New Books in Art

Shih-Shan Susan Huang‘s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) is divided into two sections, devoted loosely to esoteric and exoteric realms of knowledge. The “Inner Chapters” of Part I of the book consider esoteric Daoist images associated with meditation, visualization, and breathing practices. These chapters take readers into a world of Daoist cosmography, considering images of the body and the cosmos and the relation between these realms. Ranging from body worms to star voyages, from images of heaven and the underworld to bird forms in True Form Charts, from maps of paradise to forms of writing, the images and objects in Pt. I collectively create an archive of Daoist imagery while being very careful to explain how particular forms of image did very specific types of work. The “Outer Chapters” of Pt. II of the book examine exoteric Daoist works, including the material culture and spatial design of Daoist ritual space, ritual performance, and liturgical paintings. These chapters bring our attention to the materiality and ephemerality of some Daoist images, introducing the production and interpretation of Daoist paintings and offering us a basis for comparing the Daoist context with that of Buddhist imagery. It is an exceptionally rich study that will no doubt influence many fields in East Asian studies. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and be seen by my peers. As Jennifer Hall-Witt explains in her fascinating book Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), that’s apparently why English notables went to the opera in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They dressed up, went out, and “made the scene.” All the while there was an opera being performed, but it doesn’t seem anyone was paying close attention to it. They milled about, traded glances, visited each other’s boxes, talked, joked and generally had a good time. That all changed in the second half of the century. Most significantly, people began to watch and listen to the opera instead of each other. Jennifer tells us why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s and 1960s. Cawthra reveals the complex interactions between socially conscious photographers, magazine editors, record producers, jazz critics and the musicians themselves. From swing to bebop to cool, to West Coast Jazz to hard bop, Cawthra’s book gives the reader fascinating photographic and biographical portraits of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane among others. The photographers, too, including Charles Peterson, Gijon Mili, Francis Wolff, William Claxton, Herman Leonard, William Gottlieb, and Roy DeCarava had nuanced and unique photographic styles. Cawtha also gives insight as to how African-American jazz musicians such as Gillespie, Davis, and Rollins attempted to control their own economic and image destinies within the ever-changing political economy of the record industry. Cawthra also explains how Life Magazine, the development of the Long Playing Record (LP), and the concurrent milestones in civil rights all influenced the photographic culture of jazz – and there is a fascinating section on the very conscious marketing of “West Coast Jazz” to emerging white suburban markets in the 50s and 60s. The complex confluences of such a wide depth and breadth of social history is bound to stimulate much thinking and raise many additional questions. Rich, thought-provoking, and with images and insights that stay with you: read it, look at the photos and think long and hard…there’s no end to the combination and permutations of analyses….like jazz itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to offer scholars across the humanities. The book looks at the experimental arts in postwar Japan in a study that ranges across works of experimental theater, film, video, dance, photography, poetry, essay, and other forms of text. Much of the study focuses on close readings of the work of artists who were experimenting with different modes of performance, and different ways of relating language, image, materiality, and time, to explore the possibilities of encounter from many different frames. Scholars of embodiment will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the histories of intimacy, of collectivity, and of materiality. There are also some fascinating characters along the way, including experimental theater troupes that set fire to cars and gave audience members drugs during performances, and characters that experimented with a “self-spanking machine.” The artists in Sas’ book consider the relationship between performance texts and mapping, experiment with darkness and blindness to challenge the notion of a performance as a fully perceptible experience, and use collective activity as a space to explore relationships, and to challenge assumptions about truth and power. In the course of these fascinating accounts and close readings, Sas introduces us to ways of thinking about crimes as “contagious,” and invites us to consider notions of the “Japanese body,” “Japan,” the “Orient,” and even “home” as counterfeit coins. It is an immensely stimulating study and will leave you with much to think about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of sources from architectural blueprints to oral interviews, Field’s book succeeds in both showing us new sides of characters we thought we knew, and in introducing a new cast of historical actors who helped shape the rise of urban modernity in Shanghai. Picking up Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (The Chinese University Press, 2010), readers join Field to listen to the jazz of expatriate Whitey Smith at the wedding of Chiang Kai-shek and Song Mei-ling, to learn dance hall etiquette along with “dance empresses” anointed in annual competitions, and to follow the gangsters, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs through the Dancer’s Uprising of 1948 and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do your home cookin’, but you can eat as if you did.” I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this. But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo‘s insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the “tobacco moor” to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the “moor” in mass advertising per se. It was only then, too, that they began to carve out an empire full of “moors” in southwest Africa. David skillfully connects the two phenomenon, showing that the latter tangibly altered the character of the former. The image of Africans in ads went from one that emphasized the exotic to one that stressed the exotic under German domination. Depictions that were almost entirely fanciful became much more concrete. Africans came to represent racial Untermenchen in the service of their German overlords. It was an appealing picture, and one the Germans would–unfortunately–not soon forget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

