Browse

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 provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, this book explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment. This book scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, it shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. It suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian.

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.

The Bauhaus school in Germany has been understood through the writings of its founding director Walter Gropius and several artists who taught there: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts written by women in the school’s weaving workshop. The weavers’ innovativeness can be attributed to their notable textiles products: from colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of sound-proofing and light-reflective fabric. But it was also here that, for the first time, a modernist theory of weaving emerged—an investigation of its material elements, loom practice, and functional applications. What Bauhäusler like Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and Otti Berger accomplished through writing, as they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines (painting, architecture, or photography), was a profound step in the recognition of weaving as a medium-specific craft—one that could be compared to and differentiated from others. Writing On Weaving finds new value and significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers. Employing a method that bridges art history, design history, craft theory, and media and cultural studies, it raises and seeks to answer several, interdisciplinary questions: Are the concepts of “craft” and “medium” isomorphic, or structurally distinct? How might the principles and methods of weaving challenge modernist assumptions about distinct media? To what degree are crafts and media reliant on theoretical, textual armatures to be specific? How does a medium accrue a gendered value, as “feminine?”

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.

Teddy Roosevelt’s head sculpted from butter. The Liberty Bell replicated in oranges. The Sioux City Corn Palace of 1891 encased with corn, grains, and grasses and stretching for two city blocks—with a trolley line running down its center. Between 1870 and 1930, from county and state fairs to the world’s fairs, large exhibition buildings were covered with grains, fruits, and vegetables to declare in no uncertain terms the rich agricultural abundance of the United States. At the same fairs—but on a more intimate level—ice-cooled cases enticed fairgoers to marvel at an array of butter sculpture models including cows, buildings, flowers, and politicians, all proclaiming the rich bounty and unending promise held by the region. Often viewed as mere humorous novelties—fun and folksy, but not worthy of serious consideration—these lively forms of American art are described in this book. From the pioneering cereal architecture of Henry Worrall at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition to the vast corn palaces displayed in Sioux City, Iowa, and elsewhere between 1877 and 1891, the book brings to life these dazzling large-scale displays in turn-of-the-century American fairs and festivals. It guides through the fascinating forms of crop art and butter sculpture, as they grew from state and regional fairs to a significant place at the major international exhibitions. The Minnesota State Fair’s Princess Kay of the Milky Way contest, Lillian Colton’s famed pictorial seed art, and the work of Iowa’s “butter cow lady,” Norma “Duffy” Lyon, are modern versions of this tradition.

Design involves envisioning what we need that doesn’t yet exist, and realizing possible futures better than what we have. This book applies that way of thinking about design to a range of poorly functioning systems – our schools, highways, and cities – and services – be they public, private, and non-profit – that either no longer meet our needs or that have underperformed for too long. We rarely think of systems and services as designed and, as a result, we tend to accept their failures the way we do the weather. But we should not give into such acquiescence. Designed every bit as much as the products we buy and the environments we inhabit, our systems and services deserve as much critical scrutiny and creative re-imagining as we would give any other design. This book, drawing from previously published essays by the author, makes the case for applying design thinking to the “invisible” systems we depend on for our daily lives and then shows what that might mean for our educational and belief systems, our infrastructure and public realm, and our political and economic systems. In the process, the author challenges the design assumptions that have led to so much poor performance: that our schools cannot teach creativity, that our governments cannot predict the disasters that befall us, that our health system will protect us from pandemics, that our politics will remain polarized, that our economy cannot avoid inequality, and that our industry cannot help but pollute the environment.

This book explores how a perception of children as imaginative and “naturally” creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II. I argue that educational toys, playgrounds, the smaller middle-class house, thousands of postwar schools, and children’s museums, were designed to cultivate an ideal of imagination in a growing cohort of Baby Boom children. Psychologists avidly studied creativity after 1950, and their research was embraced by the educational toy industry, invoked in parenting guides, taught in school arts classes, and erected in new school buildings and museums. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children met and countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, becoming an emblem of national revitalization. I describe how a belief in children’s capacity for imagination and independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that has not yet abated. I emphasize the ways that material goods and spaces embodied this abstract social and educational discourse. However, I also argue that things and spaces were not passive receptacles, but material actors that actively transformed a popular understanding of creativity during a crucial period of educational reform, economic expansion, and Cold War anxiety. Historicizing, rather than essentializing, the idea of childhood creativity, reveals how this notion continues to haunt everyday things, the built environment, and American culture.

Pictures of animals are now ubiquitous, but the ability to capture animals on film was a significant challenge in the early era of photography. This book takes us back to the time when Americans started taking pictures of the animal kingdom, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the moment when photography became a mass medium and wildlife photography an increasingly popular genre. The book investigates the way photography changed our perception of animals. It analyzes how photographers created new ideas about animals as they moved from taking pictures of taxidermic specimens in so-called natural settings to the emergence of practices such as camera hunting, which made it possible to capture images of creatures in the wild. By combining approaches in visual cultural studies and the history of photography, the book goes further to argue that photography has been essential not only to the understanding of wildlife but also to the conceptual separation of humans and animals.

In any decade the work of only a very few artists offers a template for understanding the culture and ideas of their time. Photographer Diane Arbus is one of these rare artists, and this book returns Arbus’s work to the moment in which it was produced and first viewed to reveal its broader significance for analyzing and mapping the culture of the 1960s. While providing a unique view of the social, literary, and artistic context within which Arbus worked, this book also measures the true breadth and complexity of her achievement. The book considers Arbus less in terms of her often mythologized biography—a “Sylvia Plath with a camera”—but rather looks at how her work resonates with significant photographic portraiture, art, social currents, theoretical positions, and literature of her times, from Robert Frank and Richard Avedon to Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. It shows how her incandescent photographs seem to literalize old notions of photography as trapping a layer of the subject’s soul within the frame of a picture. For Arbus, “auguries”—as in “Auguries of Innocence,” her 1963 photographic spread in Harper’s Bazaar—conveyed the idea that whoever was present in her photograph could attain legendary status.

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counter hype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This book aims to demonstrate how such critical work can be done. This book offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, the book deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world. The book combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.

Distant Wars Visible brings a new perspective to the enduring question about the efficacy of conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy. In the twenty-first century, visuality has been a pivotal technology in the United States’ militaristic pursuit of its national security objectives as well as in critiques of the nation at war. This book analyzes both mainstream media and alternative and radical visual projects to understand how representations of U.S. militarism navigate in, through, and around national security logics. Visual witnessing, I argue, often remains bound up in national security agendas even as it may stretch beyond those agendas into other terrains of possibility. In the past several years, important new studies have been published about human rights, militarism and visual cultures. In conversation with these texts, this book’s interdisciplinary critical feminist approach consider how factors like gender, race and sexuality construct often competing visualizations of identity in a range of media from graphic narrative and film to conflict photography and battlefield souvenirs. The analytic of ambivalence offers a critical methodological approach that examines how contingencies and contradictions in visual culture shape the politics and ethics of witnessing. Distant Wars Visible’s main objective is to gain further insights into how the ethical imperative that motivates the desire to look at human insecurities in times of warfare is intimately bound up in the politics of recognition.

Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade, L.H.O.O.Q., which he created by drawing a moustache and goatee on a commercial reproduction of the Mona Lisa, precipitated a radical reevaluation of the meaning of art, the process of art making, and the role of the artist. This book explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in Duchamp’s work—and in Dada and Surrealist art more broadly—to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fuel and springboard for questioning art’s fundamental premises. The book argues that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp’s readymades and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrate the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, for instance, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation. And if Duchamp literally drew on art, he also did so figuratively, thus raising questions of creativity and artistic influence. Equally destabilizing, the book writes, was Duchamp’s idea that viewers actively participate in the creation of the art they are viewing. In addition to close readings ranging across Duchamp’s oeuvre, even his neglected works on chess, the book provides interpretations of works by other figures who affected Duchamp’s thinking and collaborated with him, notably Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, as well as artists who later appropriated and redeployed these gestures, such as Enrico Baj, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Wilson. As the book makes clear, these associations become paradigmatic of a new, collective way of thinking about artistic production that decisively overturns the myth of artistic genius.

Since its inception in the 1960s, the earth art movement has sought to make visible the elusive presence of nature. Though most often associated with monumental land-based sculptures, earth art encompasses a wide range of media, from sculpture, body art performances, and installations to photographic interventions, public protest art, and community projects. This book analyzes the development of the earth art movement, arguing that such diverse artists as Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, James Turrell, Jackie Brookner, Olafur Eliasson, Basia Irland, and Ichi Ikeda are connected through their elucidation of the earth as a domain of ethical concern. The book contends that in basing their works’ relationship to the natural world on receptivity rather than representation, earth artists take an ethical stance that counters both the instrumental view that seeks to master nature and the Romantic view that posits a return to a mythical state of unencumbered continuity with nature. By incorporating receptive surfaces into their work—film footage of glaring sunlight, an aperture in a chamber that opens to the sky, or a porous armature on which vegetation grows—earth artists articulate the dilemma of representation that nature presents.

This book provides a nonlinear look at the engagement of the postwar avant-garde with Eastern spirituality, a context in which the German artist Joseph Beuys appears as an uneasy shaman. Centered on a highly publicized yet famously inconclusive 1982 meeting between Beuys and the Dalai Lama, arranged by the Dutch artist Louwrien Wijers, this book explores the interconnections among Beuys, the Fluxus movement, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice. Building from the resonance of felt, the fabric, in both Tibetan culture and in Beuys’s art, the book takes as his point of departure Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in A Thousand Plateaus of felt as smooth space that is “in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction,” its structure determined by chance as opposed to the planned, woven nature of most fabrics. Felt is thus seen as an alternative to the model of the network: felt’s anarchic form is not reducible to the regularity of the net, grid, or mesh, and the more it is pulled, tweaked, torn, and agitated, the greater its structural integrity. Felt thus invents its methodology from the material that represents its object of inquiry and from this advances a reading of the avant-garde. At the same time, the book demonstrates that it is sometimes the failures of thought, the disappointing meetings, even the untimely deaths that open portals through which life flows into art and allows new conjunctions of life, art, and thought. The book explores both the well-known engagement of Fluxus artists with Eastern spirituality and the more elusive nature of Beuys’s own late interest in Tibetan culture, arriving at a sense of how such noncausal interactions—interhuman intrigue—create culture and shape contemporary art history.

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.