In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke UP, 2021), Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of a...
Aug 04, 2022•54 min•Ep. 200
Alan John Ainsworth's book Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960 (Intellect, 2022) explores the work of a wide range of American photographers attracted to jazz during the period 1900–60. It includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did. While some of these photographers are widely recognized for their work, many African American photojour...
Aug 01, 2022•53 min•Ep. 156
China’s urban landscapes are full of radically different architectural styles which memorialise different eras in the country’s political past, from the remains of imperial palaces or city walls, to Republican-era shophouses, early-PRC medium-rise apartments, and soaring glass buildings of twenty-first-century vintage. But lodged – both temporally and physically – between these latter two are constructions from a time that is only now beginning to receive more attention, namely the early reform ...
Jul 26, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 456
As a way to comment on a person’s style or taste, the word “tacky” has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called “tackies” who tacked horses on South Carolina farms prior to the Civil War. The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022) presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquitous inf...
Jul 19, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 39
Erin L. Thompson talks about monuments, and their role in American public life. Public art intervenes in directly in politics, shaping social behavior in the present. Monuments, in her account, are a bid for immortality that says “this is how things are” but often means “this is how things should be.” In the episode she talks about The Houston Museum of African American Culture. They are engaged in a super exciting project reinterpreting the cultural memory of the US Civil War, as the first Blac...
Jul 15, 2022•19 min•Ep. 81
In Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art (Duke University Press, 2022) Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by tr...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 36
Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis (Lexington Books, 2022) by Matt Reingold, published by Lexington Books as part of its Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature series, offers an incisive—and prescient, given the recent dissolution of the incumbent government—consideration of how political cartoonists in Israel broaden the conversation about the various challenges faced by the country. Organized thematically around issues that ...
Jul 11, 2022•58 min•Ep. 42
In Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press, 2022), Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mat...
Jul 08, 2022•19 min•Ep. 74
In October 1946, shortly before Independence, Mulk Raj Anand founded Marg, a magazine that soon became a pioneering forum for research on Indian and South Asian art and architecture. Over its 75 years, Marg (in its quarterly magazine as well as books) has promoted a deeper understanding of eras past while examining contemporary art practices. To mark our platinum anniversary, we are delving into Marg's archive of writing on temple art and architecture, to understand the shifts in perspective ove...
Jul 07, 2022•34 min•Ep. 198
Who are the girls that helped build America? Conventional history books shed little light on the influence and impact of girls’ contributions to society and culture. This oversight is challenged by Girl Museum and their team, who give voice to the most neglected, yet profoundly impactful, historical narratives of American history: young girls. Exploring American Girlhood through 50 Historic Treasures (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) showcases girls and their experiences through the lens of place a...
Jul 06, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 111
It is a scary and disorienting time for art, as it is a scary and disorienting time in general. Aesthetic experience is both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection with them. The self-image of art as a social good is collapsing under the weight of capitalism’s dysfunction. Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (Haymarket Books, 2022), art critic Ben Davis makes sense of our extreme present as an emerging "after-culture"—a cultu...
Jul 06, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 301
We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses. Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between this self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of social and mental distress, these theoretical insights are potential dynamite. Shifting his explorations...
Jul 05, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 110
Ella Hawkins talks about the biscuits she makes, inspired by her research on Elizabethan dress, and on everything from William Morris wallpapers to TV shows like Outlander and Game of Thrones. She also talks about her upcoming monograph, titled Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume: ‘Period Dress’ in Twenty-First-Century Performance (forthcomin from Bloomsbury), which examines how early modern garments are recycled and reimagined in contemporary costume design for Shakespeare. (You’ll hear Saronik ...
Jul 04, 2022•13 min•Ep. 72
The ongoing debate surrounding who gets to determine the subjects of public commemoration, particularly in the form of statues, has become more heated over the past few years. In his timely book, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues (Aurum Press, 2021), Peter Hughes examines the long history of statues being used to articulate the values of rulers, governments, organizations, and average citizens. Of course, that also means statues are often targets of people who want to challenge those valu...
Jul 04, 2022•46 min•Ep. 1226
Manuscripts teem with life. They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded. Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers (Riverrun, 2021) tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and...