When I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift. The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates present and past encircling him, the packed bleachers and Bronx cityscape in the background; an exhausted and bloodied Y.A. Tittle kneeling on the gridiron grass on an afternoon of defeat; young Wilt Chamberlain, still in his uniform after the game, displaying a sheet of paper scrawled with “100”; Jesse Owens exploding into a sprint at the Berlin Games. But the image in the book that most captivated me was not a photograph. Instead, it was a painting: George Bellows’ 1924 oil of Luis Firpo knocking Jack Dempsey through the ropes in the first round of their fight at the Polo Grounds. I remember studying the colors, the scramble in the ringside seats, the passive expression of Firpo as he follows through his punch, and the unbelievable scene of Dempsey (who would then–even more unbelievably–go on the win the fight) falling from the ring. The painting remains for me an example of how art can capture the drama, the sounds, and the power of a sporting moment. Allen Guttmann offers many examples of the crossing of art and sport in Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011): pastoral scenes of hunters and fishermen in the early republic, the accomplished paintings of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins in the mid-19thcentury, and the pop art portraits of celebrity-athletes in the 1970s. But the book is not simply about sports in art. Instead, Allen looks at the parallel histories of these two forms of cultural expression. The similarities are surprising. As Allen points out at the start, both art and sports have no utilitarian value to society: “They serve no practical purpose.” Allen’s work is built on decades of writing about sports history, and a career of teaching American cultural history. You get a glimpse of his expertise and insight from the interview. But you don’t get to see the pictures. For that, you have to get the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Chapter 3 of Erin Haney’s excellent book Photography and Africa (Reaktion Books, 2010) there are seven photos taken in central Africa at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Six advertise progress – from the smartly dressed and armed native troops (though still barefoot) to a posed photograph of a caravan of ivory and a depiction of rubber tapping. These images were taken to show the success, the organization, and the wealth of the Congo to the people of Brussels, Antwerp and beyond. The seventh photo shows a man sitting silently next to two indistinct objects, with a bland backdrop of open ground and two or three palm trees. This photo was also taken to inform public opinion in Europe (mainly Britain), but in this case as part of a movement against Belgian interests (and atrocities) in the Congo. The two indistinct objects in front of the man, incidently, are the severed foot and hand of his murdered five year old daughter. Not all of the photographs in Erin’s book are as politically charged as these. The book is remarkable for its variety, from a publicity self-portrait of a pioneer West African photographer taken in the 1890s to photojournalism from the last days of Apartheid and images of more than a century of industrial development on the continent. I wasn’t sure whether an audio interview with the author of a book of photography would work, but I think it did. That’s partly thanks to Erin herself, and partly thanks to the book itself and the stories it has to tell. I hope you enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Growing up in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indy-car racing offered my friends and me some very exciting heroes. As children, we played “Indy 500” on our bikes in the cul-de-sac. As we became teenagers, the Indy-car drivers who descended on our city in April and May became some of our most tangible idols. Not surprisingly, this proximity to Indy racing also fueled a fascination with the cartoon series “Speed Racer.” “Speed Racer” always managed to pull out the victory after he learned his lesson. What I didn’t really understand (in addition to why their lip movements never quite matched what they said) was that this program was a Japanese production and that this was one of the first American glimpses of what has become the international phenomenon that we call “anime.” I also did not know that this particular series grew out of a graphic tradition known to us now as “manga.” Even more interesting, manga specifically designed for boys, often based on robots, warriors, or battling creatures, is different from manga designed for girls, featuring themes of school and amorous relationships. Further, many fans of the genre engage in producing and sharing their own work. While my friends and I never engaged in drawing our own “Speed Racer” stories, we did discuss plots and think up new twists and turns for him to navigate. Some of us wanted to replace his girlfriend, Trixie; others preferred Speed’s mysterious big brother, Racer X, who was conveniently unattached. Other story lines put us in the driver’s seat competing against Speed! Boy’s Love Manga, like our own teenaged fantasies, derives from fans’ responses to commercial examples of manga created specifically for female audiences. This fantasy genre has become an international, fan-driven form of expression where readers create their own fantasy fiction and share it at conventions and on the internet. In Germany, this form of artistic exchange represents a substantial portion of the entire comic market. What is even more fascinating is that, although much of this work is created by women for other women, Boy’s Love Manga texts portray male-male romantic encounters. Co-editor Mark McHarry and one of the contributors, Paul Malone, talked with me about the collection of essays Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (McFarland, 2010). This collection of essays represents one of the first critical explorations of this wildly popular, wide-reaching, and incredibly profitable phenomenon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and for his recent arrest by Chinese police. What has been less widely appreciated is Ai’s profound impact and insight as a cultural critic, Internet artist, and chronicler of contemporary events in China. Before it was shut down on 28 May 2009 by Chinese authorities, his blog provided a Chinese-language digest of Ai’s perspectives on topics ranging from the nature of humanity to hair cuts, from his “Fairytale” project to his efforts to compile a list of the children killed in the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, from the contemplation of a “Bullshit Tax” to the 2009 Xinjiang protests. By turns hilarious, touching, and tragic, his online writing offered a perspective on current events in China that was very different from the sort of coverage available in popular Western-language news outlets. With the support and collaboration of Ai himself, Lee Ambrozy has collected, edited, and translated a selection of the artist’s written and photographic blog posts and tweets in Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 (MIT Press, 2011). Spanning the period from the founding of Ai’s blog in 2006 to his final posts in 2009, Lee’s translation is a treasure-box that not only offers a glimpse into the life and work of this transformative artist, but also speaks to the nature and power of internet culture in today’s China. We spoke for an hour about her experience creating the volume, the challenges and joys of the translator’s practice, and the story of the Grass Mud Horse, among many other things. It is an inspiring volume, and well worth a read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art