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Over the course of a career that spans more than thirty-odd years, Marina Abramović has maintained an unwavering commitment to a form of performance that tests the psychological and physical extremes of the body. The word “commitment” indeed might be the singular most defining characteristic of her art, as well as her approach to the practice of being an artist. Among an early, important group of artists who moved away from the utilization of inert materials in favor of a direct employment of their own bodies (as tool, medium, performer, instigator, facilitator), Abramović’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern… Full Review

In Winslow, Arizona, an immigration inspector stopped a consular official and asked him to produce identification. Despite the card provided, the inspector doubted the official’s status and demanded to see a laborer’s certificate, perhaps hoping to verify identification through the photograph that was mandatory on such certificates. Although this scene sounds like it could be taking place today under SB 1070, the exchange occurred in 1903, and the consular official was not of Mexican descent. During the period of Chinese Exclusion in the United States, the government targeted Chinese not only at the borders but within the country’s interior as… Full Review

The portrait, defined here as an accurate physiognomic likeness of an individual rendered in an independent image, has been seen as a clear marker of the differences between the representational strategies and priorities of the medieval period and the modern. Indeed, as Stephen Perkinson notes in his introduction to The Likeness of the King, it is tempting to understand “the introduction of physiognomic likeness as a visual symptom marking the triumph of the self-conscious individual of the Renaissance over the anonymity and corporate identities of the Middle Ages” (6). Perkinson counters this with a detailed exploration of how the… Full Review

A small but impressive exhibition, Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting brought twelve drawings and thirteen paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh to the United States for a three-city tour in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Houston. Six of the paintings were from the Bridgewater Collection (on long-term loan to the National Gallery), of which four have been purchased by the museum. In Atlanta (where it was seen by this reviewer), the twenty-five works were well displayed in four galleries, the first devoted to Venetian drawings, the remainder exhibiting a concise history of sixteenth-century Venetian painting with… Full Review

Eve Hesse Spectres 1960 offers a rare opportunity to look and think carefully about one year in an artist’s career, in this case a very early one. E. Luanne McKinnon’s selection of nineteen paintings (all Untitled) from among the four dozen Eva Hesse made in 1960 offers a satisfying range of small studies and larger compositions, and their hanging within a single gallery at the Hammer allows for provocative overlaps and differences to come forward, leading the viewer confidently into the artist’s thought process. The unobtrusive wall texts that accompany some and not others of these so far rarely… Full Review

Diane Wolfthal’s In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe is yet another beautiful book from Yale University Press. It features a delicious picture on the dust jacket cover of a man and a woman fully covered (well, almost—there have to be openings in their clothing somewhere), making love in a beautiful bed, as another couple peeks through a curtain in order to watch. Meanwhile, a cute little dog at the side of the bed turns its head to observe the voyeurs. In other words, we watch the dog watching the couple watching the lovers. Actually… Full Review

This lucid, thoughtful, and remarkably terse study provides extensive insight into a variety of subjects: not only into photography of the Japanese American internment during World War II, but also the functions photography can be made to serve in defining loyalty and security risk in other wars, and the authenticity and force of documentary photography in general. Jasmine Alinder, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, is a sophisticated photography critic able to make complex arguments without the jargon that so often characterizes cultural criticism today. Her book can thus serve as a fine introduction to some of the… Full Review

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (“the squinter”), was born in 1591 in Cento, a small town between Ferrara and Bologna, and died in Bologna in 1666. Born a generation after the Carracci, whose works influenced him, Guercino soon developed a personal style noteworthy for combining naturalism with dramatic chiaroscuro effects. From Cento, he produced paintings for such patrons as Cardinal Jacopo Serra, papal legate to Ferrara; Ferdinando Gonzaga, duke of Mantua; and Cosimo II de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. Guercino was enticed away from Cento only when his patron Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV… Full Review

In her chapter on Emilia Francis (later, Lady Dilke), Colleen Denney writes that “Victorians were guilty for delighting in the saucy details of the scandal at the same time as they projected an outward shell of moralistic judgment” (86). The protagonists Denney selected for her perceptive narrative about “scandalous” women were born into the rapidly expanding middle classes: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), Lady Dilke (1840–1904), Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), and Sarah Grand (1854–1943). This decision (which is unexplained by the author) excludes a figure like Frances Evelyn "Daisy," Countess of Warwick, author and activist, referred to in the press as… Full Review

Curators Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco use a metaphor of alchemy to describe the contemporary works they brought together for The Dissolve, their title for the SITE Santa Fe Eighth International Biennial. The ingredients for the new global media practice they highlight are bodily gestures, advanced digital technologies, and inspirations from early twentieth-century motion picture experiments, resulting in, as the exhibition catalogue states, “new hybrid forms where the homespun meets the high-tech” (20). The six-year process of choosing the final thirty works—twenty-six contemporary and four historical—and conceiving of the spatial and textual accoutrements that would do them justice… Full Review