Recently Published Reviews

What to do with a retired emperor? Soon after Emperor Akihito announced his intention to abdicate in April 2019, this question captured headlines across Japan. Not merely a response to the unusual circumstances—the last imperial retirement occurred in 1817—the inquiry was advanced as part of a bold appeal: so that he not overshadow his successor, Akihito should leave Tokyo for Kyoto. The proposal was perhaps the most ambitious of many made by Kyoto political groups in recent years to reclaim from Tokyo cultural, political, and economic institutions taken over the course of centuries. The campaign is unlikely to succeed, but… Full Review

The stairwell leading down to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s (MCA) first floor simulates the visual experience of a New York City subway. The walls are lined with DIY graffiti, written in a variety of colors and styles, offering the passage as a prologue for its exhibition, Wall Writers: Graffiti in Its Innocence. Graffiti historian, urban anthropologist, and guest curator Robert Gastman exhaustively examines the history of the early graffiti scene in New York and Philadelphia. Beginning in 1967 as youth started to routinely make marks on the streets, the study sets out to illuminate the… Full Review

Performance art has become a hot topic of research in art history, and it has surged in popularity judging by the number of performance art classes, conferences, and performance studies departments in UK and US universities. This review will consist of appraising two texts that reckon with performance: Diana Taylor’s Performance (2016) and Jennifer Doyle’s Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013). Taylor, a performance studies and Spanish professor, focuses strictly on performance art—specifically rethinking aspects of it; the field has been re-formed through new theories. On the other hand, Doyle, an English professor, focuses on… Full Review

It is difficult to assess Margarita Tupitsyn’s new book, Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992, because of its strong spirit of partisanship. It covers wide historical ground and brings in a lot of new material gathered from primary sources, but it is also unabashedly selective, its choices circumscribed by the author’s personal history. A well-known art historian and curator of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art, Tupitsyn belongs to the generation of intellectuals who came of age during the period of stagnation and decline of the Soviet Union. The history she narrates belongs to this period fully and inextricably. Her important contribution… Full Review

According to E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, the terms “performance,” “queer,” and “blacktino” in the title of their coedited book Blacktino Queer Performance signal collaborations: queer as non-normative sexualities; performance as a lens to examine sociocultural phenomena; and blacktino analytics as a “critical optic [which] allows us to maintain the goals of queer-of-color-critique and to ground it in [. . .] black and brown intergroup relations” (7). On the volume’s cover is a seminal moment in queer blacktino performance: Sylvia Riviera and Marsha P. Johnson, foremothers of blacktino transgender activism, at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Gay Pride… Full Review

The Restless Earth, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and organized by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, was an ambitious exhibition that brought together more than sixty artists from over forty countries. It presented an exceptional ensemble of personal and collective works, which describe some of the most critical and debated issues of our society—migration, the current refugee crisis, and the phenomenon of globalization. The exhibition was on display at the Triennale di Milano Foundation, a center that explores the experimental languages of contemporary art, architecture, and design. The Restless Earth was displayed in a series of rooms, galleries, and corridors, which occupied… Full Review

Olivier Barlet’s 2016 English translation of Les Cinémas d’Afrique des années 2000 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012) offers scholars and students an impressive and comprehensive study of African film made and produced specifically from 1996 to the early 2000s. The four-hundred-plus-page work focuses on the questions and polemics in filmmakers’ work as well as the criticism that dictates the theoretical framework through which scholars understand African cinema. Barlet seeks to couch his study in the transnational contexts of the current trials and turmoil of our time to which African filmmakers are responding. “Africa today,” he writes, does not exist “in isolation… Full Review

The discipline of art history has, of late, experienced a surge of interest in the adjacent field of conservation studies. Exactly a decade ago, the research and conservation institutes at the Getty cohosted the symposium “The Object in Transition,” convened to bring artists, art historians, curators, and conservators together to discuss case studies that spanned from modernist painting to Postminimalist latex-based sculpture. The symposium—which one can watch in its entirety online—addressed, in the words of its organizers, “the interpretative problems that have arisen in relation to durability and ephemerality in modern and contemporary art,” which “have been exacerbated by an… Full Review

Amanda Wunder’s impressive study discusses how sacred artworks were created collaboratively as powerful interventions to mitigate Seville’s severe financial, political, and social crises in late seventeenth-century Spain. She examines works in multiple media, including architecture, painting, sculpture, alhajas (luxury objects prized for both their spiritual or monetary value), printed materials, and ephemera. Many of these were part of urban renewal campaigns responding to the natural and human-made disasters that profoundly affected Seville’s topography and distribution of resources, which eventually contributed to the city’s decline. Wunder explains in careful detail the context of the dire economic, political, and social turmoil that… Full Review

“No animal but man ever laughs.” Aristotle’s declaration launches this book on technologically facilitated representations, insisting on a historically broad and human framework for machine pictures. Though not unmindful of photography’s material functions, Kaplan’s engagingly written survey explores the medium’s rootedness in human experience and use, elucidating both its productive and destructive uses in the amplification of Self. What might initially appeal as a light-hearted study of levity in photographic practice swiftly transforms into a deeper reflection on the psychological motivations behind comedy, which also includes vilification, mockery, and the fear of mortality. Kaplan’s volume, in other words, is not… Full Review

Joan A. Holladay and Susan L. Ward, along with thirty-three additional contributors, have completed the third installment of the mammoth Gothic Sculpture in America series. This volume includes 446 entries on close to 500 objects, bringing the total of works published in the series close to 1200. At least two more volumes are anticipated. While some of the sculptures included, such as an Angel from the Frick Collection (cat. #43), have received scholarly attention, many more are published for the first time in this volume. Holladay and Ward’s introduction acknowledges the challenges inherent in both the terms “Gothic” and “sculpture.”… Full Review

The third and last iteration of Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950 on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2017, is just one of the several exhibitions over the last five years that has sought to examine and complicate the story about the development of avant-garde movements in Mexico and their impact on the cultural and social life of the country. This latest surge of interest in modern Mexican art started with Vanguardia en México 1915–1930, organized by the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City in 2013, and continued with the exhibition Modern Mexico Avant-Garde… Full Review

The vast area of the Andes was home to extraordinary cultures that produced ritual imagery for millennia before the arrival of the Spanish and continued with new subjects and significance under the dictates of the Catholic Church. Easel paintings by indigenous artists from Cuzco, once the capital of the Inca empire, have received considerable attention along with other Precolumbian and colonial ceramics, metallurgy, architecture, and textiles from the city and its environs, Changes in artistic production follow the course of cultural, social, political, and religious action through numerous administrative systems, culminating with the Spanish in the sixteenth century. However, there… Full Review

What distinguishes the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Calder: Hypermobility exhibition from other recent Calder exhibitions is its presentation of sculpture as performance art. Jay Sanders, the Whitney Museum’s curator of performance art, and his colleagues Greta Hartenstein and Melinda Lang advance the claim that, in order to be adequately apprehended, Calder’s sculptures ought to be seen and heard in motion or, as they would have it, in a state of activation. From the position of art historical argument, this seems so logical as to sound self-evident and therefore unworthy of serious consideration. However, in the museum setting, the implementation… Full Review

Seldom is an artist offered the opportunity of creating a complete space. Seldom is an artist offered complete control of the architecture, lighting, and contents of a venue, or given complete control of the experience of the spectator. More seldom still does a public museum afford such an occasion to an artist, allowing for the creation of a truly permanent installation. With the realization of Austin, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin accomplishes this rare feat, enabling Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) to join an elite list of artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries… Full Review