NEW BOOKS
"Art History and Its Institutions:
Foundations of a Discipline Art History and Its Institutions"
focuses on the institutional discourses that shaped and continue to
shape the field from its foundation in the nineteenth century. From
museums and universities to law courts, labor organizations and photography
studios, contributors examine a range of institutions, considering
their impact on movements such as modernism, their role in conveying
or denying legitimacy, their impact of defining the parameters of
the discipline and, the process of canon formation. ... more
"African
Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art"
by Moyo Okediji
Book Description: African Renaissance: Old Forms,
New Images in Yoruba Art describes, analyzes, and interprets
the historical and cultural contexts of an African art renaissance
using the twentieth-and twenty-first century transformation of ancient
Yoruba artistic heritage. Juxtaposing ancient and contemporary Yoruba
art, Okediji defines this art history through the lens of colonialism,
an experience that served to both destroy ancient art traditions and
revive Yoruba art in the twentieth century.
With vivid reproductions of paintings, prints, and drawings, Okediji
describes how Yoruba art has replenished and redefined itself. Okediji
groups the text into several broadly overlapping periods that intricately
detail the journey of Yoruba art and artists: first through oppression
by European colonialism, then the attainment of Nigeria’s independence
and the new nation’s subsequent military coup, and ending with present-day
native Yoruban artists fleeing their homeland.
Based upon extensive interviews with the artists and critical readings
of the existing literature on contemporary Yoruba art, African
Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art will appeal
to the art historian and art collector and serve as a wonderful introduction
to the canon of Yoruba art for the general reader.
"Adobe
Acrobat 5 Master Class"
by Pattie Belle Hastings, Bjorn Akelsen, Sandee Cohen
Did you know that you could use Adobe Acrobat to create slideshows
and presentations? Many people don't realize that Acrobat PDF files
can be used for more than just sharing cross-platform, visually accurate
copies of their documents with colleagues and customers.
This gorgeous, full-color book – 384 pages in length – uses case
studies to demonstrate Acrobat's myriad uses as a sophisticated, multi-purpose,
interactive tool.
From the very first moment you pick it up and open it, you know you
are dealing with the best of graphic design. The pages are laid out
with great taste. All the elements work together on the page. You
can read the body copy with no pictures jumping up in the way of your
thoughts. Then you can look at the bottom of the pages to follow the
step by step instruction. Mr. Akselsen and Ms. Hastings deserve an
award for their ground-breaking design. [Pattie Belle Hastings
is one of my grad school classmates who has a great design sense.
This book is not to be missed. See
her Cyborg Mommy project here.]
"Photography's Antiquarian
Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes," by
Lyle Rexer
Book review: By 1995 and the apparent triumph of
anti-photographic (or photocritical) art, camera artists with a wide
variety of attitudes and motives were deliberately re-engaging the
physical facts of photography, that is, its materials and processes,
and turning to the history of photography for metaphors, technical
insight, and visual inspiration. ... full text article and images
[+]
"Wilfredo Lam & His Contemporaries
1938-1952"
by: Lowery Stokes Sims
Book review: The one-man Crisis in Modernism: In
the early 1950s, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted that
having "accepted primitive art into itself," European culture was
being "colonized in reverse,"... full text article [+]
Ethnomathematics:
Challenging Eurocentrism in Mathematics Education (Suny
Series, Reform in Mathematics Education)
Card catalog description: This collection brings together classic,
previously-published articles and new research to present the emerging
field of ethnomathematics from a critical perspective, challenging
particular ways in which Eurocentrism permeates mathematics education.
The contributors identify several of the field's.
Africa
Counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture
Book Description: This fascinating study of mathematical thinking
among Saharan African peoples covers counting in words and in gestures;
measuring time, distance, weight, and other quantities; number systems;
patterns in music, poetry, art, and architecture; number magic and
taboos, and much more.
The 'Hood Comes First : Race, Space, and Place in Rap and
Hip-Hop (Music/Culture) by Murray Forman (Wesleyan University
Press, distributed by Univ. Press of New England; 387 pages; $70 hardcover,
$24.95 paperback).
Explores spatial aspects of rap and hip-hop culture, from the idea
of the 'hood to the global marketing of the music.
The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction
by Walter Laqueur
Editorial Review: The use of violence to
achieve political goals stretches all the way back to biblical times,
and Walter Laqueur outlines its long practice in these pages. Yet
his main concern is with the 21st-century threat of "megaterrorism":
"What we know about past ages of barbarism is frightening enough,"
he writes. "The consequences of aggressive madness in the age
of high technology and the era of weapons of mass destruction may
well be beyond our imagination." Along the way, he offers a fascinating
sociology of terrorism; its practitioners, for instance, tend to come
from the educated middle classes (although this is far from a hard-and-fast
rule). Also, terrorists rarely believe their actions will allow them
to seize political power. Instead, they aim to provoke specific responses
from their targets, such as lighting an international conflict. Although
it is hardly a how-to book, The New Terrorism describes what it takes
for terrorism to succeed--Laqueur's list of essentials includes careful
planning, an ability to improvise, small units of operation, the anonymity
of large urban areas, and ready sources of money. The book is full
of rich observations, and there probably isn't a more knowledgeable
source on the subject than Laqueur, who has written several books
on European and Middle Eastern history and military analysis. His
mild pessimism is troubling, but perhaps warranted. Terrorism is about
to become even more terrible. -- John J. Miller
The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Anthony Day: The New
Terrorism would serve admirably as a first-rate textbook on the subject.
One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational
Identity
by Miwon Kwon
[Assistant Prof. of Art Hist. UCLA & Graduate Faculty at
the Vermont College of the Union Institute]
Book Description: Site-specific art emerged in the
late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the
prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the
1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process
art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional
critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted
on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years,
however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated
in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy
the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity
and changes in institutional and market forces.
One Place after Another offers a critical history
of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework
for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political
progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban
theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates
concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses
the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site
specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between
location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses
the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser,
Donald Judd, Renée Green, Suzanne Lacy, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,
Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.
One
Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity
Article in the journal "October," Vol.
80 / Spring 1997
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