Recently Published Reviews

Pamela A. Patton’s Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain makes an important contribution to the already rich field of medieval art and Jewish-Christian relations. Scholars such as Bernhard Blumenkranz, Michael Camille, Ruth Mellinkoff, Heinz Schreckenberg, Sara Lipton, Debra Higgs Strickland, Mitchell Merback, Vivian Mann, Nina Rowe, Herbert Kessler, and David Nirenberg, among others, have examined the ways in which Christian art expresses perceptions of Jews and Judaism.[1] As Patton points out, these studies focus primarily on northern European art. Patton expands the scope of this current scholarship by demonstrating that Iberian Christian imagery incorporated, altered, or resisted northern… Full Review

Over the last twenty-five years, meals constructed by artists as art have flourished through a range of itinerant arts initiatives in public and private spaces and become recent programmatic mainstays in galleries and museums around the world, giving the impression that these works are a contemporary trend. Yet, in the 1930s the Italian Futurists generated a body of work about food that predated these artist projects—opening a restaurant, La Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate), in Turin, Italy, for example, that was forty years ahead of Food, the restaurant founded in New York by Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Goodden… Full Review

Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator, Contemporary Art Museum Houston (CAMH), Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art was presented in New York over two venues: Grey Art Gallery and Studio Museum in Harlem. Timed to coincide with Performa 13 (the biennial performance art festival held in New York in November), this pioneering exhibition was activated by a number of performance commissions and bridged two legendary neighborhoods long associated with artists: Harlem and Greenwich Village. The exhibition press release stated that it was the first “to survey over fifty years of performance art by visual artists of African… Full Review

Glenn Willumson’s Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad begins with a discussion of a photograph by Andrew Joseph Russell titled East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail (no. 227) (1869), also known as Meeting of the Rails, Promontory, Utah, 1869. The photograph features workers and executives from the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad celebrating the completion of the transcontinental line. Willumson starts by analyzing how Russell’s photograph is often reproduced as historical illustration, but its original context is rarely considered. To read the image as symbolic of technological superiority and the triumph of national… Full Review

There is a kind of fatigue in recent literature on photography. The ritual of declaring a ubiquitous abundance of photographic images, both historical and contemporary, is usually accompanied by a compulsion to address this situation and a requirement to analyze them. But how, in what framework, and to what ends? Understanding photography as a journey, as a set of “itinerant languages,” is one way to respond to this challenge. The Itinerant Languages of Photography, edited by Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles, offers itself as the product of a double voyage of conferences and workshops in different locations… Full Review

Selfies, Instagram feeds, photo tagging: whatever value we may have once placed on the privacy of our photographs seems gone forever. The incorporation of digital cameras into cell phones has created this condition, launching us into a post-camera, post-print era where we press the button and a messaging service does the rest. The “rest” is to render instantly our private moments into public documents that can be neither reversed nor regulated. As many critics of new media have proclaimed, it is the end of photography as we once practiced it and the end of privacy as we once felt it… Full Review

Evolutionary approaches positing seamless and irreversible transitions from one medium to another continue to exert a significant hold over the history of art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of nineteenth-century printed images, a field still under the powerful sway of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Photography and film are held to triumph not only over painting, with its aura of uniqueness, but even over the reproductive techniques that preceded them. Burin engraving, it seems, was eclipsed by the first stirrings of technological modernity, while lithography was but a fleeting… Full Review

Visitors to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who caught this exhibition with the unassuming title Chinese Paintings from Japanese Collections were treated to the rare opportunity of viewing some of Japan’s most treasured works of art. Thirty-five paintings in handscroll and hanging scroll formats, presented in two rotations, offered diverse examples of the major subjects of Chinese painting. Figures were especially well represented, including an emaciated Confucian scholar with papyrus-like skin preaching the subtleties of an ancient text, the savagely grinning idiot-savants Hanshan (Cold Mountain) and Shide of Zen Buddhist fame, and an oversized King of Hell, swarthy… Full Review

Recognized at the time of its making as a groundbreaking painting in both Jackson Pollock’s development as an abstract artist and the field of advanced American art, Mural of 1943 is a massive work—the largest that Pollock produced, in fact—at a staggering 95 5/8 x 237 3/4 inches. These monumental dimensions were prescribed by the size of the entryway in collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim’s Upper East Side townhouse. At just thirty-one years old, Pollock was still an unknown quantity in July 1943 when Guggenheim commissioned Mural (she gave Pollock carte blanche); began paying him a stipend of $150 per… Full Review

Curator Carol Squiers’s overview of photography since the 1970s at the International Center of Photography poses a vexing question in its title. For most of photography’s history before this period, the dilemma was: is photography an art? Finally answered to the satisfaction of most art institutions, the central question in the last few decades has dramatically turned to the very basis of the medium’s identity, particularly given the onslaught of digital media. Rather than answering the question directly, or attempting to surmise the future, Squiers’s exhibition offered a contrast to conceptualist-based theories of recent photographic history. In the opening… Full Review

It is strangely difficult to consider what is meant by street photography, both for those who write about it and for the photographers for whom the street is their location and, to varying degrees, their subject. This is due in large part to the remarkable success of a genre that is most often championed through reference to its so-called “greats”—photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, and Garry Winogrand—and, more tellingly still, through a familiarity and popularity that has seen it become the stock and trade of photography blogs and image-sharing sites. Much of this popularity is predicated on a… Full Review

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on textiles entitled Interwoven Globe certainly accomplished the goal stated on the show’s website, which was to “explore the international transmittal of design from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century through the medium of textiles.” Its scope was impressive, as was the great variety of textiles on display, whether in terms of geographic and chronological span or category type: fashion, liturgical textiles, marriage quilts, raw fabric, etc. The exhibition could not have come at a better time, perfectly in step with the museum’s declared interest in becoming more global and inclusive (“one Met… Full Review

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s Holy Bible takes the form of a King James facsimile, complete with tissuey paper and gilt edges. Opening the book reveals photographs printed as if pasted over the text, with evocative scriptural phrases underlined in red. A crimson pamphlet in the back bears the essay “Divine Violence” by philosopher Adi Ophir, which argues that the biblical God regulated humanity through catastrophic violence, and that with the rise of law and the nation state, this power shifted to the human realm. This very human condition is manifested in the compelling documentary photographs, chosen by the artists… Full Review

Although entitled The Image and Its Prohibition in Jewish Antiquity, the ten essays in this collection edited by Sarah Pearce center as much on the power of the image as on its prohibition. From the remarkable wall paintings of the Dura Europos synagogue to the surprising floor mosaics featuring Helios and the zodiac, the richness of ancient Jewish art, particularly the art of Late Antiquity, is on display. Nearly half of the essays focus on the art of that period—a good choice, since much of the scholarly community, not to mention the general public, is still unfamiliar with its… Full Review

Ron Athey’s performances present bloody religious tableaux, explicit sex, and self-harming actions. Deeply disturbing and profoundly moving, these performances have garnered critical attention and generated controversy since the 1990s, when Athey’s Torture Trilogy (1992–95) became the focal point of Congressional culture war debates. The ideas and aesthetics embedded in Athey’s artworks reflect his complex, overlapping identities, both past and present: Pentecostal child prodigy, punk adolescent, heroin addict, S&M club performer, HIV-positive patient, tattooed man, avant-garde performance artist. As the first book to focus on Athey’s work, Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey addresses these and… Full Review