New Books in Art

In A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art (Duke UP, 2022) Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and ideas across generations, Grant demonstrates that for many contemporary feminist artists, the present moment can only be understood through an embodied engagement with history in which feminist pasts are reinhabited and reimagined.Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. 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, our host Sim Gill discusses the book Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste (2021) by Jonathan Gray.You’ll hear about: A brief history of the book and its connection to global studies of media and communication; The role of media and cultural studies in amplifying the voices of dislikers, and how can scholars in these fields better understand and appreciate the register of dislike; The method of refractive audience analysis as a way to understand how adaptations of media texts affect people's perceptions of the original texts; How paratexts can shape audience perceptions and understanding of a media product; How the gendered norms may hinder women from expressing dislike, and how this relates to larger cultural systems of dislike, including political contexts; Some recent developments that have added to or changed the initial arguments/findings in the book. About the bookDislike-Minded draws from over two-hundred qualitative interviews to probe what the media’s failures, wounds, and sore spots tell us about media culture, taste, identity, representation, meaning, textuality, audiences, and citizenship. The book refuses the simplicity of Pierre Bourdieu’s famous dictum that dislike is (only) snobbery. Instead, Jonathan Gray pushes onward to uncover other explanations for what it ultimately means to dislike specific artifacts of television, film, and other media, and why this dislike matters. You can find the book here by NYU Press.Author: Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work examines how media entertainment and its audiences interact, and examines how and where value and meaning are created. He is now Chief Editor of The International Journal of Cultural Studies, co-editor, with Aswin Punathambekar and Adrienne Shaw, of NYU Press’ Critical Cultural Communication book series, and I was recently nominated as an International Communication Association Fellow.Host: Sim Gill is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests concern the social and subjective effects of discourse and institutional politics as well as the interrelationships between discourse, epistemology, and subjectivity. Her master's thesis evaluated the meaning-making behind the term BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), commonly used to describe minority ethnic communities in Britain.Editor & Producer: Jing WangKeywords: Dislike, audience studies, media cultures, identity, representation, citizenshipOur podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Material objects—things made, used, and treasured—tell the story of a people and place. So it is for the Indigenous Sámi living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, whose story unfolds across borders and centuries, in museums and private collections. As described in From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture (University of Minnesota, 2023) by Barbara Sjoholm, the objects created by the Sámi for daily and ceremonial use were purchased and taken by Scandinavians and foreign travelers in Lapland from the seventeenth century to the present, and the collections described in From Lapland to Sápmi map a complex history that is gradually shifting to a renaissance of Sámi culture and craft, along with the return of many historical objects to Sápmi, the Sámi homeland.The Sámi objects first collected in Lapland by non-Indigenous people were drums and other sacred artifacts, but later came to include handmade knives, decorated spoons, clothing, and other domestic items owned by Sámi reindeer herders and fishers, as well as artisanal crafts created for sale. Sjoholm describes how these objects made their way via clergy, merchants, and early scientists into curiosity cabinets and eventually to museums in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and abroad. Musicians, writers, and tourists also collected Sámi culture for research and enjoyment. Sjoholm follows these objects and collections from the Age of Enlightenment through the twentieth century, when artisanship took on new forms in commerce and museology and the Sámi began to organize politically and culturally. Today, several collections of Sámi objects are in the process of repatriation, while a new generation of artists, activists, and artisans finds inspiration in traditional heritage and languages.Deftly written and amply illustrated, with contextual notes on language and Nordic history, From Lapland to Sápmi brings to light the history of collecting, displaying, and returning Sámi material culture, as well as the story of Sámi creativity and individual and collective agency.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book The Italian Renaissance and the Origin of the Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400-1800 (Cambridge UP, 2021) focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano developed innovative ways to read texts closely, paying attention to historical context, developing methods to determine a text's authenticity, and taking the humanities seriously as a means of bettering human life. Alongside such novel reading practices, technology – the invention of printing with moveable type – fundamentally changed perceptions of truth. Celenza also reveals how luminaries like Descartes, Diderot, and D'Alembert – as well as many lesser-known scholars – challenged traditional ways of thinking. Celenza's authoritative narrative demonstrates above all how the work of the early modern humanist philosophers had a profound impact on the general quest for human wisdom. His magisterial volume will be essential reading for all those who value the humanities and their fascinating history.Professor Christopher S. Celenza is the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He is also a professor of history and classics.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library, 2022) looks at threats to forest life across the globe. Dr. John Miller draws on literature, film and art to explore why woods matter to us, building on the ecological case for saving trees to raise the compelling question of their cultural value.The Heart of the Forest explores four enduring ways in which we connect to the woods – through Refuge, Sacredness, Horror and Hope – making fascinating links between emotion and genre. For Henry David Thoreau, the woods are places beyond civilisation; for Ursula LeGuin and C S Lewis, they are loaded with otherworldly potential; and for those fleeing captivity, they can provide a welcome sanctuary. Woods can strike fear, they can inspire wonder, they can be lovely, dark and deep.With full-colour illustration throughout, this book branches out into the British Library to find both the haunting and the hopeful in an unparalleled collection of books, manuscripts and photography. It tells a global story of how we understand trees, and its beautifully illustrated pages present a moving argument for conservation and renewal.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production. Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press, 2023) tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Daniel Neofetou's Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War (Bloomsbury, 2021) rereads Clement Greenberg's account of Abstract Expressionism through Adorno and Merleau-Ponty in order to contend that Greenberg's criticism in fact testifies to how the movement opposes the ends to which it was deployed in efforts of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War. With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female and non-white figures whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world which would do justice to them.Kaveh Rafie is a PhD candidate specializing in modern and contemporary art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation charts the course of modern art in the late Pahlavi Iran (1941-1979) and explores the extent to which the 1953 coup marks the recuperation of modern art as a viable blueprint for cultural globalization in Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work.Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women’s creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women.Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women’s creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Blank Canvas: Art School Creativity From Punk to New Wave (Intellect Publishing, 2022), Simon Strange explores the relationship between art and music within education in the United Kingdom. Strange examines the diverse range of people who broke down the barriers between art, life, and the creative self. He looks at art school Britain in the 1960s and ’70s, a hotbed of experimental DIY creativity that blurred the lines between art and music. Tracing lines from the Bauhaus “blank slate” through the white heat of the Velvet Underground and the cutting edge of the Slits, Blank Canvas draws on interviews with giants of the genre across the spectrums of music, gender, and race, from Brian Eno to Pauline Black, Cabaret Voltaire to Gaye Advert. What emerges is a portrait of the era as an eclectic range of musical styles and cultures fused, erupting into a diverse flow of outspoken originality. Providing a framework for creativity within the arts and education, the book illuminates a path for the cultural evolution of both musicians and artists hoping to create the future.Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (U Chicago Press, 2020), Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making. While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art