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The Accidental Possibilities of the City
Claes Oldenburg’s commitment to familiar objects has shaped accounts of his career, but his associations with Pop art and postwar consumerism have overshadowed another crucial aspect of his work. In this revealing reassessment, Katherine Smith traces Oldenburg’s profound responses to shifting urban conditions, framing his enduring relationship with the city as a critical perspective and conceiving his art as urban theory. Smith argues that Oldenburg adapted lessons of context, gleaned from New York’s changing cityscape in the late 1950s, to large-scale objects and architectural plans. By examining disparate projects from New York to Los Angeles, she situates Oldenburg’s innovations in local geographies and national debates. In doing so, Smith illuminates patterns of urbanization through the important contributions of one of the leading artists in the United States.
Playing with Earth and Sky
Playing with Earth and Sky reveals the significance astronomy, geography, and aviation had for Marcel Duchamp - widely regarded as the most influential artist of the past fifty years. Duchamp transformed modern art by abandoning unique art objects in favor of experiences that could be both embodied and cerebral. This illuminating study offers new interpretations of Duchamp's momentous works, from readymades to the early performance art of shaving a comet in his hair. It demonstrates how the immersive spaces and narrative environments of popular science, from museums to the modern planetarium, prepared paths for Duchamp's nonretinal art. By situating Duchamp's career within the transatlantic cultural contexts of Dadaism and Surrealism, this book enriches contemporary debates about the historical relationship between art and science. This truly original study will appeal to a broad readership in art history and cultural studies.
Weak Painting After Modernism
This book examines the terms upon which painting in the United States sought to negotiate with the legacy of American formalist aesthetics and by extension, the understanding of modernist painting it had become most readily associated with. In so doing, a separate set of possibilities for painting gradually began to emerge. The salient debates and practices that collectively worked to establish such a response are approached through the philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s idea of pensiero debole or so-called weak thought. To this end, the proposed study both identifies and seeks to examine a type of "weak" painting which, like Vattimo’s idea, took as its critical point of departure “the exhau...
Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art
Diversifying the current art historical scholarship, this edited volume presents the untold story of modern art by exposing global voices and perspectives excluded from the privileged and uncontested narrative of “isms.” This volume tells a worldwide story of art with expanded historical narratives of modernism. The chapters reflect on a wide range of issues, topics, and themes that have been marginalized or outright excluded from the canon of modern art. The goal of this book is to be a starting point for understanding modern art as a broad and inclusive field of study. The topics examine diverse formal expressions, innovative conceptual approaches, and various media used by artists around the world and forcefully acknowledge the connections between art, historical circumstances, political environments, and social issues such as gender, race, and social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, imperial and colonial history, modernism, and globalization.
Mastery of Words and Swords
The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s–1930s, Jun Lei explores the fo...
Cityscapes in History
Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience explores the ways in which scholars from a variety of disciplines - history, history of art, geography and architecture - think about and study the urban environment. The concept ’cityscapes’ refers to three different dynamics that shape the development of the urban environment: the interplay between conscious planning and organic development, the tension between social control and its unintended consequences and the relationship between projection and self-presentation, as articulated through civic ceremony and ritual. The book is structured around three sections, each covering a particular aspect of the urban experience. ’The City ...
Culture and Tactics
Juxtaposes Antonio Gramsci’s work and critical race theory to offer a new understanding of tactics as a transformative practice. While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Tactics demonstrates ...
Art History, Narratology, and Twentieth-Century Chinese Art
This study constructs a framework of narratology for art history and rewrites the development of twentieth-century Chinese art from a narratological perspective. Theoretically and methodologically oriented, this is a self-reflective meta-art history studying the art historical narratives while narrating the story of modern and contemporary Chinese art. Thus, this book explores the three layers of narrative within the narratological framework: the first-hand fabula, the secondary narration, and the tertiary narrativization. With this tertiary narrativization, the reader-author presents three types of narrative: the grand narrative of the central thesis of this book, the middle-range narrative of the chapter theses, and case analyses supporting these theses. The focus of this tertiary narrativization is the interaction between Western influence on Chinese art and the Chinese response to this influence. The central thesis is that this interaction conditioned and shaped the development of Chinese art at every historical turning point in the twentieth century. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, critical theory, Chinese studies, and cultural studies.
The Recording Machine
A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact This refreshing and erudite book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968. Author Joshua Shannon reveals an oddly stringent realism in the period, tracing artists’ rejection of essential truths in favor of surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates not only the Cold War’s preoccupation with data but also the rise of a pervasive culture of fact. Focusing on the United States and West Germany, where photodocumentary traditions intersected with 1960s politics, Shannon investigates a broad variety of art, ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. He looks closely at art by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Douglas Huebler, Gerhard Richter, and others. These artists explored fact’s role as a modern paradigm for talking, thinking, and knowing. Their art, Shannon concludes, helps to explain both the ambivalent anti-humanism of today’s avant-garde art and our own culture of fact.
A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924
This book takes a novel, data-driven approach to the cemeteries of Paris, analyzing a largely text-based body of archival material as proxy evidence for visual material that has been lost due to systematic, and legally sanctioned, acts of erasure. This study represents the first full-length study of vernacular monuments in France and the entrepreneurs who made them. It also provides methodical considerations, at the intersection of the computational and digital humanities for managing survival biases in extant historical evidence, that are applicable beyond the thematic focus of this book. Since extant examples of these more inconspicuous monuments are rare, this project employs both distant and close viewing—analyzing commercial almanacs, work logs, and burial records in aggregates alongside detailed case studies—to compensate for gaps in the material record. The book will be of interest to scholars working in visual culture, popular culture, digital humanities, and French history.
