New Books in Art

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.  How are bodies reproduced, broken apart, and circulated?  And how do the representations of these processes help us understand transnational biopolitics? Heinrich takes up these questions and others in this pathbreaking work, one that will change how readers think about the body in contemporary art and media. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before the anointment of the “Mission School” by art-world arbiters at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latino artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performers, and filmmakers made the Mission their home and their muse. The Mission, home to Chileans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Mexican Americans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans never represented a single Latino identity. In tracing the experiences of a diverse group of Latino artists from the 1940s to the turn of the century, Cordova connects wide-ranging aesthetics to a variety of social movements and activist interventions. The book begins with the history of the Latin Quarter in the 1940s and the subsequent cultivation of the Beat counterculture in the 1950s, demonstrating how these decades laid the groundwork for the artistic and political renaissance that followed. Using oral histories, visual culture, and archival research, she analyzes the Latin jazz scene of the 1940s, Latino involvement in the avant-garde of the 1950s, the Chicano movement and Third World movements of the 1960s, the community mural movement of the 1970s, the transnational liberation movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s. Through these different historical frames, Cordova links the creation of Latino art with a flowering of Latino politics. Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Michelle C. Wang’s new book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) joins a growing body of scholarship on esoteric Buddhism in China. Her work is an important contribution for the way in which she draws together murals, portable paintings, ritual manuscripts, and diagrams connected to the Mandala of Eight Great Bodhisattvas. Wang traces how the use of this maṇḍala changed over time, and how it was shaped by the distinct cultural and linguistic milieu at Dunhuang, a key Buddhist site on the Silk Road.  This book will reshape scholarly understanding both of maṇḍalas in China, and also of Dunhuang as a Buddhist site. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How can art change the world? In Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism (Routledge, 2018), Paula Serafini, a Research Associate at the University of Leicester’s CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, explores art activism, looking at the power, potential, and problematics of art for political and social change. The book draws on a wealth of ethnographic material, including the author’s own art activism, to show the complexity as well as the importance of art activism. Moreover, the book offers a major theoretical contribution, fusing work on the public sphere, theories of aesthetics and politics, social movements theory, and theories of emotions and the body, with case studies including the high profile Art Not Oil coalition. The book will be essential reading for anyone interested in art, politics, and the potential to challenge and change our institutions and our politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In her new book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press, 2016), Pamela M. Potter, Professor of Germany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, carefully examines why historians and the general public have clung to a problematic narrative, which argued that the Nazi government had total control over the visual and performing arts. In order to address this narrative Potter details how historians after the fall of Nazi Germany have written about art, film, theater, music, dance and architecture. By investigating the cultural histories of Third Reich, she demonstrates how the exile, Allied occupation, the Cold War, combined with the complex definition of modernism have helped to sustain misconceptions about cultural life during the Third Reich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press, 2018) will change the way you think about the contents, forms, and significance of the palette of this critical moment in the history of modernity. Examining the impact of emergent color technologies on French visual culture and landscapes, Color in the Age of Impressionism includes, but moves beyond, a discussion of the works and colors of Impressionist artists to consider color theory, dye manufacture, flower cultivation and gardening culture, fireworks, chromolithographic reproduction and collecting, autochromes and neo-Impressionism. Along the way, this is a history of aesthetics, art, fashion, technical innovation, and the modern markets of hue, tone, contrast, harmony, and shade during the “color revolution” of the decades Kalba explores. Approaching the history of color in the period with the archival passion and conceptual tools of the historian of visual culture, the book pushes past the discussion and prescription of taste to delve deeper into the social, economic, technological, political, and cultural history of color in a France in the throes of the emergence of a consumer and capitalist society divided by class and other differences. A “bottom-up” history of color, Color in the Age of Impressionism takes seriously the question: How did ordinary French men and women understand realism, abstraction, and fantasy during the decades of the emergence of a modernity that included a spectrum of visuality, imagination, and techniques of representation? A winner of The College Art Association’s 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the study will be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the histories of art, looking, spectacle, culture, and everyday life in France in the decades before and after the fin-de-siècle. