Fine Arts

This paper considers how three exhibitions in the 1990s and 2000s displayed ancient Egyptian and African art together to form a more “holistic” art historical approach to the African continent. The effectiveness of these exhibitions will be examined, as will how this information can aid current scholars and curators in the future.

A review of:
W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt, and Michael Taussig. Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Paperback. 152 pp.
See: http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/occupy-three-inquiries-in-disobedience/

This essay analyzes two recent interactive documentary projects: Sharon Daniel’s Public Secrets (2006), an exploration of the prison industrial complex through the testimonies of female inmates in California, and Zohar Kfir’s Points of View (2014) which “maps” Palestinian video advocacy projects made for and/or disseminated by B’Tselem, a human rights organization working in the occupied territories. I argue that the interactive documentary form, as deployed by Daniel and Kfir, draws on the legacies of radical documentary practice, but offers new possibilities for engagement and intervention. The interactive documentary form functions as a structuring device for a wealth of affectively powerful witnesses, testimonies, and varied forms of evidence. This essay explores how interactive documentaries allow viewers/users a multi-faceted affective encounter with a range of subjects and evidence. This form, in concert with a radical political stance, I argue, is a locus for the representation of and viewer/user critical engagement with broad systemic problems, renders visible hidden structures of violence and power, and engenders an “affective radicality” that moves viewers/users into larger networks of political discourse, militant activism, and practices of resistance.

Full article available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/uTaQbTtPsypKtcu6TZB2/full

While their names are not frequently juxtaposed in existing scholarship, Percy Grainger and Edward MacDowell both maintained that cosmopolitanism was not merely a return to eighteenth-century idealism, but also a practical solution to mediating the anxieties of their epoch. I argue that, as members of a transatlantic network of artists, their overlapping system of referents and mutual fascination with Nordic cultures was integral to the development of mutable definitions of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the deliberate consciousness of difference that permitted for the simultaneous expansion and contraction of identities also contributed to the rise of conflicting imperatives. In the case of Grainger, certain tensions remain unresolved, including the propensity to circulate racial hierarchies under the moniker of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Therefore, in this article, I offer a methodology for appraising the common foundations of their affiliations, advance new analytical tools for evaluating the practice of ‘cosmopolitanizing’ local sources, and problematize the purported universality of their resultant discourse. By focusing upon the particular aspect of harmonic contextuality, I find that a distinct mode of hybridity emerged as they sought to distance themselves from European artistic models while in living America – one that ironically brought properties of time and space into closer proximity. This study thereby illustrates that the consequences of their cultural dialogue led to the end of anachronisms in the service of a ‘continual and restless spirit of change’.