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How the valorization of artistic and political dissidence has contributed to the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West. Interest in Chinese contemporary art increased dramatically in the West shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Sparked by political sympathy and the mediatized response to the event, Western curators, critics, and art historians were quick to view the new art as an expression of dissident resistance to the Chinese regime. In this book, Marie Leduc proposes that this attribution of political dissidence is not only the result of latent Cold War perceptions about China, but also indicative of the art world's demand for artistically and politically provocative...
From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of protest into official agitprop. Syrian dissidents were forced to negotiate between the desire to genuinely criticize the authoritarian regime, the risk to their own safety and security that such criticism would invite, and the fear that their work would be co-opted as government propaganda, as what miriam cooke calls “commissioned criticism.” In this intimate account of dissidence in Asad’s ...
If life was hard for all under the Soviet regime, how much more difficult was it to be a dissident artist? For those who did not belong to the dominant school of Socialist Realism, it could be a life of great risk. Often forced to scavenge for materials to use in paintings and sculptures, these artists led both a sometimes dangerous, illicit underground life, as well as an acceptable public life. In Soviet Dissident Artists, Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell interview nearly fifty former dissident artists to better understand their struggles under Soviet rule and their desires to maintain their sense of inner freedom. In these probing interviews, the artists chronicle their hardships and their friendships under the old Communist regime from the 1950s to the 1980s. They relate their confrontations with the KGB and other government organizations--sometimes with tragic consequences--and how they managed to survive and create subversive work in their spare time. Recording experiences largely unknown to Western artists, these interviews describe one of the great heroic stories of the last half of the twentieth century.
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A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husba...
An account of dissidence in Hafiz Asads Syria, describing how intellectuals tried to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it.
For the uninitiated, the Komar-MelaƯmid paintings (their work is a collaboraƯtive effort) no doubt will be a surprise and a delight: it is at once sprightly, intricate, and mystical. Called “Sots” art (for Socialist art), it is a kind of Pop that parodies the propaganda posters and street banners designed for public conƯsumption by Russian officialdom. The Sots subjects from the first show include the stern head of a worker holding his finger to his lips and entitled “Don#x19;t Babble,” several banners with such slogans as “Glory to Labor” and “Our Goal Communism,” and a painting of a “Laika” cigarette pack using as its emƯblem the Soviet dog sent into orbit with “Sputnik II” in 1957.
Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism argues that Surrealism worked as a powerful agitator to disrupt dominant ideas of modern art in the United States. Unlike standard accounts that focus on Surrealism in the U.S. during the 1940s as a point of departure for the ascendance of the New York School, this study contends that Surrealism has been integral to the development of American visual culture over the course of the twentieth century. Through analysis of Surrealism in both the museum and the marketplace, Sandra Zalman tackles Surrealism?s multi-faceted circulation as both elite and popular. Zalman shows how the American encounter with Surrealism was shaped by Alfred...
How are issues related to identity representation negotiated in Middle Eastern and North African museums? Can museums provide a suitable canvas for minorities to express their voice? Can narratives change and stereotypes be broken and, if so, what kind of identities are being deployed? Against the backdrop of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaken the region in recent years, the contributors to this volume interrogate a range of case studies from across the region - examining how museums engage inclusion, diversity and the politics of minority identities. They bring to the fore the region's diversity and sketches a 'museology of disaster' in which minoritised political subjects regain visibility.