When Kasimir’s Malevich’s Black Square was produced in 1915, no one had ever seen anything like it before. And yet it does have precedents. In fact, over the previous five hundred years, several painters, writers, philosophers, scientists, and censors alighted on the form of the black square or rectangle, as if for the first time. Foreshadowed: Malevich’s "Black Square" and Its Precursors (Reaktion Books, 2022) explores the resonances between Malevich’s Black Square and its precursors, revealing...
Dec 03, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 126
The two parallel Palace Museums in Beijing and Taiwan, and their separate collections of thousands of precious artworks and artifacts from imperial times, reflects a key moment in the 1940s when the Republic of China and the People’s Republic became distinct entities. But the very survival of these vast troves of porcelain, sculpture, jade, paintings, books and many other items up to that moment was far from guaranteed given the epochal events unfolding across East Asia in the early part of the ...
Dec 02, 2022•59 min•Ep. 474
Monica Juneja and Sumathi Ramaswamy's Motherland: Pushpamala N.'s 'Woman and Nation' (Roli Books, 2022) examines Motherland, an important series of photo-performances by the acclaimed artist Pushpamala N. on the Indian nation personified as woman, mother, and goddess. The series shows Pushpamala taking on Mother India's myriad personifications: nubile beauty and saintly renunciant; militant goddess wearing a garland of skulls or receiving the ultimate sacrifice of a warrior's head; the mother-su...
Nov 29, 2022•54 min•Ep. 168
From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair (Duke UP, 2022), Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from ...
Nov 25, 2022•24 min•Ep. 337
In African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 146
Few transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recently, downloaded an astonishing twenty million times in app form, the map remains a long-standing icon of British design and ingenuity. Hailed by the art and design community as a cultural artefact, it has also inspired other culturally important pieces of artwork, and in 2006 was voted second in BBC 2’s Great British Design Test. But it almost didn’t make...
Nov 18, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 69
Artist Valerie Hegarty like to rip things up, twist them, distort them, and then leave audiences to ponder the results of her violence against imagery. Join us for a conversation about making objects, tearing them up, origin stories, and what can happen to if you grow up in a revival historic home filled with fake artifacts. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at here. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...
Nov 17, 2022•53 min•Ep. 52
Laureline Latour founded Women In Art Magazine in July 2022 from a desire to bring together artists from different countries. She studied German and Russian ab initio at Oxford University. Women In Art Magazine's teams are based between Oxford, London, Paris and beyond. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppo...
Nov 16, 2022•28 min•Ep. 125
In Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive overhaul and rebranding of all DC Comics--transformed the character from a joke to an important figure of ecological justice. In this series, Aquaman becomes an accessible figure for charting environmental violences endemic to global capitalism and for developing a progressive and popular ecological imagination. Poll argues that The New 52 Aquaman shoul...
Nov 14, 2022•43 min•Ep. 136
It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and come with their own artefacts and subcultures. Peter Rehberg’s book Hipster Porn: Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine 'Butt' (Routledge, 2022) looks at one such source artefact and its fandom, using as its matter the pink-papered magazine Butt which gained a cult following ...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 123
Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects (U Minnesota Press, 2022), the first book on architecture by the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO), deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function. Graham Har...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 326
Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 2022) provides the first comprehensive history of film experiments at the Bauhaus, the famous art school that operated between 1919 and 1933 and was located in Weimar, before moving to Dessau and later to Berlin. While the Bauhaus is commonly associated with the development of modern architecture and industrial design, Design in Motion focuses on film, and demonstrates how the cinematic medium became a proving ground for some of the s...
Nov 02, 2022•2 hr 35 min•Ep. 124
Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus (MIT Press, 2022). This book offers...
Nov 02, 2022•54 min•Ep. 14
Common views of religion typically focus on the beliefs and meanings derived from revealed scriptures, ideas, and doctrines. David Morgan has broadened that framework radically to encompass the understanding that religions are fundamentally embodied, material forms of practice. The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions (UNC Press, 2021) shows readers how to study what has come to be termed material religion—the ways religious meaning is enacted in the material ...
Nov 01, 2022•57 min•Ep. 178
What can we know about ourselves and the world through the sense of touch and what are the epistemic limits of touch? Scepticism claims that there is always something that slips through the epistemologist's grasp. A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism (de Gruyter, 2021) explores the significance of touch for the history of philosophical scepticism as well as for scepticism as an embodied form of subversive political, religious, and artistic practice. Drawing on the tradition of scepticism withi...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 162
In Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham Hongwei Bao returns with a theory-driven, methodologically-diverse, empathetic, and insightful analysis of LGBTQ literature and visual culture in postsocialist China. A thorough introduction positions Bao as a participant observer and explores key concepts including “postsocialist metamorphosis,” defined as “the tra...
