Results by title

This handsomely illustrated volume traces the intersections of art history and paintings restoration in nineteenth-century Europe.

Repairing works of art and writing about them—the practices that became art conservation and art history—share a common ancestry. By the nineteenth century the two fields had become inseparably linked. While the art historical scholarship of this period has been widely studied, its restoration practices have received less scrutiny—until now.

This book charts the intersections between art history and conservation in the treatment of Italian Renaissance paintings in nineteenth-century Europe. Initial chapters discuss the restoration of works by Giotto and Titian, framed by the contemporary scholarship of art historians such as Jacob Burckhardt, G. B. Cavalcaselle, and Joseph Crowe that was redefining the earlier age. Subsequent chapters recount how paintings conservation was integrated into museum settings. The narrative uses period texts, unpublished archival materials, and historical photographs in probing how paintings looked at a time when scholars were writing the foundational texts of art history, and how contemporary restorers were negotiating the appearances of these works. The book proposes a model for a new conservation history, object focused yet enriched by consideration of a wider cultural horizon.

In 2017, twenty-five years after its initial release, a new season of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s cultural touchstone Twin Peaks shook the world of television. In this volume, Franck Boulègue explores Twin Peaks: The Return through a philosophical, mythological, and spiritual lens. 

Divided into three sections, the book first examines the third season as expanded storytelling through the lens of Gene Youngblood's theory of synesthetic cinema, intertextuality, integrationist, and segregationist approaches in the realm of fiction, and focuses on the role of audio and visual superimpositions in The Return. It goes on to question the nature of the reality depicted in the seasons via scientific approaches, such as electromagnetism, time theory, and multiverses. The third and final section aims to transcend this vision by exploring the role of theosophy, the occult, and other spiritual sources. With a foreword by Matt Zoller Seitz, editor at large at RogerEbert.com and television critic for New York magazine, this book is essential reading for fans of the landmark show and anyone who studies it. 

An original perspective on the mythologies and ecologies of water, the poetics and politics of voice, and the invocation of a communal spirit through film and other arts.

“Follow the Water Follow the Sound” is a call and response. Far removed from the associations of seduction and fear that the siren—both as mythological figure and alarm device—has inspired, it is an invitation to another perceptual attunement to our environment. Offering an original perspective, this bookengages with notions of singing, voicing, and listening that reach into a sonic pluriverse and imagine the "sirenic" as a practice oriented towards emergent futures, fabulations of becoming, and pedagogies of transformation. Through these notions, it provides the grounds for an expanded conception of cinema emerging through sound, music, and performance. Bringing together scholars, curators, and artists from across disciplines, Sirenic unfolds as a polyphonic publication. 

With contributions by Ruth Baettig, Dalida María Benfield, Elena Biserna, Mattia Capelletti, Caroline Courrioux, Alice Jasmine Crippa, Giuseppe Di Salvatore, Magali Dougoud, Burcu Dogramaci, Lidia Gasperoni, Alexandra Gelis, Tobias Gerber, Ute Holl, Roberta Ioli, Pauline Julier, Fabienne Liptay, Niccolò Moronato, Gabriel Paiuk, Dorota Sajewska, Alice Sartori, Alexandra Tsiamparta, and Matthias Wittmann.

Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging—and the bodily access they imply—to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another’s bodily experience and the effects—physical, emotional, and social—of medical procedures.In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and “knowledge projects” surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O’Reilly; films like David Cronenberg’s Crash and Marina de Van’s In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramírez.At the heart of this work is the scar—a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture.Petra Kuppers is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge.

Winner of the Mary Ellen LoPresti Publication Award, Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), 2022

William Edmondson (1874–1951) was the first African American sculptor to have a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Edmondson started sculpting in his late fifties, after the Nashville Women's Hospital, where he worked as a janitor, closed. During his life he was well known for his yard art, such as whimsical birdbaths and "critters" of real and imaginary provenance, and the grave markers he carved for African American families. His sculptures are now highly sought after by collectors.

The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework is the first large-scale museum examination of artist William Edmondson's career in over twenty years. Organized by Cheekwood Curator-at-Large Marin R. Sullivan, the exhibition draws upon new scholarship and methodologies to contextualize Edmondson's sculpture, both within the histories of Nashville during the Interwar years and the art histories of modern art in the United States.

