Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art, Benjamin Anderson studies three cultures—Frankish, Umayyad, and Byzantine—to examine how each used cosmological imagery to express social and political relationships between the ruler and the people. That zodiac imagery has remained stable from antiquity to the present allows for this type of study. For those unfamiliar with the history of zodiac and cosmos studies, Anderson provides a logical and helpful introduction, deftly framing the two approaches to the study of cosmos iconography in art and architecture: the Warburgian school, which focused primarily on the survival and revival of cosmic images, and the… Full Review

Annie Bourneuf’s monograph Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible is a brilliantly written and meticulously researched contribution to the reinterpretation of classical modernism. Each of the three main chapters attends to a group of works and concepts that are central to the canonical artist Paul Klee. The study analyzes pictures and texts from the period between 1916 and 1923, from the small-format graphics, which were produced during World War I, and early Schriftbilder (pictographs and images containing letters or poems), to the Quadratbilder (square images) from the Weimar Bauhaus period; it covers the part of Klee’s life that begins… Full Review

In the classic art-historical telling, performance art was birthed around 1910 in Italy by a group of men who incited audience riots with ideological and aesthetic provocations at their Futurist serata, or evenings. Fast-forward to the 1950s, and body-based art emerges as one of several tactics to dematerialize the art object and resist easy commodification of one’s artistic endeavors—a concern primarily for those testing the boundaries of, rather than fighting for access to, the art world and its market. Only with this traditional narrative in mind can one fully appreciate the audacity of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist… Full Review

In Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000–2015, Jennifer Liese brings together seventy-five texts by contemporary artists working in diverse media, including such well-known practitioners as Mira Schor, Xu Bing, Coco Fusco, Ryan Trecartin, Adrian Piper, and Mike Kelley. As becomes clear in the introduction, Liese—the director of the Writing Center at Rhode Island School of Design—aims to show that artists in the twenty-first century are not only writing more but also expanding the category known as “artists’ writing.” On this count, I would say Liese has succeeded. With an emphasis on the activity of writing rather than on the final… Full Review

Despite the growth of museum-history scholarship in recent decades, there is still much to learn about museums’ origins and development. Kathleen Curran’s skillfully researched and richly illustrated book is a stimulating contribution to this field, especially regarding collections and display practices among the first generation of major American art museums as they matured. These include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (both founded in 1870), what became the Philadelphia Museum of Art (whose origins date to 1876), and, to a lesser extent, museums further west, including the Art Institute of… Full Review

Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, along with its corresponding exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a much-needed and long sought-after addition to the corpus of Egyptological studies. With the exception of such classic treatises as Wolfram Grajetzki’s The Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt: History, Archaeology and Society (London: Duckworth Egyptology, 2006) and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Pharaohs and Mortals: Egyptian Art in the Middle Kingdom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), few books have been wholly dedicated to the art of the Middle Kingdom. This stands in stark contrast to the Old Kingdom, which entices readers with… Full Review

The Art of Life in South Africa is not an art-history book, but every page addresses both art and history. Magaziner, a historian, uses art education in apartheid-era South Africa as a window into the experience of living in a repressive state, and the complicated, nuanced ways in which trainees and teachers adapted to, and thrived in spite of, that state. Art making is an act of self-expression, an intervention to make the world more beautiful, which seems wholly incongruous with the horrors of apartheid-era South Africa. Yet, through Magaziner’s rich description of an art-teacher training program, a seemingly peripheral… Full Review

As installed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium provided a salient comment on the artist who perhaps best represents the new canon of twentieth-century Latin American art. This canon is grounded in three pillars of Oiticica’s work: abstraction, participation, and conceptualism. I have previously argued that in the Global North this canon was first consolidated by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez’s seminal exhibition Heterotopías / Inverted Utopias, which opened at the Reina Sofía in 2000 (see Daniel R. Quiles, “Exhibition as Network, Network as Curator: Canonizing Art from ‘Latin America,’” Artl@s Bulletin 3… Full Review

There has been a spate of recent exhibitions identifying and reflecting upon a turn in photographic practice: a turn toward the materiality of the photograph and the full embrace of its unique processes of “capture.” These exhibitions, and the catalogue texts that supplement them, often seize on the notion of photography’s essence as indexical. Photography’s material structure and process of image making are said to be determined by their causal relationship to the world. Their indexical trace of this world, rather than the iconic depiction of it, determines photography’s unique contribution to representation. And those practices that reflect on this… Full Review

I remember thinking sometime around 2010, when SITE Santa Fe presented The Dissolve, that it seemed odd how much the site—Santa Fe, or geography more broadly—mattered so little in that year, or any other prior year’s, biennial. Rather, The Dissolve was about media (technologies of moving images) and not about place. When Irene Hofmann stepped in as director of SITE Santa Fe in 2011, she overhauled the biennial format, taking two years off before presenting SITElines.2014 Unsettled Landscapes. Where other biennials had rejected place as a precept, this biennial exhibition (created with two guest curators, Candice Hopkins and Lucía… Full Review