New Books in Art

How do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts, and what does cognitive science have to do with it? In Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2020), William Seeley offers a cognitive science-based account of how we engage with art, what it is that artworks do, and what artists do to make sure they do it. In his diagnostic recognition framework for locating art, artworks are communicative devices in which artists embed perceptual cues that enable the perceiver to categorize the work as intended and thereby unlock its meanings. Seeley, an associate professor at the University of Southern Maine, also considers how his framework might handle conceptual art, what goes wrong when a novice about art perceives an artwork, and the relation between the neuroscience of art and neuroaesthetics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP 2020), Jill Richards radically rewrites our understanding of first-wave feminism by demonstrating its proximity to international avant-garde movements including surrealism, Dada, and futurism. Using case studies including the movement for a proletarian birth strike, the anti-Nazi pranks of Claude Cahun, and the theatre of Ina Cesaire, Richards shows that our understanding of early 20th-century women activists as stodgy and conservative is woefully inadequate. While some among the turn of the century feminist movement saw suffrage as the primary goal, others dreamed of revolution, decolonization, and a world where art was life and life was art. Richards also shows how these forgotten feminisms sharply depart from the liberal understandings of human rights taking shape alongside them.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

On the Swahili coast of East Africa, monumental stone houses, tombs, and mosques mark the border zone between the interior of the African continent and the Indian Ocean. In Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press), Prita Meier explores this coastal environment and shows how an African mercantile society created a place of cosmopolitan longing.Meier understands architecture as more than a way to remake local space. Rather, the architecture of this liminal zone was an expression of the desire of coastal inhabitants to belong to places beyond their homeports. Here architecture embodies modern ideas and social identities engendered by the encounter of Africans with others in the Indian Ocean world.Prita Meier is Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art History, and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She co-edited with Allyson Purpura World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean (Krannert Art Museum, 2017).Co-hosted with Jenny Peruski a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her research focuses on ornamentation and bodily adornment in coastal Eastern Africa. She can be reached by email at jperuski@g.harvard.edu.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Tamar Herzig, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, the Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E Curiel Institute for European Studies, and as the Vice Chairperson of the Historical Society of Israel about her new book, A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press).Dr. Herzig took time out from her extraordinarily busy schedule to discuss her exciting new read, detailing the life of a very interesting, possibly tragic, definitely frustrating Italian Jew turned Christian goldsmith who was, on one hand, connected to the wealthiest and most powerful of families in Northern Italy, and, on the other, an inveterate gambler and general lout.Salomone da Sesso, was so good at his job that he was a verifiable celebrity. He had a very complex relationship with, and occasionally ran afoul of, his fellow Jews, so much so that he is charged with sodomy (amongst other things) and coverts to Christianity.As Ercole de Fidelis (Ercole the Faithful) he enjoyed the favor of the likes of Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia. When he lost their support, however, he fell into poverty. He was forced into exile and died unnoticed. We discuss microhistory, Jewish apostasy, sodomy, and the archival tradition.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

In Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press), Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East.He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities.Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural theorist of race, security, and empire in the late 20th and early 21st century United States.Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

