New Books in Art

Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts.  Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern period. Inspired by the archaeology of Foucault but using an approach that spans the history of science, art history, and visual studies, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) identifies a “specimen logic” through which images of insects were removed from their habitats, decontextualized, and mobilized into networks of regional and global exchange and circulation. Part I of the book traces the emergence of insects as subject matter for artistic representation, looking in turn at the work of Joris Hoefnagel, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Thomas Moffet, and still-life painters from 1580-1620. The choices made by these artists contributed to the transformation of ideas about nature as controllable and commodifiable. Part II shifts our attention to the later seventeenth century, and considers how the work of artists such as Robert Hooke and Maria Sibylla Merian helped visualize insects (as well as their own professional identities) anew across several media. Neri’s work urges us to reconsider some common binaries that tend to characterize thinking and writing about images in history: art/science, professional/amateur, image/object. To see some of the images that we talked about in the interview, check out the following links: Hoefnagel images can be found here, and the stag beetle is here. Digitized images from Aldrovandi’s work can be navigated to from here [site is in Italian]. The Van Der Ast image can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Daniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images. In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth century Hispanic world. In beautifully argued chapters, Bleichmar explores that ways that eighteenth century natural history expeditions were grounded in a visual epistemology where observation and representation were powerful tools for negotiating both scientific and imperial spheres. The “botanical reconquista” spanned fields, shops, gardens, and cabinets across the New World and the Old. Botanists, artists, and others employed images for collaboration and competition, developing distinct styles and practices for observing and representing the natural world. The expeditions’ taxonomic botanizing was ultimately more successful than their efforts to exploit the cinnamon, cinchona, and other products that comprised the “green gold” of the colonial herbarium. Nonetheless, they made imperial nature visible…even as they made much of the empire invisible. Enjoy the book! And be sure to check out the fifth chapter, which juxtaposes Casta paintings from Mexico with some fascinating and little-known paintings from Quito and Peru to deepen and extend our understanding of the visuality of Spanish empire in the eighteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Shih-Shan Susan Huang‘s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) is divided into two sections, devoted loosely to esoteric and exoteric realms of knowledge. The “Inner Chapters” of Part I of the book consider esoteric Daoist images associated with meditation, visualization, and breathing practices. These chapters take readers into a world of Daoist cosmography, considering images of the body and the cosmos and the relation between these realms. Ranging from body worms to star voyages, from images of heaven and the underworld to bird forms in True Form Charts, from maps of paradise to forms of writing, the images and objects in Pt. I collectively create an archive of Daoist imagery while being very careful to explain how particular forms of image did very specific types of work. The “Outer Chapters” of Pt. II of the book examine exoteric Daoist works, including the material culture and spatial design of Daoist ritual space, ritual performance, and liturgical paintings. These chapters bring our attention to the materiality and ephemerality of some Daoist images, introducing the production and interpretation of Daoist paintings and offering us a basis for comparing the Daoist context with that of Buddhist imagery. It is an exceptionally rich study that will no doubt influence many fields in East Asian studies. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and be seen by my peers. As Jennifer Hall-Witt explains in her fascinating book Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), that’s apparently why English notables went to the opera in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They dressed up, went out, and “made the scene.” All the while there was an opera being performed, but it doesn’t seem anyone was paying close attention to it. They milled about, traded glances, visited each other’s boxes, talked, joked and generally had a good time. That all changed in the second half of the century. Most significantly, people began to watch and listen to the opera instead of each other. Jennifer tells us why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s and 1960s. Cawthra reveals the complex interactions between socially conscious photographers, magazine editors, record producers, jazz critics and the musicians themselves. From swing to bebop to cool, to West Coast Jazz to hard bop, Cawthra’s book gives the reader fascinating photographic and biographical portraits of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane among others. The photographers, too, including Charles Peterson, Gijon Mili, Francis Wolff, William Claxton, Herman Leonard, William Gottlieb, and Roy DeCarava had nuanced and unique photographic styles. Cawtha also gives insight as to how African-American jazz musicians such as Gillespie, Davis, and Rollins attempted to control their own economic and image destinies within the ever-changing political economy of the record industry. Cawthra also explains how Life Magazine, the development of the Long Playing Record (LP), and the concurrent milestones in civil rights all influenced the photographic culture of jazz – and there is a fascinating section on the very conscious marketing of “West Coast Jazz” to emerging white suburban markets in the 50s and 60s. The complex confluences of such a wide depth and breadth of social history is bound to stimulate much thinking and raise many additional questions. Rich, thought-provoking, and with images and insights that stay with you: read it, look at the photos and think long and hard…there’s no end to the combination and permutations of analyses….like jazz itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to offer scholars across the humanities. The book looks at the experimental arts in postwar Japan in a study that ranges across works of experimental