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Steven Lubar’s latest book Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven gets to the heart of what makes museums so interesting to both appreciate and critique. For him, the complex nature of the museum lies in the balancing act a curator and other museum staff must strike in both displaying a collection and making it open, accessible and useful while resisting the temptation to encourage or even force a certain way of looking or behaving among visitors. Structured along the four chapters collect, preserve, display and use, Steve tells the history of museums, from cabinets of curiosities and the Victorian model all the way to the contemporary in an easily accessible and very engaging way. In the last part of his book, the coda, he reveals how working with contemporary artist Mark Dion allowed him and his students from the Jenks Society for Lost Museums to think about museums in new ways, making them social and useful spaces that combine an object-centered and people-centered approach. Ricarda Brosch is a curatorial trainee at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Wojtek Sawa‘s The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard (National Center of Culture, 2016) is a bilingual Polish-English project that engages with the intricacies of remembering and forgetting as part of the individual’s personal history, which appears to challenge and collaborate with documented histories. Evolving out of personal memories, The Wall Speaks seeks to illuminate how the individual responds to overwhelming changes that shape and modify not only personal experiences but also collective memories. Although the emphasis is put on specific traumatic events—the core of the narrative constitutes stories of the Polish survivors who lived through World War II—this project reaches to individuals and communities which find themselves in a marginalized condition. The Wall Speaks is about Polish children and teenagers of World War II. It is also about people today who are prohibited from speaking with a voice of their own and are treated as less than fully human.” The personal stories/histories that Sawa assembles contribute to the re-arrangement of historical linearity, as well as to the formation of labyrinth-like connections between generations across time and space. This publication is part of a broader project that involves exhibitions, installations, and performances organized in museum, galleries, and academic institutions in the United States and Poland. Performative aspects that the project emphasizes invite dialogical communication that serves to maintain memories—personal and collective—and the continuity of humanistic aspirations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Catherine Soussloff discusses an area of Foucault’s development that has remained largely overlooked: his engagement with painting.  Indeed Foucault, we learn, described himself as a painter.  Throughout his career, he examined painting and the image as he pursued critical elements of his philosophical ideas. Soussloff examines Foucault’s engagement with periods in European art history that captured his attention in particular: the Baroque, mid-nineteenth century French painting, Surrealism, and figurative painting of the 1960s and 1970s. The book also considers Foucault’s interest in five artists: Velázquez, Manet, Magritte, Rebeyrolle, and Fromanger. Soussloff’s study reveals the importance of art in Foucault’s philosophy, and affirms the relevancy of Foucault in consideration of the role of the image in the twenty first Century Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Email: kellsworth@csudh.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Folklore scholar Joseph Sciorra is the Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Queens College which is part of the City University of New York.  He’s also a Brooklyn-born and -raised Italian American and in this episode of the New Books in Folklore podcast, he talks about his latest book, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) which “offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’s Italian American Catholics” (xiv). A transdisciplinary work, albeit firmly grounded in folklore scholarship and based on ethnographic research conducted over 35 years, this book is a comprehensive study of the myriad ways in which a people express their personal religious faith in tangible, dynamic, and often public forms.  The resulting yard shrines, sidewalk altars, elaborate presepi (Nativity scenes), and other manifestations – which also include extravagant Christmas light adornments of domestic exteriors, The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island, and a series of Brooklyn religious processions – usually receive no kind of official sanction. In fact, they are more likely to provoke disdain than approbation in most quarters.  Nonetheless, they allow residents to both meaningfully relate to and actively construct the city in a way that is unique to “New York” and also speak to a vernacular Italian-American ethos that sets great store by the concept of lavoro ben fatto, or “work done well”. In Built with Faith, Sciorra gives prominence to the voices of the creators of this landscape of devotional material culture, voices which he has captured over decades in formal interviews as well as less formal ‘phone conversations, and casual street-side chats. He also takes pains to present the history of the sorts of displays that are his subject. In addition, the volume includes numerous photographs of the sites in question, often taken by the author himself. As noted by another New Books in Folkore interviewee, Luisa Del Giudice, in her review for the Journal of American Folkore: “Sciorra has vividly demonstrated why the study and practice of such material culture is important and how individual human creativity informed by a spiritual and cultural core becomes an act of both personal and community identity. These art forms may not have much social capital, but Sciorra does. As Director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of New York, editor (Italian American Review), blogger (“Joey Skee,” for i-Italy), noted scholar and cultural activist, Sciorra, through Built with Faith, will make a high impact beyond the disciplines of vernacular culture; art and architecture; migration and ethnic, urban, religious studies; and beyond New York City. This is definitely a carefully crafted work—that is, un lavoro ben fatto.” Cindy R. Lobel, writing for the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Buildings and Landscapes journal, is similarly effusive: “Built with Faith makes a fine contribution to the literature on landscape, material culture, immigration, ethnic studies, and urban studies. It offers important information on the kinds of approaches Italian American New Yorkers have taken toward shaping the built environment of New York through their religious and cultural practices. Sciorra documents and offers wonderful thick descriptions of Italian American mat... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art