaire, football and Minecraft are all games, but for C. Thi Nguyen they are also an art form – specifically, the art form of agency, our capacity to set goals and pursue them. In GAMES: Agency as Art (Oxford University Press), Nguyen argues that a game designer sculpts agency by specifying the goals and abilities of the potential player – what the player should care about and what their abilities are in the game environment. Learn more as he joins Carrie Figdor on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/games

03/11/2020

What is an art school?

Bridging geography, sociology, and art history, ART SCHOOLS and PLACE: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scene (Rowman & Littlefield) thinks through the status of art schools and arts education in the contemporary world. Cultural and creative industries researcher Silvie Jacobi joins NBN host Dave O'Brien to fill us in on the book 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/silvie-jacobi-art-schools-and-place-geographies-of-emerging-artists-and-art-scenes-rowman-and-littlefield-2020

30/10/2020

INTERROGATING SECULARISM: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (Syracuse University Press) deconstructs liberal accounts of secularism through an examination of the work of authors and artists from ethnic and religious minorities. Listen in as author Danielle Haque and your host Kristian Petersen discuss secular ideologies, contemporary orientalism, the racialization of Muslims, the War on terror, state surveillance, visual and literary cultural production, transnational identities, publishing norms, museum practice, human rights discourses, Muslim feminist praxis, and LGBTQ identities. 👂👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/danielle-haque-interrogating-secularism-race-and-religion-in-arab-transnational-art-and-literature-syracuse-up-2019