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The first in the four-part series, this book charts the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing as seen on the street and in museums, in films and literature, and in advertisements and magazines. The book features a close-up focus on accessories—the shoe, the hat, the necklace—intimately connected to the body. The chapters here offer new theoretical and historical takes on the role of clothing, dress, and accessories in the construction of the modern subject. The book offers array of ideas about the modern body and the ways in which we dress it. From perspectives on the “model body” to Sonia Delaunay’s designs, from Fascist-era Spanish women’s prescribed ways of dressing to Futurist vests, from Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet to Salvatore Ferragamo’s sandals, from a poet’s tiara to a worker’s cap, from the scarlet letter to the yellow star: this book imparts startling insights into how much the most modest accessory might reveal.

This book shows that anime is far more than a style of Japanese animation. Beyond its immediate form of cartooning, anime is also a unique mode of cultural production and consumption that led to the phenomenon that is today called “media mix” in Japan and “convergence” in the West. According to the book, both anime and the media mix were ignited on January 1, 1963, when Astro Boy hit Japanese TV screens for the first time. Sponsored by a chocolate manufacturer with savvy marketing skills, Astro Boy quickly became a cultural icon in Japan. He was the poster boy (or, in his case, “sticker boy”) both for Meiji Seika’s chocolates and for what could happen when a goggle-eyed cartoon child fell into the eager clutches of creative marketers. It was only a short step, Steinberg makes clear, from Astro Boy to Pokémon and beyond. The book traces the cultural genealogy that spawned Astro Boy to the transformations of Japanese media culture that followed—and forward to the even more profound developments in global capitalism supported by the circulation of characters like Doraemon, Hello Kitty, and SuzumiyaHaruhi. It details how convergence was sparked by anime, with its astoundingly broad merchandising of images and its franchising across media and commodities. It also explains, for the first time, how the rise of anime cannot be understood properly—historically, economically, and culturally—without grasping the integral role that the media mix played from the start.

Contrary to critics who have called it the “undecade,” the 1970s were a time of risky, innovative art—and nowhere more so than in Britain, where the forces of feminism and labor politics merged in a radical new aesthetic. In Art Labor, Sex Politics Siona Wilson investigates the charged relationship of sex and labor politics as it played out in the making of feminist art in 1970s Britain. Her sustained exploration of works of experimental film, installation, performance, and photography maps the intersection of feminist and leftist projects in the artistic practices of this heady period. Collective practice, grassroots activism, and iconoclastic challenges to society’s sexual norms are all fundamental elements of this theoretically informed history. The book provides fresh assessments of key feminist figures and introduces readers to less widely known artists such as Jo Spence and controversial groups like COUM Transmissions. Wilson’s interpretations of two of the best-known (and infamous) exhibitions of feminist art—Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document and COUM Transmissions’ Prostitution—supply a historical context that reveals these works anew. Together these analyses demonstrate that feminist attention to sexual difference, sex, and psychic formation reconfigures received categories of labor and politics. How—and how much—do sexual politics transform our approach to aesthetic debates? What effect do the tropes of sexual difference and labor have on the conception of the political within cultural practice? These questions animate Art Labor, Sex Politics as it illuminates an intense and influential decade of intellectual and artistic experimentation.

The central question addressed in ARTIST|ANIMAL is simply this: what happens when artist and animal are brought into juxtaposition in the context of contemporary art? The book’s title deliberately holds those two terms in juxtaposition, without specifying either the characteristics or the consequences of their alignment. Those are what the book goes on to explore. Its chapters consider artworks from the first decade of the twenty-first century by a small selection of contemporary artists from America, Europe and Australasia who engage directly with questions of animal life. These are artists, in other words, whose concern is with the nature and the quality of actual animal life, or with the human experience of actual animal lives. For the most part, at least, their art treats animals as creatures who actively share the more-than-human world with humans, rather than as mere symbols or metaphors for aspects of the so-called human condition. The spread is nevertheless still fairly wide, running from artists with ecological concerns, to those engaging with the temporary or permanent modification of animal bodies, to those seeking to further the cause of animal rights through their work. The features that distinguish this book from the very few others in the field are these: it draws on substantial first-hand interviews with the artists themselves; it explains how contemporary art makes a vital contribution to the wider cultural understanding of animal life; and it insists on the necessary connection of creativity and trust in both the making and the understanding of these artworks.

The history of the American Midwest is marked by stories of inhabitants’ struggles to envision the unbroken expanses of their home landscape. During the 1920s and 1930s these attempts to visualize the landscape intersected with another narrative—that of the airplane. After World War I, aviation gained purpose as a means of linking together the vastness of American space. It also created a new visual sensibility, opening up new vantage points from which to see the world below. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of modern aerial vision and its impact on twentieth-century American life. In particular, the project centers on visualizations of the American Midwest, a region whose undifferentiated topography and Jeffersonian gridwork of farms and small towns were pictured from the air with striking frequency during the early twentieth century. Forging a new and synthetic approach to the study of American art and visual culture, this work analyzes an array of flight-based representation that includes maps, aerial survey photography, painting, cinema, animation, and suburban architecture. The book explores the perceptual and cognitive practices of aerial vision and emphasizes their formative role in re-symbolizing the Midwestern landscape. Weems argues that the new sightlines actualized by aviation composed a new episteme of vision that enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian identity with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity.

