Art History最新文献

This essay focuses on a series of photographic negatives relating to the ground-breaking exhibition Parallel of Life and Art, which opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1953. Painstakingly preserved by one of the five exhibition-makers, the artist-photographer Nigel Henderson, these dark, translucent forms of photographic image offer the basis for a new interpretation of the exhibition. Crucially, they show how Parallel of Life and Art was rooted – technologically, aesthetically, and conceptually – in photographic negativity. This engagement with the negative found concentrated expression in four photographic images that Henderson created and integrated into the display. Simultaneously rejecting and reworking the conventions of modern art, these images enacted complex forms of negation, which inflected the exhibition as a whole. Read in dialogue with the negatives from Parallel of Life and Art, they pose profound challenges to the established distinctions between the artwork, the photograph, and the exhibition in post-war Britain.

The most remarkable feature of the Hammelburg Mahzor, a fourteenth-century German High Holiday book, is the inclusion of zoocephalic figures: humans with beastly heads. The purpose of this essay is to explore the semiotics and phenomenology of this specifically Jewish visual idiom, and to suggest that its presence lies at the intersection of language, philosophy, poetry, and history. In the Mahzor, zoocephaly signals distinction that collapses temporalities, tests the limits of alterity, and engages in a sophisticated word–image play that strives to establish visceral connections with the community of the manuscript's users. Hammelburg zoocephali invoke the fragility of the human condition by establishing reverberating relationships between themselves and other inhabitants of the Mahzor's pages: echoes of many, avatars of none. Outwardly monstrous yet emphatically human, these zoocephali prove to be particularly excellent images to think with about the place of Hebrew manuscripts in the long history of medieval visual culture.

In 1778, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg began work on a pair of companion pictures marking George III's attendance at a spectacular military review on the broad expanse of Essex wasteland that was Warley Common. Scholars of the painter's art have largely overlooked these ambitious, large-scale landscapes, but their commission and subsequent display at the Royal Academy played a key role in advancing Loutherbourg's career. Strikingly novel, the paintings attracted a good deal of critical attention for their curious mix of the patriotic and the satirical, the topographic and the scenographic. Taking its cue from this latter stage set-like quality, this essay situates Loutherbourg’s Warley scenes in relation to a series of dramatic spaces, moving from the ‘battlefield’ depicted to the London stage to the Academy exhibition room, highlighting a series of connections and interactions that shed new light on the performativity of Georgian art, culture and spaces of display.

Critical image comparison is a widespread art-historical practice. This essay explores why a Brabantine artist encouraged viewers to exercise it in the late fifteenth century. At the time, northern European artists tested out how images could be means of transcending the visible world while simultaneously showcasing their very constructedness. The self-reflexivity that characterises such images has engendered a particularly rich field of art-historical studies. This essay focuses on a little-known image which was designed to combine two visual concepts devised more than three centuries apart – a twelfth-century map of Jerusalem, and a cityscape popularised in the fifteenth century – and required viewers to realise this combination in their minds, using external images recollected before their internal eyes. In its complex conception, the image becomes a unique contributor to the vibrant debate about the right use of images in late medieval devotion, and to the long history of image comparisons.

Published posthumously in 1950, queer Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt's photobook Ceylon crafted an aesthetic of queer environmental abundance. His photographs, ranging from documentary-style to surrealist-inspired images, were taken between 1933 and 1944, shaped by and contributing to rising waves of national consciousness and anti-colonial movements ahead of the island's independence in 1948. British rule since 1815 had destroyed common land and outlawed homosexuality for being ‘against the order of nature’. Wendt sought to confront and challenge colonial control over both ecology and sexuality, imagining alternative possibilities through both experimental and social realist photography. Other queer representations of the island (by Bevis Bawa, Ernst Haeckel and Edward Carpenter) are considered alongside the photographer's collaboration with queer, anti-imperialist filmmaker Basil Wright. Drawing on a queer ecological methodology and decolonial theory, this essay argues that Ceylon celebrated a queer environmental aesthetic of abundance by picturing Sri Lankan sexuality and landscapes as unbounded by colonial rule.