Books Received
JVC regularly receives books for review from leading international publishers. Listed below are those that we have received most recently.
If you are interested in reviewing any of these books please contact the Reviews Editor directly: mark [dot] little [at] tvu [dot] ac [dot] uk. Please include, where appropriate, a copy of your CV and a brief statement of why you would like to review the book requested.
Books will normally be available for review for two months from the date of receipt.
Roy Harris, The Great Debate About Art (Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, June 2o10)
This short text examines the impact of the doctrine of “art for arts sake”. [IN REVIEW]
Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minnesota, June 2010)
This book discusses the relationship between the embodied experience of food, its sensations and consumption and the theoretical foundations of the European avant-garde. [IN REVIEW]
A. Bryant & G.Pollock, Digital and Other Virtualities: renegotiating the image (I.B.Tauris, June 2010)
A collection of key texts on the subject by writers such as Willemen, Massumi, Rifkin and Weber.
M.J. Jacob & M. Grabner, the studio reader: On the Space of Artists (Chicago, June 2010)
A collection reflecting on the relationship of art and the artist to studio practices; includes Schneeman, Baldessari, Nauman, Buren and Jones.
Matthew Jesse Jackson, The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (Chicago, June 2010)
A comprehensive study of some aspects of unofficial Soviet art focused around the work of Ilya Kabakov.
Richard Grusin, Premediation: affect and mediality after 9/11 (Palgrave Macmillan, June 2010)
A discussion of the use of the media as a pre-emptive technology in the global security arsenal. [IN REVIEW]
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago, July 2010)
An exhaustive account of the scope and complexity of American practices of memorial building. [IN REVIEW]
Peter Muir, Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics (Ashgate, August 2010)
Loss and forgetting are the central ideas engaged here through a meditation on Attie’s affecting installations and the body of theory emerging from Benjamin’s work on the concept of history.
Charlene Regester, African American Actresses: The struggle for visibility 1900-1960 (Indiana University Press, August 2010)
Through a series of biographically oriented chapters the author explores racial politics, notions of stardom and identity across the period.
David Brody, Visualising American Empire: Orientalism & Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago August 2010)
An exploration of the role of visual culture in the operations of empire in the Philippines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Roland Recht, Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals (Chicago, September 2010)
A study of the relationship between vision and religious knowledge in the context of the medieval church
Cavanagh & Yonan, The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Ashgate, September 2010)
An edited collection of texts that examine cultural and aesthetic aspects of the porcelain industry in the period.
Kirstin Ringelberg, Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings (Ashgate, September 2010)
Studios and domestic space as representations as well as the products of these environments are considered alongside and as part of a reflection on the impact of gender boundaries on both male and female professional artists in the period.
Dickenson, Blair & Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Alabama, September 2010)
A collection of nine essays that reflects upon the spaces of memory in a public context including WW2 memorials, the cold war, nuclear energy and the Civil Rights Movement.
Ornella & Knauss, Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke’s Cinema (Pickwick, September 2010)
Essays that view Haneke’s output in relation to theology, voyeurism, ethics and aesthetics amongst many approaches. [IN REVIEW]
Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minnesota, October 2010)
An exploration of the roots and trajectories of the earth art movement. The text explores the work of artists such as Smithson, Eliasson, Mendieta, Turrell and Ikeda through the lens of phenomenology and in particular at its intersection with the writings of Irigaray and Levinas.
David Clarke, Water and Art (Reaktion, October 2010)
An examination of the ways in which water has been engaged as subject matter in both modern and contemporary art. This wide ranging study includes a fascinating section on the particular resonances of water in Chinese culture.
Vittorio Gregotti, Architecture: Means and Ends (Chicago, October 2010)
A collection of 24 short essays which range across subjects such as technics, the City, dwelling, cyberculture and the various manifestations of the designer/architect.
Paula Anand, Counter Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planete (Columbia, October 2010)
Using the little known Kahn archive as a backdrop, Anand steers a course through the practices of archiving, the relationship of cinema and memory, philosophy and geography in this meticulous study.
Fiona Candlin, Art, museums and touch (Manchester University Press, October 2010)
An exploration of the importance of touch in what is usually considered as the visual regime of the museum. Candlin uses archives, museology and government policy to elucidate the complex interactions at the heart of the museal sensorium.
Erin Haney, Photography and Africa (Reaktion, November 2010)
This latest addition to the Exposures series ranges across Africa’s colonialist and post-colonial engagements with photography as well as exploring its deeper contribution to the life of other art forms including painting, performance and textiles.
Wendy Steiner, THE Real Real THING: The Model in the Mirror of Art (Chicago, November 2010)
What does it mean to be a model in the age of the eternal pose? This is the central question that structures Steiner’s elegant study of the relationship between the notion of the real and it’s virtual counterpart as negotiated through acts of creation and the act of modelling.
Jeffrey Edward Green, The Eyes of the People: Democracy in the Age of Spectatorship (Oxford University Press, November 2010)
This book considers the tensions between the political voice of the engaged subject and the experience of politics shared by most people – through their eyes - as witnesses of the political moment. After a carefully staged reassessment of the theories of democracy the author ultimately call for a fundamental rethinking of western democratic ideals.
Andy Stafford, Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image (Liverpool University Press, November 2010)
A consideration of the relationship between text and image in the context of the French speaking world – including chapters on Algeria, the banlieue, photo-essayism and historical writing among others. All quotations are provided only in French.
M. Iverson & S. Melville, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago, November 2010)
A book about the emergence of the discipline that also points a significant direction for it’s future. The authors consider a number of assumptions about the origins of art history as a practice as well as undertaking close readings of Heidegger, Lacan, Reigl and Baxandall. [IN REVIEW]
James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford, November 2010)
A comprehensive study of iconoclasm that positions it as a practice of modernity. The text touches on the contemporary museum’s influences and Abstract Expressionism as the culmination of a puritan trajectory but the main focus of the book is on the period from around 1538 until the enlightenment.
Saito Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minnesota 2011)
An interesting study by a psychiatrist of the Japanese popular cultural phenomena of martially expert young girls and their appearance across a range of media and in particular their relationship to their Otaku fan base.
Natalie op de Beeck, Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (Minnesota 2010)
A beautifully illustrated and exposited exploration of the function of children’s illustrated book in the construction of American national images of modernity in the period between 1910 and 1940.
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Visions: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago 2011)
A careful and wide ranging analysis of the metaphors and performative codes that attach to blackness in American culture. Includes studies of documentary photography, iconography of popular music stars and media art.
Erin Brannigan, Dance Film: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford 2011)
An examination of the multiplicity of practices that inform dance on film including the musical though the books focus is on avant-garde and experimental practice and the ways in which that has influenced dance practice and “cine-choreography”. Includes studies of work by Deren, Bausch and others.
Craig Richardson, Scottish Art since 1960: Historical Reflections and Contemporary Overviews (Ashgate 2011)
An important addition to the literature of national cultural identity which brings together interviews, new archival material and case studies of exemplary artworks in an insightful and original way.
David Serlin (ed), Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (Minnesota 2011)
A fascinating collection that ranges over a variety of subjects from public health advocacy and education to the handling of dead bodies in the 17th century.
Gillian Whiteley, Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash (I.B. Tauris 2011)
A rethinking of the relationship between and the repurposing of rubbish by art. Examines assemblage, kitsch and found objects as detritus transformed by the processes of value accumulation.
Grimes, Hüsken, Simon & Venbrux (eds), Ritual, Media, and Conflict (Oxford 2011)
A collection of essays that explore the dissemination and escalation of conflict through media-driven ritual or ritually saturated media at local and global levels.