In the late 1960s, the artist Barry Le Va began to use non-traditional materials (shattered glass, spent bullets, sound recordings, scattered flour, and sharpened meat cleavers) to execute a striking body of sculptural installations. Taking inspiration from popular crime novels and contemporary art theory, Le Va conceived of these works as an aesthetic aftermath. He charged his viewers to act like detectives at a crime scene, attempting to decipher an order underlying the apparent chaos. In addition to the aesthetic charge of its scattered visual poetry, Le Va’s work is compelling because of how clearly it articulates the web of perceived connections autonomous art objects, conservative politics and scientific objectivity. The artist's ephemeral installations were designed to erode not simply the presumed autonomy of the art object but also the economic and political authority of the art establishment. And while their unstable nature echoed the broad counter-cultural agitation against the social and political status quo, their embrace of impermanence was also informed by scientific discourse. Indeed, Le Va’s work reflects the degree to which engagement with scientific and mathematical topics such as entropy and information theory forms a significant but under-examined thread running through much of the most important sculpture of the late 1960s. In essence, Le Va’s aim to “keep the piece in a suspended state of flux, with no trace of a beginning or end” sought to challenge the metaphysics of stability that underpinned the interlocking assumptions behind blind faith in lasting beauty, just government and perfectible knowledge.

In 2009, Hal Foster initiated a questionnaire to prominent art historians, critics, and curators about the problem of the contemporary in which he stated that there is “a sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.” The responses he gleaned are just part of the recent scholarship in art and art history focused on understanding the nature and limits of the contemporary, and the significant debate about the problem of the contemporary for history. This book takes as its premise that the contemporary, as much as we may want to consider it otherwise, is being made history as it happens. The important question is not whether there is (or should be) contemporary art history, but how. And “how” is the primary concern of this book, the key argument of which is that we cannot answer the demands of the contemporary by using out-dated research practices, received theories of history, and linear temporal models. Nor can we proceed without rethinking our practices of writing. Acknowledging a significant trend in current art practice, in which artists have engaged with historical subject matter, methods, and questions, it asks how the work of the artist implicates and interrogates that of the critic or historian. It asks how to emulate the artist-historian, how to do history differently, and thus examines and attempts to deploy unorthodox historical methodologies that are witnessed in and distilled from the work of a number of contemporary artists.

Since the 1890s, American artists have employed the arts of the freak show to envision radically different ways of being. The result is a rich avant-garde tradition that critiques and challenges capitalism from within. This book traces the arts of the freak show from P. T. Barnum to Matthew Barney and demonstrates how a form of mass culture entertainment became the basis for a distinctly American avant-garde tradition. Exploring a wide range of writers, filmmakers, photographers, and artists who have appropriated the arts of the freak show, the text exposes the disturbing power of human curiosities and the desires they unleash. Through a series of incisive and often startling readings, the book reveals how such figures as Mark Twain, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Nathanael West, and Diane Arbus use these desires to propose alternatives to the autonomous and repressed subject of liberal capitalism. The book explains how, rather than grounding revolutionary subjectivities in imaginary realms innocent of capitalism, freak-garde works manufacture new subjectivities by exploiting potentials inherent to capitalism.

This book, the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga, explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art—from scroll paintings to superflat—challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian (or one-point) perspective, the dominant mode of visual culture in the West since the seventeenth century. More than just a visual mode or geometric system, Cartesianism has shaped nearly every aspect of modern rational thought, from mathematics and science to philosophy and history. The chapters in this book approach Japanese popular culture as a visual mode that employs non-Cartesian formations, which by extension make possible new configurations of perception and knowledge. Whether by shattering the illusion of visual or narrative seamlessness through the use of multiple layers or irregular layouts, blurring the divide between viewer and creator, providing diverse perspectives within a single work of art, or rejecting dualism, causality, and other hallmarks of Cartesianism, anime and manga offer in their radicalization of perspective the potential for aesthetic and even political transformation.

Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. This book looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms, showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political, addressing the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating. The book claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to acknowledge historical and contemporary realities by presenting images of these realities. If documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, it asks, what kind of speaking (and speaking about) emerges in documentary, and how are we engaged by it? In considering this and other questions, the book examines a range of noteworthy films, including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, John Huston’s Let There Be Light, and MilicaTomi’s Portrait of My Mother.

Media screens—film, video, and computer screens—have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. This book aims to address this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes. Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, the book traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today’s digital culture. This book identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject’s field of vision. As a result it proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.