New Books In Art

Today I talked to Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales about their book Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense (Abbreviated Press, 2020). The Códice Casanatense, or Codex Casanatense 1889 as it is formally known, is a 16th-century Indo-Portuguese collection of some 76 captioned watercolours now held in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. Deposited there at the beginning of the 18th century, it resided in almost complete obscurity for two and half centuries and was not brought to scholarly attention until the 1950s. It has never been discussed in detail for the general reader. Painted by an Indian artist, and annotated in Portuguese, the Codex is a remarkable work of collaboration that portrays the peoples, costumes and customs of a region extending from Africa to China. This region, crossed by Portuguese explorers and traders, maps on what is now commonly called the Maritime Silk Road. Lively and evocative, the Códice Casanatense is a unique historical record that provides a human

Architecture can seem complicated, mysterious or even ill-defined, especially to a student being introduced to architectural ideas for the first time. One way to approach architecture is simply as the design of human environments. When we consider architecture in this way, there is a good place to start – ourselves. Our engagement in our environment has shaped the way we think which we, in turn, use to then shape that environment. It is from this foundation that we produce meaning, make sense of our surroundings, structure relationships and even frame more complex and abstract ideas. This is the start of architectural design. Philip D. Plowright's book Making Architecture Through Being Human: A Handbook of Design Ideas (Routledge, 2019) is a reference book that presents 51 concepts, notions, ideas and actions that are fundamental to human thinking and how we interpret the environment around us. The book focuses on the application of these ideas by architectural designers to produce meaningful spaces that make

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Ara Marjian, Professor of Italian and affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at New York University about his newest book Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Paosolini, a filmmaker who created art in a variety of media, has something approaching a cult following. Merjian explores, “Pasolini’s fraught relationship to the aesthetic experiments of his own age… [and] demonstrates how Pasolini's campaign against neocapitalist culture fueled his hostility to the avant-garde. An atheist indebted to Catholic ritual; a revolutionary communist inimical to the creed of 1968; a homosexual hostile to the project of gay liberation: Pasolini refused the politics of identity in favor of a scandalously paradoxical practice, one vital to any understanding of his legacy. Against the Avant-Garde examines these paradoxes through case studies from the 1

In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At the book’s center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens. Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical

The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2019) examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu’s lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the transwar proletarian movement. More broadly, it outlines an ethical position known as persistence, which occupies the grey area between complicity and resistance: Like resilience, persistence signals a commitment to not disappearing—a fierce act of taking up space but often from a position of privilege, among the classes and people in power. Akamatsu grew up in a settler-colonial family in rural Hokkaido before attending arts college in Tokyo and becoming one of the first women to receive formal training as an oil painter i

In Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to weave together divers cultural strands (literature, the visual arts, drama, journalism, poetry, essays) into a tapestry of historical practice. Which realisms are being invoked under the category of “Neorealism” as it was plied and applied in the mid-20th Century? What were the aims of these realisms? What did they accomplish? Each of Italian Neorealism’s four chapters sketches answers to these questions by approaching a corpus that interweaves some very well-known texts from Italian Neorealism (Rome, Open City, Bicycle Thieves, La terra trema, etc.) with texts that have enjoyed scantier critical attention (like films from the period that have not widely circulated, for example) or which hail from extra-cinematic and even extra-Italian contexts. The result is an eminently readable study whose broad embrace does not sa

In Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Duke UP, 2020), Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! http

We think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired Chinese porcelains. Many of these were made in the kilns in and surrounding Jingdezhen. Found in almost every part of the world, Jingdezhen's porcelains had a far-reaching impact on global consumption, which in turn shaped the local manufacturing processes. The imperial kilns of Jingdezhen produced ceramics for the court, while nearby private kilns manufactured for the global market.  In The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge UP, 2020), Anne Gerritsen asks how this kiln complex could manufacture such quality, quantity and variety. She explores how objects tell the story of the past, connecting texts with objects, objects with natural resources, and skilled hands with the shapes and designs they produced. Through the manufacture and consumption of Jingdezhen's porcelains,

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu Shanzhuang) was strategically located at the node of mountain “veins” through which the Qing empire’s geomantic energy was said to flow. At this site, from late spring through early autumn, the Kangxi emperor presided over rituals of intimacy and exchange that celebrated his rule: garden tours, banquets, entertainments, and gift giving.  Stephen Whiteman's book, Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe (University of Washington Press in 2020) draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the ear

Monopoly, Solitaire, football and Minecraft are all games, but for C. Thi Nyugen they are also an art form – specifically, the art form of agency, our capacity to set goals and pursue them. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), Nguyen argues that a game designer sculpts agency by specifying the goals and abilities of the potential player – what the player should care about and what their abilities are in the game environment. The resulting disposable ends and interesting struggles yields valuable aesthetic experiences that enhance our capacities for autonomous agency. Yet Nyugen, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, also warns of the harmful effects of the gamification of real life, when the simple goals and motivations in games leak into our real- world agency and can lead to social and moral disaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What is an art school? In Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Dr Silvie Jacobi, a researcher and head of education at London School of Mosaic, thinks through the status of art schools and arts education in the contemporary world. The book draws on ethnographic research in Manchester and Leipzig, comparting and contrasting two nations, two educational systems, and two cities, to show the different approaches to training and supporting contemporary culture. The book also compares artforms, considering both traditional practices, alongside the emergence of digital and media arts. Bridging geography, sociology, and the history of art, the book is essential reading for scholars of cultural and creative industries, as well as anyone interested in the continuing value and importance of the arts in education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingc

In Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), Sianne Ngai continues her theoretical work of demystifying the vernacular aesthetic categories encountered in late capitalist daily life. In this witty and penetrating book-length treatment of the affective experience of the “gimmick,” Ngai draws upon formalist literary criticism, post-Kantian aesthetic philosophy, and Marxist political economy in order to illuminate the historical production of this attractive yet unsettling cultural form. From The Magic Mountain to It Follows, smiley faces to subprime mortgages, Ngai’s image of the surprisingly ubiquitous gimmick emerges from a careful evaluation of the capitalist subject’s fundamental discomfort surrounding the coupling of value to labor-time. Michael Eby is a writer and researcher on contemporary art and digital culture. He lives in New York and tweets @michaeleby2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomin

Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 2020) tells the unique story of a generation of artists, feminists, and queer activists who emerged in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With a focus on new media, Zychowicz demonstrates how contemporary artist collectives in Ukraine have contested Soviet and Western connotations of feminism to draw attention to a range of human rights issues with global impact. In the book, Zychowicz summarizes and engages with more recent critical scholarship on the role of digital media and virtual environments in concepts of the public sphere. Mapping out several key changes in newly independent Ukraine, she traces the discursive links between distinct eras, marked by mass gatherings on Kyiv's main square, in order to investigate the deeper shifts driving feminist protest and politics today. Dr. Jessica Zychowicz was recently a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine (2017-18) and i

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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

It would be hard to overstate the importance of culture. It teaches us, heals us, rips us apart and puts us back together in new and surprising ways. Given its fundamental importance to the human experience, it would make sense that looking at the sort of people who produce it for us, thinking about who they are, what their experiences are, and what that may say about the cultural products they then make. There is no product without a producer, and cultural products are no different, so understanding cultural products means thinking more critically about who produces them. This is the goal of the recently published ​Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Manchester University Press, 2020). Written by Orian Brook, Mark Taylor and, my guest today, Dave O’Brien, the book combines quantitative data analysis with personal interviews to weave together the complicated picture of who the people behind some of our most cherished experiences are. Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow

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,

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

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 Christian

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

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 write