Edmondson has largely been confined to narratives that focus on his artistic discovery by white patrons in the 1930s, his work's formal resonance with so-called primitivism and direct carving techniques, and his place in the traditions of African American "outsider" art. This exhibition revisits Edmondson's work within these frameworks, but also seeks to reevaluate his sculpture on its own terms and as part of a comprehensive practice that included the creation of commercial objects rather than strictly fine art.

The exhibition's title references the sign that hung on the outside of Edmondson's studio, advertising what was for sale and on view to the public in his yard, including tombstones, birdbaths, and statuary meant to be used and intended for outdoor rather than gallery display.

An intriguing look at secrecy during the Byzantine Empire and the role of the art historian in seeking truth.

Secrecy has played a role throughout human history and continues to capture the popular imagination. Some of the most seductive aspects of the Byzantine Empire—such as the relics of the imperial palace and the military uses of Greek fire—have been shrouded in mystery for centuries. This book provides a brief history of secrecy in Byzantium and examines the role of the art historian in uncovering the truth, demonstrating how visual evidence can not only reveal new findings but also purposely conceal answers.

Art historians face many challenges in their search for hidden knowledge, including accessing accounts preserved in fragmentary glimpses and reconciling how practices of speculation and reconstruction result in different, and sometimes contradictory, understandings. With pressing urgency, this book asks scholars to consider their role in articulating the stories of marginalized people, particularly for queer and trans history.

At the core of these investigations is the quest to discover how clandestine knowledge was transmitted and how relationships were strengthened by collective secret keeping, as well as how concealment is used as a strategy for exercising power. With insights into the religious, imperial, military, and cultural uses of secrecy, this book offers an intriguing look at the ways secrecy manifested itself during the Byzantine Empire and the implications it has for the issues we face today.

Adolf Dehn belongs to a group of distinguished midcentury American artists who were eclipsed by Abstract Expressionism and the following movements in American art. His lithographs of the Roaring Twenties introduced a note of social satire into American printmaking. He was one of the most gifted and innovative printmakers of the American Scene movement of the 1930s and one of the most significant American watercolorists.

In this wide-ranging biography, Henry Adams explores how a once central figure can come to be forgotten. Noting that Dehn’s watercolor Spring in Central Park has been widely reproduced on calendars, postcards, and other Metropolitan Museum of Art souvenirs, Adams asks why it is that some artists are celebrated as key figures while others, even those who created images that form an integral part of our visual culture, are relatively unknown. With his account of the life of the prolific and influential Dehn, and a look at the circles of artists and writers in which Dehn moved, Adams helps to fill in what he calls the “secret or subterranean history of art.”

Huichol Indian yarn paintings are one of the world's great indigenous arts, sold around the world and advertised as authentic records of dreams and visions of the shamans. Using glowing colored yarns, the Huichol Indians of Mexico paint the mystical symbols of their culture—the hallucinogenic peyote cactus, the blue deer-spirit who appears to the shamans as they croon their songs around the fire in all-night ceremonies deep in the Sierra Madre mountains, and the pilgrimages to sacred sites, high in the central Mexican desert of Wirikuta.

Hope MacLean provides the first comprehensive study of Huichol yarn paintings, from their origins as sacred offerings to their transformation into commercial art. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork, she interviews Huichol artists who have innovated important themes and styles. She compares the artists' views with those of art dealers and government officials to show how yarn painters respond to market influences while still keeping their religious beliefs.

Most innovative is her exploration of what it means to say a tourist art is based on dreams and visions of the shamans. She explains what visionary experience means in Huichol culture and discusses the influence of the hallucinogenic peyote cactus on the Huichol's remarkable use of color. She uncovers a deep structure of visionary experience, rooted in Huichol concepts of soul-energy, and shows how this remarkable conception may be linked to visionary experiences as described by other Uto-Aztecan and Meso-American cultures.

Silent film is more than just a cinema of firsts, greats, or classics. It is a cinema of experimentation, ambition, and connection. To watch a silent film is to be transported into another world. The Silent Film Companion seeks to broaden the silent film canon by focusing on compelling non-canonical films from around the globe, providing a fresh perspective and new view of silent cinema. With over fifty films discussed, this volume captures just a sliver of the many delights silent cinema has to offer. It encourages discovery, and rediscovery, of the world of silent cinema: one where the movies were still young, full of possibility, and eager to entice others to take part in a wonderful adventure. 