theater, film, video, dance, photography, poetry, essay, and other forms of text. Much of the study focuses on close readings of the work of artists who were experimenting with different modes of performance, and different ways of relating language, image, materiality, and time, to explore the possibilities of encounter from many different frames. Scholars of embodiment will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the histories of intimacy, of collectivity, and of materiality. There are also some fascinating characters along the way, including experimental theater troupes that set fire to cars and gave audience members drugs during performances, and characters that experimented with a “self-spanking machine.” The artists in Sas’ book consider the relationship between performance texts and mapping, experiment with darkness and blindness to challenge the notion of a performance as a fully perceptible experience, and use collective activity as a space to explore relationships, and to challenge assumptions about truth and power. In the course of these fascinating accounts and close readings, Sas introduces us to ways of thinking about crimes as “contagious,” and invites us to consider notions of the “Japanese body,” “Japan,” the “Orient,” and even “home” as counterfeit coins. It is an immensely stimulating study and will leave you with much to think about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of sources from architectural blueprints to oral interviews, Field’s book succeeds in both showing us new sides of characters we thought we knew, and in introducing a new cast of historical actors who helped shape the rise of urban modernity in Shanghai. Picking up Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (The Chinese University Press, 2010), readers join Field to listen to the jazz of expatriate Whitey Smith at the wedding of Chiang Kai-shek and Song Mei-ling, to learn dance hall etiquette along with “dance empresses” anointed in annual competitions, and to follow the gangsters, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs through the Dancer’s Uprising of 1948 and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do your home cookin’, but you can eat as if you did.” I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this. But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo‘s insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the “tobacco moor” to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the “moor” in mass advertising per se. It was only then, too, that they began to carve out an empire full of “moors” in southwest Africa. David skillfully connects the two phenomenon, showing that the latter tangibly altered the character of the former. The image of Africans in ads went from one that emphasized the exotic to one that stressed the exotic under German domination. Depictions that were almost entirely fanciful became much more concrete. Africans came to represent racial Untermenchen in the service of their German overlords. It was an appealing picture, and one the Germans would–unfortunately–not soon forget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

When I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift. The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates present and past encircling him, the packed bleachers and Bronx cityscape in the background; an exhausted and bloodied Y.A. Tittle kneeling on the gridiron grass on an afternoon of defeat; young Wilt Chamberlain, still in his uniform after the game, displaying a sheet of paper scrawled with “100”; Jesse Owens exploding into a sprint at the Berlin Games. But the image in the book that most captivated me was not a photograph. Instead, it was a painting: George Bellows’ 1924 oil of Luis Firpo knocking Jack Dempsey through the ropes in the first round of their fight at the Polo Grounds. I remember studying the colors, the scramble in the ringside seats, the passive expression of Firpo as he follows through his punch, and the unbelievable scene of Dempsey (who would then–even more unbelievably–go on the win the fight) falling from the ring. The painting remains for me an example of how art can capture the drama, the sounds, and the power of a sporting moment. Allen Guttmann offers many examples of the crossing of art and sport in Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011): pastoral scenes of hunters and fishermen in the early republic, the accomplished paintings of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins in the mid-19thcentury, and the pop art portraits of celebrity-athletes in the 1970s. But the book is not simply about sports in art. Instead, Allen looks at the parallel histories of these two forms of cultural expression. The similarities are surprising. As Allen points out at the start, both art and sports have no utilitarian value to society: “They serve no practical purpose.” Allen’s work is built on decades of writing about sports history, and a career of teaching American cultural history. You get a glimpse of his expertise and insight from the interview. But you don’t get to see the pictures. For that, you have to get the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Chapter 3 of Erin Haney’s excellent book Photography and Africa (Reaktion Books, 2010) there are seven photos taken in central Africa at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Six advertise progress – from the smartly dressed and armed native troops (though still barefoot) to a posed photograph of a caravan of ivory and a depiction of rubber tapping. These images were taken to show the success, the organization, and the wealth of the Congo to the people of Brussels, Antwerp and beyond. The seventh photo shows a man sitting silently next to two indistinct objects, with a bland backdrop of open ground and two or three palm trees. This photo was also taken to inform public opinion in Europe (mainly Britain), but in this case as part of a movement against Belgian interests (and atrocities) in the Congo. The two indistinct objects in front of the man, incidently, are the severed foot and hand of his murdered five year old daughter. Not all of the photographs in Erin’s book are as politically charged as these. The book is remarkable for its variety, from a publicity self-portrait of a pioneer West African photographer taken in the 1890s to photojournalism from the last days of Apartheid and images of more than a century of industrial development on the continent. I wasn’t sure whether an audio interview with the author of a book of photography would work, but I think it did. That’s partly thanks to Erin herself, and partly thanks to the book itself and the stories it has to tell. I hope you enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art