New Books in Art

Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern industry, and a history of aristocratic consumption of porcelain as these stories open into an economic history of globalized markets, as well as a social history of sorts of Central Europe’s fledgling bourgeois and lower-class consumer public. Marchand traces these interlocking stories across three centuries, from the first European firing of porcelain in 1708 under the supervision of Johann Friedrich Böttger to the present day, where contemporary tastes threaten to consign the white tableware of Europe’s past to the flea markets of today. Porcelain in Marchand’s hands acts as something like an objet de memoire, to think of Pierre Nora and other scholars’ work on national histories. One of the book’s many virtues is the sense of Professor Marchand reassembling a continental pattern out of several shards.Porcelain, as Professor Marchand writes, “is a rich and complicated adventure, in which we not only visit lavishly decorated palaces but also linger in blisteringly hot craft workshops and spartan working-class homes. Though actual porcelain objects in all their splendor and strangeness play a central role, the focus is really on the people who made, marketed, and purchased them, whether they were princes, or peddlers, or middle-class housewives.” It is also an attempt to write Central European history in a new way, one that the author hopes will be taken up by other scholars of history and material culture.John Raimo is a PhD. Candidate in History at NYU finishing up my dissertation (on postwar publishing houses) this summer in European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Today I talked to Carla Diana about her new book My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).Carla Diana is a robot designer responsible for the creative aspects of Diligent Robotics’ new hospital service robot named Moxi. She created and leads the 4D Design masters program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, wrote the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, LEO the Maker Prince, and she cohosts the Robopsych Podcast.The author is intrigued by where technology is headed—the “electronic guts” of high-tech offerings--at the same time that she never loses focus on what kind of gut reaction a user will have in interacting with a product. This episode therefore ranges from discussing modalities central to Diana’s work (sound, movement, and lighting) to addressing how important it is for designers and engineers alike to engage in “bodystorming” exercises that align everyone around what the user’s experience will be like. Delight and ease of use are both key criteria in achieving success. If there’s a Frankenstein aspect to helping bring robots “alive,” fortunately Diana is somebody concerned with all the ethical challenges that arise.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In The Power of Artistic Thinking: Think Like an Artist and Innovate (Common Ground, 2019; 2021 paperback), Marisol D’Andrea, PhD explores the potential of artistic thinking and shares practical guidance to help us all harness the power of artistic thinking. Through in-depth interviews and conversations with artists, scholars, and thought leaders, she has arrived at core commonalities in artistic thinking: passion and obsession; imagination and belief; observation and connection; visualization and pondering; learning and exploration; and practice and repetition. In this book, she examines these elements and translates them into practical exercises.D’Andrea writes, “Through the arts, I learned—and I hope you will learn, too—how to prioritize your thinking (i.e., follow your passions), how to think (e.g., imagine), when to think (e.g., explore), and to discover who you are (e.g., self-transform) … It was artistic thinking that empowered me and spurred me on to write this book.”Marisol D'Andrea, PhD is a visual artist, illustrator, author, and multidisciplinary researcher. She holds a doctoral degree in Leadership, Higher and Adult Education from the University of Toronto and currently resides in Canada.Susan Grelock Yusem, PhD, is independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s The General’s Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance. It is also the subject of the most recent book in the Research/Practice edited by Anthony Downey.Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts, the series examines the interdisciplinary research methods that artists employ in their practices. In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to generating research, what forms of knowledge do artists produce?Anthony Downey, editor of The General's Stork (Sternberg Press, 2020) speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about the work of Heba Y. Amin and her exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms, London, which he curated and the epistemic implications of cartographic imaging and computer vision for our understanding and command of territories. Downey also discusses I'm Good at Love, I'm Good at Hate, It's in Between I Freeze, a volume in the series that follows the artist Michael Rakowitz as he attempts to restage a concert by the singer Leonard Cohen that never took place in the occupied Palestinian territory.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Today I talked to Nicole Tersigni about her book Men to Avoid in Art and Life" (Chronicle Books, 2020).Nicole Tersigni is a comedic writer experienced in improve comedy and women’s advocacy. She lives in metro Detroit with her husband, daughter, and two dogs.This episode takes a romp through five types of men to avoid like the plague: the mansplainer, the concern troll, the comedian, the sexpert, and the patronize. Tersigni talks through what each type means and an example from her book pairing an older painting (often from either the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Rijksmuseum) with her own contemporary caption. In turn, host Dan Hill adds in what type of emotional response stood out among the women depicted per type of men, e.g. anger in response to mansplainers, contempt for concern trolls, fear in response to sexperts, and the slightest of smiles in dealing with a patronizer.