New Books in Art

Everyone will lose someone they love at some point in their life; a spouse, a parent, or a child. Having to deal with the clothes or personal effects that remain can be a heartbreaking experience. It is a challenge: what is one to do with all the small and large items that made up the material life of the one who’s gone - store them in the attic? Discard them? Donate them to charity or call the junkman?In his recently released book, Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects, artist and writer Jay Garfinkel found another way. His unique book contains photographs of the personal effects of victims of terror attacks in Israel. He gave the families a way to preserve a piece of their legacy through a fine art photograph of their cherished object.The subtitle of the book, Memory and Cherished Objects, was selected, says Garfinkel, because "the person we have lost will not make any new memories, so we need to create a space for them in our life. Heirlooms create a space where memory happens.”The American-Israeli artist Jay Garfinkel tragically lost his son in middle age. His response was to create a dozen fine art photographs of his son's most treasured possessions that stirred memories. His exhibit-sized prints freed him to throw away everything else. It gave him some comfort. But real comfort came after he agreed to work with OneFamily, an Israeli NGO that assists families affected by terror and war. Over a period of 14 months, he met with 33 Israel families whose loved ones were murdered in terror attacks—and with their cooperation, he selected an object of the deceased, which he then documented as a still life photograph.Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects describes his journey meeting families of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds in different parts of the country. Garfinkel recorded intimate conversations about love, loss, and finding one's equilibrium by helping others find their way.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021).Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.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

There has recently been a sharp increase in cases where corporations have been sued by street and graffiti artists because their artworks had been used and exploited without the artists’ authorization, for example in advertising campaigns, as backdrops in promotional videos, or as decorating elements of products. This trend shows and confirms that these forms of art are vulnerable. They are actually more exposed to unauthorized exploitation (and destruction as well) than works of fine art, because they are placed in the public eye.Protecting Art in the Street: A Guide to Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti (Dokument Forlag, 2020) explains, with words and images, how copyright laws apply to street art and graffiti, and how they can be of help to creators within these artistic communities. Knowledge about these issues does matter. There has recently been a spike in legal actions or complaints against corporations and individuals that have tried to exploit commercially street artworks without the artists’ consent; and more importantly without sharing with them any profit. Also, legal actions have been brought by street artists to fight the destruction of their pieces.By adopting a simple language, Protecting Art in the Street constitutes an easy-to-understand guide aimed at navigating street artists and graffiti writers through otherwise difficult and intricate legal issues concerning the protection of their artistic outputs.Nick Pozek is Assistant Director at the Parker School of Foreign & Comparative Law at Columbia University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

