Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Tina M. Campt
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 232 pp.; 78 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (9780262045872)
Scholarship on the theory of the gaze explores the power dynamic within the act of looking and being looked at. The male gaze, the racist gaze, and the colonial gaze are analytical concepts that help us understand how representation is implicated in the construction of gendered and racialized hierarchies and systems of control. They also reveal how subjects resist visuality’s capture through processes of self-representation and aesthetic defiance. Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See offers a profound reconceptualization of the politics of visibility and spectatorship within contemporary art. The book features nine artists who work… Full Review
November 23, 2022
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André Dombrowski, ed.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021. 640 pp.; 152 b/w ills. Cloth $185.00 (9781119373896)
Author’s note: This article capitalizes the movement of Impressionism only when transcribing a quotation or with deliberate emphasis in discussing the book’s definition of the movement. In its goals to transport readers “to the moment in history when Impressionism made beholders alert and uncomfortable” (7) and to offer a springboard for future inquiries, André Dombrowski’s edited volume Companion to Impressionism succeeds. Its thirty-four essays dive into single-object studies, scrutinize critical reception, and integrate transnational examples with a diverse set of methodological tools to analyze impressionism’s imbrications of the objective and subjective, the perceptual and the sensual, in rendering a world… Full Review
November 16, 2022
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Joanna Pawlik
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 296 pp.; 48 color ills.; 55 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780520309043)
“Qui suis-je?” André Breton asks at the opening of his anti-novel Nadja (1928): Who am I? And then, a line down, whom do I haunt? It is a well-known and by now overdetermined couple of lines, which nevertheless, as much as the entire novel itself, have had a considerable impact on generations of writers, poets, and artists around the world since its publication. One deeply impacted group is explored by Joanna Pawlik in the second chapter of her book on the reception of (chiefly French) Surrealism in the United States from the 1940s onward: Beat and San Francisco writers. In… Full Review
November 4, 2022
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Rakhee Balaram
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021. 480 pp.; 75 color ills.; 125 b/w ills. Cloth $125.00 (9781526125163)
Rakhee Balaram’s Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Art of French Feminism is a resolute rejoinder to an assumption within art history that radical feminism’s agitations of May 1968 are no longer relevant in a post #MeToo world. Despite the relatively short period covered by Counterpractice (ca. 1970–81), Balaram presents an extraordinary breadth of visual, literary, and historical material accompanied by a depth of research, significantly expanding current understanding of the myriad artists, movements, and practices in the decade after 1968 in France, with special attention to how artists were catalyzed by the philosophy of French feminist vanguards Hélène Cixous, Luce… Full Review
November 2, 2022
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Sarah Betzer
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021. 272 pp.; 42 color ills.; 81 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9780271088839)
When riding Line 1 of the Paris Metro you might encounter the Louvre-Rivoli station. As you exit the train you come face-to-face with antique statuary displayed in niches along the dimly lit platform. In the shadowy commotion of mass transit you may even notice the Venus de Milo stir to life among the crowd of Parisians and tourists. This contact between ancient sculpture (in fact, copies of works housed in the Louvre that were installed in the Metro in 1968) and that quintessence of modern life—taking the subway—has rich precedents, traced by Sarah Betzer in Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter… Full Review
October 28, 2022
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Lucy Bradnock
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 240 pp.; 60 color ills.; 19 b/w ills. Hardcover $65.00 (9780300251036)
Lucy Bradnock’s No More Masterpieces: Modern Art after Artaud offers a reassessment of Artaud’s reception among artists in the United States (and particularly artists who could be grouped within the American avant-garde). Looking at the period when his work was introduced to the English-speaking world in the 1950s and tracing its circulation through informal networks and official publications, Bradnock deftly demonstrates the challenges, limitations, and opportunities of Artaud’s emergence in the United States. The result is a well-researched and highly readable reconsideration of his legacy and influence there. Artaud’s texts—often opaque and contradictory—offer fertile ground for artists, who can interpret… Full Review
October 26, 2022
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Rebecca Wanzo
New York: NYU Press, 2020. 256 pp.; 6 color ills. Paperback $29.00 (9781479889587)
The past two years have seen a comic turn in African American visual culture. From Jean Lee Cole’s exploration of the earliest forms of Black humor in the final chapter of How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920 (2020) to Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s analysis of contemporary Black comedy as a vehicle to expose and critique racial hierarchies in Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and to Richard J. Powell’s comprehensive examination of Black satire as a language of resistance in Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), there has… Full Review
October 21, 2022
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Sarah M. Miller
Toronto: RIC Books, 2020. 450 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $34.95 (9780262044172)
A 1938 draft of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland opens with Abbott’s Brooklyn Bridge: Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn. The steel construction of the Brooklyn Bridge spans the image, forming a stark contrast to the old brick warehouse in the foreground. The disruptive horizontality of waterfront construction partially obscures the verticality of New York’s skyscrapers in the background. If skyscrapers and construction are emblematic of the march of progress, the image’s layers and obfuscations suggest that change is not so linear. Instead, Abbott compresses the past, present, and future within the flat planes of the… Full Review
October 19, 2022
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Basile Baudez
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 288 pp.; 176 color ills. Hardcover $65.00 (9780691213569)
Carefully rendered wash drawings in a variety of hues, prints enhanced by gouache and watercolor—the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw a progressive expansion of polychromy in architectural representations and are analyzed by Basile Baudez in Inessential Colors. Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe. Throughout his extensively illustrated work the author interrogates this phenomenon, which initially served to bring clarity to a building’s design and later engaged in a visual language intended to captivate the viewer. The field of study is vast, from Italy to the Netherlands, Great Britain to France, by way of Russia, Spain, or Germany. The author… Full Review
October 14, 2022
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James Nisbet
POINT: Essays on Architecture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. 144 pp.; 29 color ills.; 5 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 ( 9780691194950)
Land art is back in the limelight. On September 2, 2022, Michael Heizer publicly unveiled his colossal City (1970–2022), which comprises a mile-and-a-half-long by half-mile-wide installation of mounds and depressions made of dirt, rock, and concrete in the Nevada desert. In recent contemporary art scholarship, many have looked to histories of Land art or earthworks from the late 1960s and 1970s to think through our current environmental crises and Heizer’s City seems remarkably timed for this discussion. How informed or invested were first-generation Land artists, particularly in the American West, in ecological issues? To what degree did their monumental or… Full Review
October 5, 2022
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