As a teenager visiting the Andy Warhol Museum, Beth Pickens realized the importance of making art. As an adult, she has dedicated her life to empowering working artists. Intimate yet practical, Your Art Will Save Your Life (The Feminist Press at CUNY) helps artists build a sustainable practice while navigating the world of MFAs, residencies, and institutional funding.Beth Pickens is a Los Angeles-based consultant for artists and arts organizations. She provides career consultation, grant writing, fundraising, and financial, project, and strategic planning services for clients across the US. Before relocating to Los Angeles in 2014, Pickens was based in San Francisco and served as Senior Program Manager at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Managing Director of both RADAR Productions and the Queer Cultural Center.Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history, literature, and anthropology. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Those who have followed this podcast in the past, and those who follow developments in cybernetics in the present, will be no strangers to the name Ranulph Glanville. This brilliant, multiple-PhD holding polymath who co-mingled cybernetics with ethics, pedagogy, and, above all, design, has, through his voluminous body of ground-breaking papers, had a greater influence upon the field than, arguably, any scholar since Heinz von Foerster.At the 2015 Conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in Berlin, a group of self-proclaimed “Glanvillians” made up largely of former students and collaborators of Glanville, and a few interlopers like myself, met over a breakfast table at the Scandic Hotel, Potzdammer Platz, Berlin and, at the prompting of Thomas Fischer and Candy Herr, committed themselves to consolidating Glanville’s legacy and pointing the way to future extensions and investigations of his central claim that design is the practice of cybernetics and cybernetics is theory for design.The result is Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New (Springer) edited by Fischer and Herr. Featuring an eclectic blend of mid-career and senior scholars, the assembled chapters probe the vital relationship between conversation and design, the commitments of a radical constructivist epistemology, the virtues of being “out of control”, the embracing of error, and the seemingly paradoxical notion of getting “lost with rigour” across a wide array of artistic and scientific domains.As both the interviewer and a contributor to the book, I have, in the sprit of “walking our talk”, eschewed the erasure of error by editing and left, in full view, the meandering trail of a wandering and, at times, stumbling conversational journey featuring prolonged gaps in thinking, confusion between different articles by the same author, technical miscues, and even a pitched battle between my two cats, in order to model our commitment to process over perfection and personify Glanville’s favourite Samuel Beckett quote: “Try again, fail again, fail better.” I hope you find the stops along the way of this meandering journey as stimulating as I did.Thomas Fischer is a design researcher, epistemologist and cybernetician. He is a Professor and Director of Research at the Department of Architecture at XJTLU in Suzhou, China. Thomas is also a Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.Christiane M. Herr is an architectural researcher and educator focusing on the areas of structural design, digitally supported design, radical constructivism, design pedagogy and traditional Chinese approaches to creative thinking. Christiane is a Senior Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, where she directs the Master of Architectural Design as well as the Bachelor of Architectural Engineering programmes.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates this human condition. Observing how the concept of the happy future—which was at the core of the project of Soviet modernity—has lapsed from the post-Soviet imagination, Tlostanova shows how the possible way out of such a sense of futurelessness lies in the engagement with activist art. She interviews artists, art collectives, and writers such as Estonian artist Liina Siib, Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, and Azerbaijani writer Afanassy Mamedov who frame the post-Soviet condition through the experience and expression of community, space, temporality, gender, and negotiating the demands of the state and the market. In foregrounding the unfolding aesthesis and activism in the post-Soviet space, Tlostanova emphasizes the important role that decolonial art plays in providing the foundation upon which to build new modes of thought and a decolonial future.Madina Tlostanova is professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden).Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The prolific artistic production of Vesna Kittelson always maintains autobiographical connections: her installations of deconstructed books and her luminous drawings of fountains recall her childhood in Split, Croatia; her early color field paintings represent people and places she remembers; her war paintings portray the tragedy and emotion experienced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as her reactions to the 9/11 attack in the United States; the brilliant botanical watercolors in her artist’s books result from her research on Charles and Emma Darwin; and her dynamic cutout portraits of her students reveal bonds with fellow artists and immigrants of a later generation. A vital participant in the Minneapolis arts community for decades, Kittelson demonstrates her strong passion for creativity through her ever-evolving practice and extensive international career.Today I talked to Vesna about Synthesis: Lost and Found in America: The Art of Vesna Kittelson (Afton Historical Society Press-University of Minnesota Press, 2020)Contributors to the book include: Heather Carroll, Minnesota History Museum; Wendy Fernstrum; Joanna Inglot, Macalester College; Lyndel King, Weisman Art Museum; Camille LeFevre; John Lyon, Walker Art Center; Kerry A. Morgan, Minnesota College of Art and Design; Marcia Reed, Getty Research Institute; Susannah Schouweiler, Weisman Art Museum.Kirstin L. Ellsworth is an Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How has social media changed inequality in the cultural industries? In The Politics of Expertise in Cultural Labour: Arts, Work and Inequalities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Karen Patel, AHRC Leadership Fellow based at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University, considers the idea of expertise in cultural labour, examining how it is understood and displayed by cultural workers.The book draws on an extensive and deep engagement with key theories of work, expertise, and culture, as well as offering detailed empirical case studies of the everyday working lives of creative practitioners. Moreover, by analyzing the impact and importance of social media, the book offers an important insight into how inequality functions even where technology seems to offer an end to cultural hierarchy. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art