Oct 26, 2022•59 min•Ep. 43
In this episode of the Vault, we hear Harry Berger’s talk about Leonardo da Vinci and Vassari’s "Lives of the Painters." Harry Berger was a scholar of Renaissance English literature who wrote books about art history, anthropology, and philosophy. He taught at UC Santa Cruz, where he was an emeritus professor until he died in 2021, at age 96. Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster ...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 47
Reframing Disability in Manga (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) analyzes popular Japanese manga published from the 1990s to the present that portray the everyday lives of adults and children with disabilities in an ableist society. It focuses on five representative conditions currently classified as shōgai (disabilities) in Japan―deafness, blindness, paraplegia, autism, and gender identity disorder―and explores the complexities and sociocultural issues surrounding each. Author Yoshiko Okuyama b...
Oct 24, 2022•44 min•Ep. 9
In the tradition of The Lady in Gold and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the remarkable history behind one of the world's most beloved paintings, Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine More than half a millennium ago, a young woman sat before a Grecian-nosed artist known as Leonardo da Vinci. Her name was Cecilia Gallerani, and she was the fourteen-year-old mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Her lover, a ruthless man, was aware that da Vinci's brilliance as a painter would not only capture h...
Oct 20, 2022•49 min•Ep. 1273
Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. For Leonardo da Vinci, water was an enduring fascination, appearing in myriad forms throughout his work. In Watermarks, Leslie Geddes explores the extraordinary range of Leonardo’s interest in water and shows how artworks by...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 122
There has been no greater surge in global fashion trends and expressions of personal style than in the contemporary era of social media fashion influencers. But what constitutes “being in fashion” amongst this multiplicity of interpretations? In this episode of Humanities Matter, Dr. Laura Petican, Professor of Sociology at the National University, San Diego, and Dr. Jacque Lynn Foltyn, Associate Professor and Director of University Galleries at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, explore vario...
Oct 17, 2022•37 min•Ep. 66
The Asmat are an indigenous people of Indonesian Papua and are renowned for their artistic carving flair and complex life-cycle rituals. They also have big ambitions that reach as far as the Vatican. Over the past five decades, pressures from the state, religious authorities, and the global art market, have led to profound cultural changes and a widespread sense of predicament, dysphoria and disempowerment among the Asmat. In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Rober...
Oct 13, 2022•24 min•Ep. 68
Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (U California Press, 2022) is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the soc...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 197
Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland (Ohio State UP, 2022) offers a fresh perspective on the role of popular culture in the one-hundred-year history of the Polish state, from its foundation in 1918 to the present. Drawing on dozens of press articles, interviews, and readers' letters, Ewa Stańczyk discusses how journalists, artists, and audiences used comics to probe the boundaries of national culture and scrutinize the established notions of Polishness. C...
Oct 11, 2022•37 min•Ep. 175
What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, violent disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the Culture Wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions. Does a concern with race, gender, and sexuality, with unacknowledged power and privilege, with identity, give present critics the right to criticize the great works of the past? If we have learned to see tho...
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 182
How does the state support writers? In State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (Oxford UP, 2020), Asha Rogers, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the University of Birmingham, explores the history of authors, institutions, and governments approach to literature in a changing, imperial and post-imperial, Britain. The book uses a wealth of examples, from key organisations such as the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain, throug...
Oct 06, 2022•44 min•Ep. 322
Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. In Game...
Oct 04, 2022•58 min•Ep. 189
What comes to mind when we think of swans? Likely their beauty in domestic settings, their preserved status, their association with royalty, and possibly even the phrase ‘swan song’. Dr. Natalie Goodison’s Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022) explores the emergence of each of these ideas, starting with an examination of the medieval swan in natural history, exploring classical writings and their medieval interpretations and demonstrating how the idea of a swan’s song d...
Oct 04, 2022•53 min•Ep. 11
In The Metabolic Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2020), Clémentine Deliss, a curator, researcher, and former director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum, explores possible functions for anthropological museums in a postcolonial culture. Anthropological museums in Europe, as products of imperialism, have been compelled to legitimate themselves because the very basis of their exhibitions, the history of their collections, came about all too often through colonial appropriation and outright theft. In this b...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 121
It is often thought that the story of Tutankhamun ended when the thousands of items discovered by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were transported to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and put on display. But there is far more to Tutankhamun's story. Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the 100 years of research on Tutankhamun that has taken place since the tomb's discovery: we learn that several objects in the tomb were made of meteoritic iron that came from out...
Oct 03, 2022•41 min•Ep. 12
