Tag: Visual Culture

This key point in US history urgently calls for peaceful, art-filled protest.

August 7, 2019

Teachers strike in Oakland. Photo credit: Brooke AndersonPhotography. Published on Common Dreams.Used with permission. T. V. REEDBuchanan Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Washington State University As Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth has carefully documented, throughout modern history large-scale civil disobedience has been the most effective way to bring about significant social change—including overthrowing authoritarian regimes. If only … More This key point in US history urgently calls for peaceful, art-filled protest.

The Big Surreal

March 6, 2019

BY JOANNA FRUEH Surrealism is an art and literary movement in the early twentieth century. Its best-known work is a painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, in which clocks look like they’re melting in a bleak and blank terrain. In Surrealist painting, distortions of everyday reality, in scale, shape, and space give surreal … More The Big Surreal

On David Wojnarowicz, politics, and gestures.

July 3, 2018

BY LISA DIEDRICHProfessor of women’s and gender studies, State University of New York at Stony Brook Next week, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will launch a major exhibition of the work of David Wojnarowicz, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night.” It notes that Wojnarowicz was “queer and HIV-positive” and an “impassioned … More On David Wojnarowicz, politics, and gestures.

What Nazi exhibitions tell us about how the far right engages audiences today

June 4, 2018

BY MICHAEL TYMKIWLecturer in art history at the University of Essex For many people, events such as the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, with its torchlight parade, eagle-emblazoned shields and Nazi flags, bring with them uncomfortable reminders of fascist visual culture from the 1920s to 1945. While individuals and organisations associated with the … More What Nazi exhibitions tell us about how the far right engages audiences today

Foucault in the Contemporary Archive

December 19, 2017

CATHERINE M. SOUSSLOFFProfessor of art history, visual art, and theory at the University of British Columbia Last spring, I was in Paris as a Visiting Researcher at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, with a beautiful office just steps from the “old” Bibliotèque Nationale de France (BnF), newly renovated and now containing virtually the entire … More Foucault in the Contemporary Archive

Fun with Your Modern Head

August 4, 2017

Fritz Kahn, “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” (2d ed, ca. 1929).Artist: Fritz Shüler. © Kosmos Verlag, Stuttgart. National Library of Medicine. BY MICHAEL SAPPOLSwedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala In recent decades, scholars have begun to reckon with the visual turn in the popular science of the 18th and 19th centuries — the plates of the Encyclopédie … More Fun with Your Modern Head

René Magritte’s Selected Writings: On Jane Graverol

September 7, 2016

Jane Graverol’s Le Cortège d’Orpheé. BY KATHLEEN ROONEY Though the artist René Magritte (1898–1967) wrote extensively throughout his life and career—from aspirations of being a detective novelist to crafting genre-jumping essays, prose poems, lectures, reviews, and more—it’s hard to say why exactly it has taken so long for Magritte’s writings to become available in English. His Ecrits … More René Magritte’s Selected Writings: On Jane Graverol