Recently Published Reviews

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

The second and final showing of Kathryn Andrews: Run for President closed at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in early January 2017. When I visited, I saw wall-sized photomurals of past presidential publicity gambits—often palpably raced ones—framing sculptures with mirror-polished steel surfaces, sagging balloons, and memorabilia from blockbuster movies including Spiderman, The Matrix, and Lethal Weapon. There was also clown-related symbolism, particularly in the installation that drew from Bozo the ClownTM’s 1984 presidential run, but also in four portraits of men made-up as hobos and/or clowns. Andrews’s show was a kaleidoscopic arrangement of symbols… Full Review

After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration—a book that puts the question of a starting point at its heart—wears a black-on-black cover. The black title is pressed in to the book’s black surface, barely discernible save for its slight gloss. On the back of the book, a large circle ringed in that same glossy black looms over a blackened oval. Riffs on these shapes appear in the book’s interior to separate the sections; they appear as white against black, reconfigured, layered, and partitioned. These design elements are suggestive of After Year Zero’s central preoccupations: universalisms new and old, de-centering… Full Review

I first saw On Kawara’s work in person in 1998 at the retrospective exhibition Whole and Parts 1964–1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. At the time I was a graduate student in that city, and my memory of the show is marked by the architecture of the museum, with its rectangular spaces and high ceilings, where each of his bodies of work was assigned a separate space, objectivizing them and creating a sense of preciousness. Overall, the symmetric configuration of the spaces gave the impression that his work had arrived at a final destination, where it was… Full Review

In Painting the Hortus Deliciarum: Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time, Danielle B. Joyner has tackled one of the most challenging topics in Romanesque studies, the illuminated manuscript compilation known as the “Garden of Delights.” Created ca. 1175–85 by Abbess Herrad for the Augustinian convent of Saint Odile at Hohenberg in Alsace, and destroyed in the bombardment of Strasbourg in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, this highly important Romanesque work survives only in copies and descriptions. Students of Romanesque art and culture will welcome this volume not only for its thoughtful insights but also for its beautifully reproduced illustrations… Full Review

Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, as well as one of his key courtiers, Alcuin, flattered the ruler with praise for his interest, indeed expertise, in science generally and astronomy in particular. In 809 CE a group of computistic scholars, apparently under the leadership of Adalhard of Corbie, gathered at Aachen and produced a handbook containing both texts and images that were intended to be helpful in understanding the calendar and, on the basis of that knowledge, of properly arranging the liturgical year. The Carolingians embarked on a program of spiritual and societal regeneration. Correct worship was essential for that program’s success. The… Full Review

In Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin, Celeste-Marie Bernier has written an intellectual and cultural biography of the artist. Her study is a deeply researched, archival-focused examination of the ways in which war, military service, race, identity, and art making were inextricably bound together for Horace Pippin (1888–1946). Suffering and Sunset is also polemical, challenging white-dominated archival and historical structures and official histories that have ignored and negated both the black male artist and the African American combat soldier. Understanding World War I as the defining experience for Pippin, Bernier reconsiders… Full Review

In recent decades, American and European museums have mounted major exhibitions highlighting individual Mesoamerican cultures, notably the Olmec, the Maya, and the Aztecs. Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico has a different focus. Using the culture hero Quetzalcoatl as its pivot, the exhibition and accompanying book investigate cultural and artistic traditions across Mesoamerica, and even beyond, during the period immediately preceding the Spanish conquest, known as the Postclassic (AD 950–1521). The exhibition was originally planned by curator Virginia M. Fields of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who sadly did not live to… Full Review

The heft of this volume and the comeliness of its jacket forecast the import and “handsome elegance” (334) of its contents. Richly illustrated, meticulously edited, and exquisitely produced, the object itself fuses ornament with substance in a kind of metonymic representation of its main argument. This work consists of twenty-six contributions grouped into seven sections, of which four reflect chronological groupings of medieval, early-modern, modern, and contemporary topics, while the remaining parts focus on conceptual themes. Geographically, the “global” reference in the publication’s subtitle is well justified, since the places discussed in its essays span several continents (the Islamic world… Full Review

Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space is a palimpsest of a book. It is rich with stories of intricate entanglements among capital, space, and politics; it provides a probing analysis focused on how this evidence allows for a new understanding of how the world operates. And it claims a role, albeit somewhat vaguely, for the agency of designers and others in crafting counter-narratives and insurgent practices. Easterling’s strength is in her convincing descriptions that flip the background into the foreground—we thought we knew how economies were optimized, but the process of optimization elicits hefty resonance. She describes the… Full Review

Philosophically inflected histories of modern painting take many forms. French phenomenology shapes one of the richest and most deeply ingrained of these. Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye offers an alternative to this standard way of charting European painting from roughly 1825 to 1900. His account is alternative in that it shifts emphasis decidedly away from what has become comme il faut in such philosophical studies, i.e., approaches that give pride of place to “impressionism” as an ordering concept. Alliez wants to resist this way of parsing the development of modern painting, and the artists and works he discusses are chosen to… Full Review