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world.In Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern (Houghton Mifflin, 2021), Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Now in its fifth edition, Analyzing Architecture has become internationally established as the best introduction to architecture. Aimed primarily at those wishing to become professional architects, it also offers those in disciplines related to architecture (from archaeology to stage design, garden design to installation art), a clear and accessible insight into the workings of this rich and fascinating subject. With copious illustrations from his own notebooks, the author dissects examples from around the world and all periods of history to explain underlying strategies in architectural design and show how drawing may be used as a medium for analysis.This new edition of Analyzing Architecture is revised and expanded. Notably, the chapter on ‘Basic Elements of Architecture’ has been enlarged to discuss the ‘powers’ various architectural elements offer the architect. Three new chapters have been added to the section on ‘Themes in Spatial Organization’, covering ‘Occupying the In-between’, ‘Inhabited Wall’ and ‘Refuge and Prospect’. Two new examples – a Mud House from Kerala, India and the Mongyo-tei (a tea house) from Kyoto, Japan – have been added to the ‘Case Studies’ at the end of the book. The ‘Select Bibliography’ has been expanded and the ‘Index’ revised.Works of architecture are instruments for managing, orchestrating, modifying our relationship with the world around us. They frame just about everything we do. Architecture is complex, subtle, frustrating… but ultimately extremely rewarding. It can be a difficult discipline to get to grips with; nothing in school quite prepares anyone for the particular demands of an architecture course. But this book will help.Analyzing Architecture is the foundation volume of a series of books by Simon Unwin exploring the workings of architecture. Other books in the series include Twenty Buildings Every Architect Should Understand and Exercises in Architecture.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Korean War is now America's seminal war. It was the first war conducted with the new United Nations, the first war fought against the Chinese Communists, and the first modern war the US didn't win. Louis Nelson designed the mural wall at the Korean Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington DC. His just published memoir, Mosaic: War Monument Mystery, An Historical Memoir (239 Productions, 2021), is his story about the Korean War today and its Memorial. It is a story of death, rescue and growth. MOSAIC examines how this war affected him and its veterans--then and now--leading to the design of the memorial. It situates the memorial in its context featuring the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials. It is also the story of one of the late 20th century's great designers. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books.A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Like the transdiscipline of cybernetics, the philosophical movement known as Existentialism rose to prominence in the decade following World War II, was communicated to the general public by a handful of charismatic evangelizers who, for a time, became bona fide celebrities in popular culture, generated much excitement and innovation on university campuses across Europe, the Americas and beyond, and, in subsequent decades, seemed to fade to the periphery of intellectual discourse with some declaring both movements dead and others keeping the faith in small circles of committed artists, scholars, and practitioners. Along the way, both movements have found some of their strongest expressions through works of art; from the plays and novels of some of existentialisms key players, to the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition that toured America after its original incarnation at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London.In the early decades of the 21st century, well into the so-called Information and at a historical moment fraught with new and amplified ethical challenges, both fields seem, to many, to be poised for a comeback. One such observer is Steve Dixon, whose monograph, Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance (Routledge, 2020), not only explores the often surprising conceptual overlaps between the two fields but manages to offer nothing less than an original aesthetic theory fusing perspectives from the philosophy of Existentialism with insights from the ‘universal science’ of cybernetics to provide a new analytical lens and deconstructive methodology to critique art.In this study, Steve Dixon examines how a range of cutting edge contemporary artists’ works embody core ideas from such Existentialist philosophers as Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre on freedom, being and nothingness, eternal recurrence, the absurd, and being-for-others while, simultaneously, engaging in complex explorations of concepts proposed by such cyberneticians as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Gregory Bateson on information theory and ‘noise’, feedback loops, circularity, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence.Dixon’s ground-breaking book demonstrates how fusing insights and knowledge from these two fields can throw new light on pressing issues within contemporary arts and culture, including authenticity, angst and alienation, homeostasis, radical politics, and the human as system. Join me now as Dixon, in his own words, “talks for England” in an energetic romp across these complex, overlapping intellectual and aesthetic landscapes.Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art