Films covered are from fourteen countries, including Brazil, Mexico, China, Cuba, India, Italy, and Russia, and represent a diversity of subjects. Each chapter provides historical and cultural context to the film, the filmmakers, and a concise analysis of each film. The Silent Film Companion is a must-read for students and fans of silent cinema interested in seeing a side of silent cinema that is rarely explored.

Formed amidst the incendiary violence and political turmoil of the 1960s, beyond the barricades, the Situationist International (SI) remains to this day influential in anti-capitalist cultural, political and philosophical debates. 

Looking at philosophy, sociology, critical theory, art, architecture and literature, The Situationist International is an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of the SI and its thought. Leading thinkers analyze the SI's interdisciplinary challenges, its roots in the artistic avant-garde and the traditional workers' movements, its engagement with the problems of postcolonialism and issues of gender and sexuality.

Including contributions from key thinkers, including Anselm Jappe and Michael Lowy, as well as new and upcoming scholars, The Situationist International unpacks the complexity of a group that has come to define radical politics and culture in the postwar period. 

What do contemporary American movies and directors have to say about the relationship between nature and art? How do science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Darren Aronofsky's π represent the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame?

Steven Dillon's intriguing new volume surveys American cinema from 1990 to 2002 with substantial descriptions of sixty films, emphasizing small-budget independent American film. Directors studied include Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant, as well as more canonical figures like Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The book takes its title and inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, a science fiction ghost story that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and art. The author argues that American film has the best chance of aesthetic success when it acknowledges that a film is actually a film. The best American movies tell an endless ghost story, as they perform the agonizing nearness and distance of the cinematic image.

This groundbreaking commentary examines the rarely seen bridge between select American film directors and their typically more adventurous European counterparts. Filmmakers such as Lynch and Soderbergh are cross-cut together with Tarkovsky and the great French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in order to test the limits and possibilities of American film. Both enthusiastically cinephilic and fiercely critical, this book puts a decade of U.S. film in its global place, as part of an ongoing conversation on nature and art.

As shown by the success of Squid Game and Parasite, South Korea’s film industry is producing films and original series for streaming services, film studios, and television stations worldwide. South Korea is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and film. Similarly, the exponential growth in the South Korean film industry has been mirrored by a growing body of industry and film policy forums and academic conferences in both the East and the West. 

The South Korean Film Industry is the first detailed scholarly overview of the South Korean film industry. The thirteen chapters discuss topics from short films to popular television series that have engaged global audiences. Contributors explore the major changes in South Korean film making, marketing, and in the international growth and popularity of South Korean films. By bringing together a wide range of academic specialists, The South Korean Film Industry situates the current scholarship on South Korean cinema within the ongoing theoretical debates in contemporary global film studies. This volume will be widely read in undergraduate and graduate classes related to Korean and East Asian studies, cinema and media studies, cultural studies, and communication studies. Moreover, many institutions offer dedicated modules on South Korean cinema, media, and popular culture, for which The South Korean Film Industry will be ideal.

In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of “Man,” upon which the aesthetic itself often depends.

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.

On any given night, hundreds of guests walk the darkened streets of Colonial Williamsburg looking for ghosts. Since the early 2000s, both the museum and private companies have facilitated these hunts, offering year-round ghost tours. Critics have called these excursions a cash grab, but in truth, ghosts and hauntings have long been at the center of the Colonial Williamsburg project.

The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg examines how the long-dead past comes alive at this living-history museum. In the early twentieth century, local stories about the ghosts of former residents—among them Revolutionary War soldiers and nurses, tavern owners and prominent attorneys, and enslaved African Americans—helped to turn Williamsburg into a desirable site for historical restoration. But, for much of the twentieth century, the museum tried diligently to avoid any discussion of ghosts, considering them frivolous and lowbrow. Alena Pirok explores why historic sites have begun to embrace their spectral residents in recent decades, arguing that through them, patrons experience an emotional connection to place and a palpable understanding of the past through its people.

Marshall Fredericks’s Detroit sculptures capture the spirit of the Motor City and its dramatic transformation from the 1950s to the present day. In this book, Janna Jones analyzes eight of these enormous works of public art, situating them and their structures in metro Detroit’s distinctive midcentury milieu and bringing much-needed critical attention to this sculptor’s oeuvre. Sadly, some of these artworks have suffered along with the city as it shrank from its postwar zenith. Both the buildings and the sculptures erected for them deserve to be rescued from neglect, and then maintained and preserved for the future.
 

