New Books in Art

Writer and academic Anthony Gardner (NSK from Kapital to Capital, Politically Unbecoming) interviews Marko Ilić about his new book A Slow Burning Fire, which documents Yugoslavia's cultural output throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.This first comprehensive study of the former Yugoslavia's alternative art scene tells the origin stories of some of the most significant artists of the late twentieth century. In Yugoslavia from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, state-supported Students' Cultural Centers became incubators for new art. This era's conceptual and performance art—known as Yugoslavia's New Art Practice—emerged from a network of diverse and densely interconnected art scenes that nurtured the early work of Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), and others. In this book, Marko Ilić examines Yugoslavia's New Art Practice in light of the political upheavals of the 1980s.Countering the usual binary of official versus unofficial art, Ilić shows that the Students' Cultural Centers were an expression of Yugoslavia's “third way” political and economic system, which was founded on workers' self-management. Ilić examines key actions, gestures, and propositions affiliated with the New Art Practice, including the conceptual and dematerialized art practices that emerged from Zagreb's Student Center Gallery, the struggle of Belgrade's Students' Cultural Center (where Abramović performed her career-defining Rhythm 5), to break into the international art scene, the pre-Žižek culture of Ljubljana, and Sarajevo's miraculous dokumenta, held in the midst of Yugoslavia's disintegration.Produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How can sociology help us understand art and music? In The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music: New Directions and New Discoveries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), the editor Lisa McCormick, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, draws together the latest research in cultural sociology that examines art and music. Global in scope, and eclectic in choice of subjects and methods, the book is united by the shared approach of the strong programme in cultural sociology. As a result, the book offers a cultural approach to cultural objects, setting new agendas and explaining controversies. The range of topics, both historical and contemporary, make the book essential reading across both arts and humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in art and music!Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In this episode, I was joined by Nicholas Scott Baker to discuss his book, In Fortune’s Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Professor Baker is an Associate Professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia interested in the political and economic cultures of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Renaissance Italy.In this fascinating new book, Professor Baker reveals how Renaissance Italians developed a new concept of the future as unknown time-yet-to-come. As In Fortune’s Theater makes clear, nearly everyone in Renaissance Italy seemingly had the future on their minds. Authorities in important commercial hubs such as Genoa, Venice, Rome, and Florence legislated against overzealous betting on the future. Merchants filled their commercial correspondence with a lexicon of futurity. Famed painters such as Caravaggio, Giorgio Vasari, and Paolo Veronese manipulated the existing iconography of the figure of Fortuna into a moral allegory about unseized opportunity. And seemingly every important Renaissance Italian intellectual including Petrarch, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Poggio Bracciolini, Leon Battista Alberti, Laura Cereta, Giovanni Pontano, Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, and Baldassare Castiglione cared deeply about time-yet-to-come.Baker’s book is a rich, multilayered examination of the problems of risk, fortune, and the future in the Renaissance, and it should have broad appeal to anyone interested in the economic and political culture of early modern Europeans.Michael Paul Martoccio is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in the economic and military historian of the early modern Mediterranean. I am especially interested in how early modern economic practices – consumerism, market culture, and the commercialization of war – shaped notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and political geography. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at martoccio@wisc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

This episode features discussions with Thomas Weaver (Senior Acquisitions Editor for Art and Architecture) and Victoria Hindley (Acquisitions Editor in Visual Culture and Design) about publishing in the fields of art, architecture, and visual culture, as part of our virtual attendance of the 2021 College Art Association Conference. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book.The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the varying perspectives and approaches of a group of artists who challenged the dominance of white heterosexual men in the canon of contemporary art. The many artists discussed and displayed here do not make up a “movement” or a school or a chronological progression, but represent the diverse interests and activities of artists across a decade and beyond. They grapple with black nationalism, anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, anti-Thatcherism, black feminism, black queer subjectivity, psychoanalysis, forms of narrative and documentary image-making, in different ways and through different modes of representation across a range of media.The book, which grows out of a series of exhibitions that began in 2014, offers essays, close readings of selected works, panel discussions, and archival presentations, bringing together different voices and generational perspectives. Contributions come from the artists themselves, established scholars, and younger practitioners, critics, and art historians. They discuss the exhibitions, call for a reappraisal of dominant art historical approaches, and consider the use and role of the archive in artworks; look at works by Mona Hatoum, Martina Atille, Said Adrus, Chila Kumari Burman, and Pratibha Parmar; and present key documents and other material.Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How does the art market work? In Contemporary Art from Nigeria in the Global Markets: Trending in the Margins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Jonathan Adeyemi, who holds a PhD from, and was formerly Associate Lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at, Queen’s University Belfast, explores the unequal power dynamics of contemporary at by focusing on the case study of Nigeria. The book draws on a wealth of historical and theoretical knowledge, alongside detailed engagements with art history, sociology, and cultural policy themes, to show how and why contemporary artists from Nigeria are not afforded the same status as their western counterparts. An important addition across a range of academic fields, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in art today.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Michael Truscello, author of Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure, discusses the ways in which infrastructure determines who may live and who must die under contemporary capitalism.In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this “infrastructural brutalism”—a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.Truscello explores the necropolitics of infrastructure—how infrastructure determines who may live and who must die—through the lens of artistic media. He examines the white settler nostalgia of “drowned town” fiction written after the Tennessee Valley Authority flooded rural areas for hydroelectric projects; argues that the road movie represents a struggle with liberal governmentality; considers the ruins of oil capitalism, as seen in photographic landscapes of postindustrial waste; and offers an account of “death train narratives” ranging from the history of the Holocaust to postapocalyptic fiction. Finally, he calls for “brisantic politics,” a culture of unmaking that is capable of slowing the advance of capitalist suicide. “Brisance” refers to the shattering effect of an explosive, but Truscello uses the term to signal a variety of practices for defeating infrastructural power. Brisantic politics, he warns, would require a reorientation of radical politics toward infrastructure, sabotage, and cascading destruction in an interconnected world.The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

An extended conversation between Lauren Fournier, writer, independent curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism and writer, educator and philosopher McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Capital Is Dead, Reverse Cowgirl.)Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Tai Shani (Turner Prize winning artist, educator and author of Our Fatal Magic) and Amy Hale (anthropologist, folklorist, and writer) discuss the work of artist, occultist and writer Ithell Colquhoun to celebrate the publication of Amy’s book Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gully.This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic.Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Lauren Fournier, writer, independent curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism discusses her forthcoming book with writer, educator and philosopher McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Capital Is Dead, Reverse Cowgirl.)In the 2010s, the term “autotheory” began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the self—divisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir “I”; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art