Jul 04, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 156
With I Am Jugoslovenka!: Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester UP, 2022), Jasmina Tumbas examines forms of feminist political and artistic engagement in Yugoslavia and its successor nations. By bringing together a wide range of materials—from performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism, and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars—this study reveals that performative representations of women’s emancipation w...
Jul 01, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 170
Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded at-hoc in discrete, time- and output-bound chunks. This is the logic of projects. The workforce no longer dedicates itself to the making of a singular commodity, as it was the case with Smith, but bids for...
Jul 01, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 109
The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern UP, 2022) traces how the environmental effects of industrialization reverberated through the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In the early twentieth century, hygiene encompassed the myriad attempts to create healthy spaces for life and work amid the pollution, disease, accidents, and noise of industrial modernity. Examining classic films—including The Last Laugh, Faust, and Kuhle Wampe—as well as documentaries, ci...
Jul 01, 2022•56 min•Ep. 132
Images of Japanese and Japanese American women can teach us what it meant to be visible at specific moments in history. In Shadow Traces: Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photographic Archives (U Illinois Press, 2022), Elena Tajima Creef employs an Asian American feminist vantage point to examine ways of looking at indigenous Japanese Ainu women taking part in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition; Japanese immigrant picture brides of the early twentieth century; interned Nisei women ...
Jun 17, 2022•52 min•Ep. 56
Today I talked to Lilianne Milgrom about L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece (Girl Friday Books, 2021). In 1866, maverick French artist Gustave Courbet painted one of the most iconic images in the history of art: a sexually explicit portrait of a woman's exposed genitals. Audaciously titled L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the scandalous painting was kept hidden for a century and a half. Today, it hangs in the world-renowned Orsay Museum in Paris, view...
Jun 15, 2022•47 min•Ep. 108
Wanda M. Corn's book Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern (Prestel Publishing, 2017) explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garmen...
Jun 14, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 107
Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and reconstruction, postwar economic acceleration, and beyond. Throughout, Teasley is sensitive to issues of gender and class within the communities of d...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 81
Art forms have rules, usually implicit, that govern the experiences that artists want their audiences to have: for example, a representational painting should be hung right-side-up, the same sort of paint medium should be used in restoration, and the painting should not be touched. In Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press 2022), Sherri Irvin argues that contemporary conceptual art is constituted by custom rules as well as by their physical medium: the artist may specify ...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 286
Yi Gu's Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard UP, 2020) examines the rise of open-air painting in 20th-century China, showing how this emphatically new form of landscape painting precipitated and participated in an ocular turn. In its urgent embrace of Cartesian optics and its interrelationship with new technologies like photography, open-air painting taught Chinese artists (and citizens) new, modern "ways of seeing." Gu traces the birth of the form in the early 20th century, sho...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 33
In Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic (Duke UP, 2021), Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being disc...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 448
The #metoo movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural thought is that fans ought to give up the artworks of immoral artists, but according to Mary Beth Willard, it’s hard to find good reasons to do so. In Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists (Routledge, 2021), she contends that because most boycotts of artists won’t succeed, there’s no ethical reason to do so most of the time. She then argues th...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 106
In this podcast, Lisa Blackmore, Senior Lecture in the School of Philosophy, History and Interdisciplinary Studies Center at the University of Essex, and Liliana Gomez, Professor of Art and Society at the University of Kassel, introduce their edited volume Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean art (Routledge, 2020) and the multiple ways it proposes to "think with water". Spotlighting the ways in which artists in the Americas have long been in dialogue with water, liquids and fluids as...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 160
The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to seemingly leaderless internet misinformation.Many of such events have been the subject of academic study - but research is often slow to keep up with the rapidly changing scene. If a researcher tracing the r...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 105
The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2021) examines the challenges inherent in exhibiting design ideas. Traditionally, exhibitions of architecture and design have predominantly focused on displaying finished outcomes or communicating a work through representation. In this ground-breaking new book, Fleur Watson unveils the emergence of the ‘new curator’. Instead of exhibiting finished works or artefacts, the rise of ‘performative curation’ provides a space where experim...
Jun 07, 2022•34 min•Ep. 73
Virtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go…' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and listeni...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 146