As a Thai-Australian woman artist, Phaptawan Suwannakudt has long battled prejudice and discrimination relating to her gender. This disappointment with society’s dictates features at the heart of Phaptawan’s artistic practice. Spanning more than four decades, Phaptawan’s rich body of work includes paintings, sculptures and installations, informed by Buddhism, women’s issues and cross-cultural dialogue. Now her talents are on display on the global stage once again, in ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ from 26 March to 5 September 2021.In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Phaptawan Suwannakudt chats to Dr Natali Pearson about identity, power, and placemaking in the space in-between, recounting how she overcame hurdles to her artistic education and practice in what was once a male-dominated art scene, to become one of Australia’s and Thailand’s most prominent female artists.Phaptawan Suwannakudt (born in Thailand, 1959), is an internationally acclaimed Thai contemporary artist. She trained as a mural painter with her father, the late master Paiboon Suwannakudt, and subsequently led a team of painters that worked extensively in Buddhist temples throughout Thailand in the 1980s-90s. She was also involved in the women artists group ‘Tradisexion’ in 1995, and later in ‘Womanifesto’. Phaptawan relocated to Australia in 1996 where she completed a Master of Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, Thailand and internationally. Most recently, her work was featured in 'Beyond Bliss', the Inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale in 2018-2019, as well as in the 2020 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne, Australia. Many of her works are held in public and private collections locally and overseas, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Thailand, the National Gallery Singapore, and the Thai Embassy in Paris, among others. You can find more information about Phaptawan Suwannakudt on her website: phaptawansuwannakudt.com/.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020) could be described as a memoir in essay form. Collecting pieces from the past two decades, this book covers Luc Sante's childhood as an immigrant from Belgium, his engagement with the downtown arts scene that gave rise to punk, and the eventual downfall of a version of New York that may have been dangerous but certainly allowed space for creative experimentation, even failure. It also includes essays covering sideshow photography, detective fiction, and experimental film, and profiles of figures including Barbara Epstein, H.P. Lovecraft, and Vivian Maier. As Sante says in this interview, in the war between poetry and prose he is a non-combatant: these essays often read as prose poems in the deep lyricism and experimentation with form.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In his latest authoritative book, Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft Brumfield frames the life and work of pioneering color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), while also putting his own magisterial career into sharp perspective. Brumfield updates and interprets several of Prokudin-Gorsky’s iconic images with his own late twentieth and early twenty-first century versions, and the result is an extraordinary study of two photographers and two Russias.Prokudin-Gorsky was a polymath, inventor, explorer, entrepreneur, and eminently talented photographer, who pursued an over-arching goal of bringing color to the emerging technology of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky combined a strong grounding in both the science and the arts, which gave him easy mastery over the technology. But he was also a gifted entrepreneur, able to see the vast mainstream potential of photography, and throughout his career, he championed the rights of photographers and led the industry in its professional development. From the beginning of his professional life, he pursued his goal to produce color photography, but throughout his career, he was a vocal champion for his colleagues, assuming the editorship of Russia’s “Amateur Photography,” and campaigning successfully for photographers to assert ownership of their work.Prokudin-Gorsky’s groundbreaking use of glass slides to produce color soon came to the attention of the Imperial Family — passionate shutterbugs themselves — and Prokudin-Gorsky secured an invitation to present his slides to Nicholas II. The tsar became a staunch supporter of Prokudin-Gorsky, ordering the Minister of Ways and Communications to furnish Prokudin-Gorsky with a specially designed railway car for his laboratory, and access to river transport. The tsar also gave Prokudin-Gorsky an enviable laissez-passer for the entire empire, and an order that enabled the photographer to solicit aid from all government officials. For the next six years, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout Imperial Russia on several regional expeditions, sponsored by the Ministry of Ways and Communications, capturing the emerging industrial might of the empire. But along the way, he also captured the natural beauty of Russia’s wilder corners: the majestic Caucasus, the arid desert of Central Asia, and the dense forests of the Urals.Did Prokudin-Gorsky understand that he was documenting a world that would soon disappear? For disappear it soon did, and Prokudin-Gorsky fled Russia in 1918, bringing with him thousands of color slides. Fast forward half a century, and enter William Craft Brumfield, who began documenting Russia’s architecture in the 1970s. He was a natural choice to curate a public exhibition of Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection for the Library of Congress in 1986, and his association with the Library and the collection has continued to this day. “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” is the magnificent culmination of this decades-long collaboration.William Craft Brumfield is the foremost Western expert on Russian architecture, and taught at some world’s most renowned centers of Slavic studies, including Harvard, Tulane, and the Pushkin Institute. In 2019, in recognition of Brumfield’s contribution to Russian culture, President Putin awarded him with Russia’s highest honor for a foreigner: The Order of Friendship.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Tavia Nyong’o's Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018), examines a broad range of artists and disciplines, from Adrian Piper to Kara Walker to the meaning of the auroch's in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Throughout the book, Nyong’o draws the reader's attention to the ways Black and queer artists construct alternative worlds in a context of brutality and discrimination. Negotiating between the twin poles of Afro-futurism and Afro-pessimism, Nyong’o summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How to understand propaganda art in the post-truth era—and how to create a new kind of emancipatory propaganda art. Propaganda art — whether a depiction of joyous workers in the style of socialist realism or a film directed by Steve Bannon — delivers a message. In Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2019), Jonas Staal argues that propaganda does not merely make a political point; it aims to construct reality itself. Political regimes have shaped our world according to their interests and ideology; today, popular mass movements push back by constructing other worlds with their own propaganda.Jonas Staal speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about his proposal for a new model of emancipatory propaganda art — one that acknowledges the relationship between art and power and takes both an aesthetic and a political position in the practice of world-making.Jonas Staal is a scholar of propaganda and a self-described propaganda artist. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016–ongoing). With BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, he co-founded the New World Academy (2013–16). His most recent project Collectivize Facebook exploring legal ways to return the ownership of data in its many forms to the collective ownership of the users of software platforms.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary 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

The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke UP, 2019), speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about what she calls decommodified labor — the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which artists relate to work, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own precarity and why the increasing presence of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor.Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She's the author of Scandals and Abstraction (about which she spoke on an earlier episode), and co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism. She's currently working on expanding her project Marx for Cats, initiated with Caroline Woolard and Or Zubalsky.La Berge's discusses the proliferation of animals in contemporary art starting 45 minutes in the episode. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary 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

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. In Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (U Illinois Press, 2020), GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.Order this book through University of Illinois Press and use this code to get a discount: F20UIPGerShun Avilez is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism.John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. John is on Twitter at @marsjf3. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art