New Books in Art

Proof: Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family by Byrd Williams, with text by Byrd Williams IV, forward by Roy Flukinger and afterword by Anne Wilkes Tucker, is published by the University of North Texas Press, (2016). 224 pages. The Byrd Williams Collection at the University of North Texas contains more than 10,000 prints and 300,000 negatives, accumulated by four generations of Texas photographers, all named Byrd Moore Williams. Beginning in the 1880s in Gainesville, the four Byrds photographed customers in their studios, urban landscapes, crime scenes, Pancho Villa’s soldiers, televangelists, and whatever aroused their unpredictable and wide-ranging curiosity. When Byrd IV sat down to choose a selection from this dizzying array, he came face to face with the nature of mortality and memory, his own and his family’s. In some cases, these photos are the only evidence remaining that someone lived and breathed on this earth. The 193 photos selected here are organized into thematic sections such as “Landscapes,” “Violence and Religion,” and “Darkness.” They are significant not just for the range of subjects, but for the inclusion of a variety of examples of the evolving photographic technology from the 1880s to the present. This book is an unprecedented portrait of both photographic history and the history of Texas, as well as a record of one unique family. BYRD M. WILLIAMS IV maintains a studio in Dallas and teaches photography at Collin County Community College. He provided the photographs for Fort Worth’s Legendary Landmarks and his work is in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The value of the arts is a constant and vital question in contemporary culture. In Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Intellect Books, 2016) Kirsty Sedgman, British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, approaches this question from the point of view of the audience. The book offers an introduction to the question of what an audience is, as well as thinking through the best methods to study the audience, before turning to the story of National Theatre Wales (NTW). The book discusses the tensions between aesthetics and participation, using places and performances from NTW to illustrate the range of responses, and the range of value, that different types of audience can derive from theatre. An engaging and accessible introduction to both the theoretical and practical questions surrounding cultural value, measurement, audiences, and theatre, the book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Paul C. Taylor examines primary themes in racialism from the perspective of aesthetic culture. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and at Penn State University, considers such issues as black invisibility, expressive culture and politics, and the problem of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He also lays the foundation for analytic philosophical tools to be brought more widely to bear on scholarly discussion of issues related to race and racialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Robert Brain’s The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015) unveils a fascinating world of exchange between artistic studios and physiology laboratories concealed by such pithy aphorisms. Brain argues that the influence and stature of physiological aesthetics have been overlooked in accounts of modernism in science and art, and seeks to recover experimental systems that were incredibly influential and fertile in their cultural situation. Brain first sets himself to chart the development of physiological recording in the sciences, first as experimental technique, then as ontology, in a fascinating chapter on the protoplasm theory of life and on to its application to the human qua human problems of linguistic analysis. He then describes the experimentalization of visual art (Georges Seurat, Edvard Munch) and poetry (Gustave Kahn, F. T. Marinetti). The influence of Charles Henry, who inhabited both artists’ circles and physiology laboratories in his work as a preparateur, becomes a key pivot in Brain’s narrative through his creation a scientific aesthetic that could be deployed as a kind of productive black-box. The Pulse of Modernism is a rich portrait of fin-de-siecle material and intellectual culture, and challenges the pride of place given to Victorian sensibilities in the fashioning of the late modern (early modernist) scientific subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Sister Mary Corita, IHM (1918-1986), was a beloved artist and teacher whose role as the rebel nun continues to inspire contemporary audiences. Corita joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 when she was just eighteen years old, and soon after became an initially reluctant Art teacher at Immaculate Heart College. Corita remained part of the community on Franklin and Western Avenues in Hollywood until 1968 when Los Angeles archbishop Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, and other conservatives, targeted the orders reformist ways. Corita’s Pop Art styled prints celebrating the presence of God in the most ordinary of everyday subjects (Mary is the juiciest tomato of all) drew the ire of McIntyre in particular. At age fifty, she took one of many unconventional steps and left the order to start life anew as an independent woman. In Corita Kent: Art and Soul: The Biography (Angel City Press, 2015), April Dammann traces Corita’s path as an artist and religious woman who participated in the heady scene of the Los Angeles art world in the 1960s while engaging her own devout spirituality at the same time. Coritas journey into printmaking took her beyond the confines of the college to the world of the most famous artists and designers in Los Angeles including Charles Eames, John Cage, Edward Kienholz, and Tony Duquette. She interacted with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and other members of Los Angeles literary avant-garde. Clad in her nuns habit, Corita was more than a picturesque observer of the scene, however. Her highly refined silkscreens combining word and image with meticulously placed colors transformed the medium. She culled subject matter from the ideas of thinkers and social commentators ranging from Goethe to Isaiah, to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and radical priest and soul mate Daniel Berrigen. Corita’s students, many of whose voices color Dammann’s carefully researched book, were beneficiaries of Corita’s aesthetic and intellectual explorations. As we reconsider the life of Corita Kent, we are confronted, in the quiet yet powerful manner of the artist herself, with a woman whose contributions to the radical forms of the 1960s are immense. Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently, is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hill. Email: kellsworth@csudh.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color images. Volume 2: 144 pages, 120 color images. Piksa Niugini records noted Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s most important cultural and historical zones – the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city Port Moresby. The project is contained in two volumes in a slipcase one of portraits of local people, and the second of personal diaries. This remarkable body of work captures one of the world’s last truly wild and unique frontiers. Stephen’s work for this book was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The first volume of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone and 4 color; the second is an eclectic collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs that Dupont created as he produced the project, which add to a broader understanding of the images in volume one. Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the worlds most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world. Dupont’s work has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondents Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007, he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan, and in 2010 he received the Gardner Fellowship at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of The Composition of Movements to Come (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Stevphen Shukaitis, a senior lecturer in work and organisation at the University of Essex, approaches these issues from an Autonomist Marxist perspective, thinking through a diverse range of issues, for example cultural labour, and practices, for example the art strike. The book also uses a range of artistic examples, including a detailed engagement with Neue Slowenische Kunst to think through the composition of movements to come. The podcast discusses a forthcoming exhibition of the work of Gee Vaucher at Firstsite in Essex, UK. The book will be of interest to critical theorists, as well as scholars from art, politics and social movement studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The New Yorkers by Robert Herman, with an introduction by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the City Museum of New York, is published by Proof Positive Press (2015). Robert Herman is a photographer and author of two books of his work, The New Yorkers and The Phone Book (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2015). Robert has been a street photographer since his days he started using his father’s Nikon F and a 50mm lens, and began by exploring the city as a means to connect with the people in his neighborhood and learn the craft of making images. Robert has a BFA in filmmaking from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and he received a masters degree in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Art. With his love of light and color, and a joy of making images that find the transcendent in the seemingly mundane, Robert’s images tell another story – that of his battle with bipolar disorder. Through the process of creating the work for The New Yorkers, Robert sought physical representation of the empathy he had for his subjects while struggling with his own sense of feeling as an outsider. Its this search for connection and connectedness in his images is what makes The New Yorkers of interest to all who know and love the city as well as those who want to know it. The New Yorkers is available through Roberts website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety. Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Since 2007, American photographer Jade Doskow has been documenting the remains of World’s Fair sites, once iconic global attractions that have often been repurposed for less noble aspirations or neglected and fallen into decay. Lost Utopias (Black Dog Publishing, 2016) brings together the substantial body of work that Doskow has completed over the past decade, including iconic monuments such as the Seattle Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower, Brussels Palais des Expositions and New York’s Unisphere. Doskow’s large-scale colorphotographs poignantly illustrate the utopian architecture and art that has surrounded the Worlds Fairs, across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Presented in a large-scale hardback book, Doskow’s work carries a unique sense of both grandeur and dreaminess, whilst also reflecting upon the often temporary purposes that these structures once held. Jade Doskow is an award-winning photographer based in Peekskill, New York. She holds a BA in Philosophy of Art and Music from New York University and an MFA in Photography & Video from the School of Visual Arts. She is currently on the photography faculty of the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography, and was named by ‘American Photo’ as ‘One to Watch’ in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art