The founding of the United States after the American Revolution was so deliberate, so inspired, and so monumental in scope that the key actors considered this new government to be a work of art framed from natural rights. Recognizing the artificial nature of the state, these early politicians believed the culture of a people should inform the development of their governing rules and bodies. Eric Slauter explores these central ideas in this extensive and novel account of the origins and meanings of the Constitution of the United States. Slauter uncovers the hidden cultural histories upon which the document rests, highlights the voices of ordinary people, and considers how the artifice of the state was challenged in its effort to sustain inalienable natural rights alongside slavery and to achieve political secularization at a moment of growing religious expression.

A complement to classic studies of the Constitution’s economic, ideological, and political origins, The State as a Work of Art sheds new light on the origins of the Constitution and on ongoing debates over its interpretation.

The introduction and definitive guide to the work of celebrated folk artist Yvonne Wells, whose vibrant, innovative story quilts address an array of historic, cultural, and religious themes

The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells is an introduction and definitive guide to the self-taught quilter whose expansive body of work serves as testament to the sweeping tides of American life and Wells’s significance as a major figure within the folk art and art world writ large.

Beginning when she was nearly 40 years old and without formal training, Wells created her first quilt for practical use but was soon hand stitching appliqué figures into bold, original designs that unleashed her voice as a storyteller. Incorporating a wide variety of symbolic materials and unconventional objects—“anything I can stick a needle in”—Wells’s vivid story quilts reveal a fearless and encyclopedic vision ranging from the intimately autobiographical to iconic scenes from African American history, the Bible, Southern culture, and contemporary headlines.

The result of years of close collaboration between Stacy I. Morgan and Wells herself, The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells is richly illustrated with more than 100 quilts accompanied by narratives about each, told in the artist's own words, and interspersed with in-depth essays documenting Wells’s unique artistic practice and creative journey during her five-decade art career.

This book is an expanded, larger-format, and more highly illustrated version of a smaller book released by CEU Press in 2011. It presents and comments on an extensive set of religious and personal photographs and illustrations that depict people along with divine beings or absent loved ones. First, Christian examines the periodic appearances of Christ-like strangers in the Spanish countryside through the vision of a woman in La Mancha in 1931. Then he considers the long history of images with liquids on them not only for early modern Spain, but also in the United States, Italy and France in the 1940s and 1950s. The third and most extensive chapter addresses the iconography of illustrated depictions of divine and spirit beings in conjunction with humans and how its conventions were incorporated into commercial postcards and personal photographs, culminating in photo montages of families and their absent soldiers in World War I. The fourth theme is new to this edition. It compares the electric moments in Spanish communities when people ritually come into physical contact with saints and with animals, or transform themselves into saints or animals for ritual purposes. Over 50 of the color photographs by Spain's preeminent documentary photographer, Cristina García Rodero, are included.

This book looks at what it means to work in a creative studio. The volume takes a broad view of the concept of studio, defining it as any creative space that exists in the real or digital world – so this could be your studio at the university, a space or table you have at home, or a digital environment such as Miro where you work alone or with others. This book guides you in setting up a studio space and thinking about how to get the most out of solo and collaborative work within that space. It examines some of the practical elements, such as hardware and tools you might need, along with some of the soft skills, such as time management that will help you in your working.Having helped you to establish your working space, the authors provide guidance on specific creative skills that cross multiple disciplines and ways of working. Providing help with creating portfolios, including those that are needed to get into university, those you might produce while at university, and also ones that might be used after you complete your studies. The book also takes a deep five into how to present your work, both in person and online, synchronously, and asynchronously. Relatedly the volume examines crits, and how you might use and respond to feedback provided by your lecturers and peers. The authors are also joined by more than 20 contributors who help this volume to dive deeply into different subject areas. Ranging from sculpture, textiles, art and graphic design, readers will find tailored expert tips to help them in their own discipline to get the most from the digital creative environment.This book challenges the reader to think about what it means to be creative and how digital can play a role in this. Furthermore, it asks the reader to ask what is next. To think about the career they would like that will engage in creative practices. Think about how the creative studio might differ in the world of work and how you can ensure you keep your creative energies going. Throughout this, though, the authors, with the help of expert contributors, guide and support the reader in exploiting the digital creative environment to its maximum.

The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist’s studio. Examples abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a “factory,” artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices.

The Studio Reader pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist’s practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually—at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines. A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, The Studio Reader reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit.