New Books in Art

Reading Winnie Wong's new book on image production in Dafen village will likely change the way you think about copying, China, and the relationship between them. Based on fieldwork that included artist interviews, studio visits, and participant observation alongside local officials, bosses, interpreters, foreign artists, buyers, and traders, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes readers into the production of images in a village in Shenzhen. After establishing what we're talking about when we talk about "copying" and "copies" in this context, Wong guides us through a series of media and spaces that collectively upend several assumptions that are often brought to understanding Dafen and its painters specifically, and copying and creativity in China more broadly. Indeed, understanding what Dafen painters are not is a crucial first step toward understanding what is happening in their work and home lives. Dafen painters, we learn, are not "especially unfree victims" of global capitalism or of totalitarian communism in a way that prevents them from making original and creative art. (In fact, Wong challenges us to think again about what and where "creativity" is, and how and by whom it is produced as a value.) Dafen painters do not work on a typical mass assembly-line. And their paintings are not simply "forgeries" of Western masterpieces. After coming to understand this, we learn about the painters and their work by visiting their workshops, reading about their life trajectories and the different sorts of training they receive, exploring propagandistic TV dramas and documentaries about them, and peering into some of the ways that artists working outside of Dafen (in Beijing, in Germany, in Amsterdam, and beyond) have understood and engaged with Dafen painting practices. It is an arresting and masterfully argued study and should be required reading for anyone interested in labor, art, and/or the history of authenticity and copying in modern China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a wonderful piece of visual anthropology by Ritu Gairola Khanduri, which uses the history of cartoons, from colonial to current times, to talk about various aspects of Indian society from the state, to political society to modernity. Through archival material and fascinating discussions with cartoonists, the book reveals the various ways in which cartoons talk in India, past and present.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (Penn State University Press, 2014), Melissa Dabakis takes readers on an unexpected journey from Boston to Rome to discover multiple American women sculptors working in studios, winning public commissions, and earning artistic renown in the mid-19th Century. The book navigates through the worlds of sculpture, feminism, American and Italian politics, slavery and abolition, expatriate circles, Roman culture, and Italian independence struggles. Dabakis illuminates the critical period from 1850 to 1876 when American women sculptors not only forged professional artistic careers but also participated in and impacted feminist and abolitionist movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press, 2015) guides readers into the scenic illusions of the Qing dynasty, focusing on pictorial illusions and the technologies that helped create and contextualize them in high Qing palaces, and especially under the reign of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-95). Imperial Illusions describes and explains a range of visual images and objects that were meant to trick the eye and delight the viewer, from illusionistic murals in tombs and temples, to massive wall- and ceiling-mounted paintings, diagrammed treatises on optics and vision, copperplate engravings, and more. Not only do these illusions help us understand Qianlong – especially when read alongside his poems – but they also inform a broader history of Sino-European artistic and technological exchange and help broaden the very notion of “Chinese painting.” This trans-disciplinary book is relevant not just to the history of art and of the high Qing, but also to the history of science and technology! Check out the website for Imperial Illusions for some wonderful multi-media accompaniments to the book! http://arthistorypi.org/books/imperial-illusions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can significantly inform how we see its art, literature, medicine, architecture, and more, Tweeting Da Vinci (Da Vinci Press, 2014) takes a deeply interdisciplinary approach to engaging the cultural history of Italy from the Etruscans to Da Vinci and beyond. The chapters explore the significance of volcanic activity, cave geology, lightning, gemstones, the healing powers of amber, underwater cities, and much more as they inform how we understand the histories of painting, religious practice, entombment, and the work of authors including Virgil, Dante, and Leonardo Da Vinci, among others. A pair of chapters focuses particularly closely on demonstrating how analyzing Da Vinci’s art from the perspective of geology and botany has helped to identify and authenticate his work and that of his students. Enjoy! Here’s the website for an upcoming conference on medical geology, a topic that Ann discusses during the interview: http://medgeo15.web.ua.pt/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Arts and culture are under threat in the age of austerity. This threat is underpinned by the misuse of the idea of participation in contemporary performance. This is one of the central arguments of Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2013) by Professor Jen Harvie. The book considers how arts and culture are changing in the era of neoliberalism, seeking to pinpoint the way that ideologies of individualisation, participation and creativity have, at best, ambivalent effects. The book sets out its argument by exploring the rise of working practices such as delegating and prosumption. The rise of the precarious labourer is linked with the rise of audience and spectator participation. Whilst this can have positive impacts, it is also part of shifting the basis for aesthetic work to the participant. A similar process occurs with the demand that the cultural practitioner become entrepreneurial- whilst this might make the practitioner more attentive to her audience it may also create an individualised, market driven cultural practice. These issues play out in place and space too, as the narrative of the creative city is contrasted with the forms of exclusion associated with contemporary issues of housing in the city. The book concludes by asking a fundamental question, as to how best to fund the arts, discussing the rise and risks of philanthropy and market modes of support. The book uses a host of examples, from contemporary art, theatre pop ups and cultural institutions. It will be vital reading for anyone interested in the state of culture today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on “object-oriented ontology” and related issues, it’s also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of “correlationism” or panpsychism, don’t quite understand what all of the recent humanities-wide Whitehead-related fuss is all about, and aren’t sure where to begin. After a helpful introduction that lays out the major terms and stakes of the study, seven chapters each function as stand-alone units (and thus are very assignable in upper-level undergrad or graduate courses) while also progressively building on one another to collectively advance an argument for what Shaviro calls a “speculative aesthetics.”The Universe of Things emphasizes the importance of aesthetics and aesthetic theory to reading and engaging the work of Whitehead, Harman, Meillassoux, Kant, Levinas, Bryant, and others as an ongoing conversation about how we understand, inhabit, and exist as part of a material world. It’s a fabulous (and fabulously clearly written!) work that I will be recommending widely to colleagues and students. During the course of the interview we talked a bit about the opportunities that electronic and web-based media have brought to life and work in academia. On that note, you can find Steve’s blog here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

I love picking up a historical monograph in which the footnotes count for a quarter or more of the total pages. Most students don’t share this strange love of mine. I’m therefore always trying to figure out ways to bring in other sorts of works that will engage students without giving up anything in terms of historical richness or depth of thought. To this end, I often assign “graphic histories” in my classes (aka comics). One that I recently used in class, and was deeply impressed with, was Gene Luen Yang‘s Boxers & Saints (First Second, 2013). This informative, thought-provoking, and deeply moving graphic history is set during the “Boxer Rebellion” (1898-1900), a massive anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement that rocked northern China. Each of the two volumes of this work focus on a different character, one an anti-Christian and anti-foreign Boxer leader, and the other a Chinese convert to Catholicism. Skillfully weaving these stories together, Gene Luen Yang provides a fascinating meditation on war, the meaning of heroism and sainthood, Chinese identity, and faith, all historically grounded in a careful reading of secondary sources by such great Chinese historians as Joseph Esherick and Paul Cohen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms.  The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador Dalí’s urinated-upon pen, the early history of art/engineering at Bell Labs, the technology of digital infrared visualization, the aesthetics of “Photoshop cinema,” bioart and its glow-in-the-dark bunnies, and the work of some amazing artists including Lillian Schwartz, Jeremy Blake, and many many others. It is a gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond. As you work through the book, I highly recommend searching the Web for some of the amazing work described in its chapters. I’m based in Canada and so some of the following links may not work for you: in that case, just try searching on your own for the title: The rock opera Battle for Milkquarious! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDMhwq3pcA Jeremy Blake, Winchester Redux http://vimeo.com/16485005 Zbigniew RybczyÅ„ski, Tango http://vimeo.com/9033947 Paper Rad: http://www.paperrad.org/ This site has some clips from Lillian Schwartz’z Proxima Centauri: http://lillian.com/kinetic/ You can browse video clips from WGBH’s New Television Workshop here: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art