Research and Innovation

Professor Shannon's 2017 book, The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (Yale University Press) offers a new understanding of the transformation of the visual arts around 1968. Uncovering a stringent realism in the period's art, this book traces many artists' rejection of essential truths in favor of mere facts and surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates its relationship to the Cold War's preoccupation with data as well as the longer rise of a pervasive culture of fact. The book focuses on the United States and West Germany, closely reading works ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. The Recording Machine is the winner of a Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant.

The significance of the sculptural decoration of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi has long been debated. This article demonstrates that the sculptural program is not only an early example of a newfound emphasis on Theseus as the particular hero of Athens, but that it is indicative of an effort to create visual parity between the deeds of Theseus and those of Herakles. The Athenian Treasury is, therefore, the first building to use mythic imagery involving Theseus, Herakles, and their battles against the Amazons as a sophisticated allusion to conflict with Persia and to the decisive role of Athens at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. The mythological themes elaborated in the treasury's decoration ingeniously predicate ancient parallels for contemporary events. My reevaluation of the Athenian Treasury's decoration invites us to reassess the intersections between art, life, and myth in the aftermath of momentous world events like Marathon.

How have Blacks been understood in Japan and represented in Japanese art? What role did the representation of Blacks perform in the construction of Japan’s own racialized identity vis-a-vis both blackness and whiteness? How did the Japanese artistic diaspora in the United States, as part of an Asian minority subject to discrimination—including Japanese and Japanese-Amerian incarceration during World War II—approach the subject? Covering a period of approximately two hundred years, from the early 19th century to the early 21st century, this essay is the first study of its kind and provides a basis for the consideration of the racialized nature of Japanese art and modern art more generally.

Modernism in Havana reached its climax during the turbulent years of the 1950s as a generation of artists took up abstraction as a means to advance artistic and political goals in the name of Cuba Libre. During a decade of insurrection and, ultimately, revolution, abstract art signaled the country's cultural worldliness and its purchase within the international avant-garde. This pioneering book offers the first in-depth examination of Cuban art during that time, following the intersecting trajectories of the artist groups Los Once and Los Diez against a dramatic backdrop of modernization and armed rebellion. Abigail McEwen explores the activities of a constellation of artists and writers invested in the ideological promises of abstraction, and reflects on art's capacity to effect radical social change. Featuring previously unpublished artworks, new archival research, and extensive primary sources, this remarkable volume excavates a rich cultural history with links to the development of abstraction in Europe and the Americas.

Unlike the work of his contemporaries Rubens and Caravaggio, who painted on a grand scale, seventeenth-century Flemish painter Jan Brueghel’s tiny, detail-filled paintings took their place not in galleries but among touchable objects. This first book-length study of his work investigates how educated beholders valued the experience of refined, miniaturized artworks in Baroque Europe, and how, conversely, Brueghel’s distinctive aesthetic set a standard—and a technique—for the production of inexpensive popular images.

As one of the most widely reproduced sculptures of the nineteenth century,
Hiram Powers's Greek Slave was a landmark statue defined in relation to its own reproduction.
This article considers how the popularity of The Greek Slave at exhibition turned the statue into
a ubiquitous subject for a wide range of reproductive media including prints, calotypes,
daguerreotypes, stereoviews, statuettes, and even textiles. It explores these reproductive
representations as sites of sculptural display that shaped the experience of the statue for vast
and varied audiences and as self-reflexive and interpretative responses to the dissemination of
a shackled nude across the transatlantic Victorian world.

Read More (URL): https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/korobkin-on-the-greek-
slave-and-materialities-of-reproduction

For the Spring 2016 issue of Art Journal, I edited a collection of essays and a roundtable discussion concerning issues of diversity in higher education. In my introduction, I argue that the complex experience of identity in the contemporary world has yet to produce a truly intersectional scholarship—that is, one that considers the relationships among gender, race, ability, and so forth, as well as how the theoretical frameworks from one particular camp (e.g., queer studies) might be mobilized by scholars outside that field. The very terms that we seek to expand begin to constrain us and even potentially reinforce the marginality of those positions we hope to move to the center of our art making and our scholarship.

Lo Ch'ing is one of China's foremost contemporary poet-painters. Despite the differences in their circumstances, many contemporary Chinese painters share one common trait: they have been stimulated by contact with contemporary Western art, but they did not merely imitate it; instead, they have rediscovered the abstract and expressionistic possibilities in their own tradition. It is in this sense that they are heirs to the great tradition of Chinese painting. Through their synthesis of the theories, techniques and styles of traditional literati painting in their own work, they were able to achieve innovation that enriched the tradition. These artists exemplify one of the best ways to be contemporary Chinese artist. Lo Ch'ing has internalized such conflicting state of tradition and modernity (or even post-modernity, if you will) in his work. The 'Chinese tradition' takes a not so subtle turn in the Taiwanese environment. Indeed, Taiwan was, incidentally, the most curious and embracing place for matters of experimental nature, particularly during late 1970's to 1980's when Lo Ch'ing rose to fame. The rise of industrialization, post-industrialization, and curious issue of Taiwan's cultural identity created a nurturing and controversial ground for creative talents. Industrialization and post-industrialization are subjects of Lo Ch'ing's work. Certainly, there is an oddity in Lo Ch'ing's depiction of alien saucers and floating rocks and mountains, yet Lo Ch'ing's work presents a fresh curiosity that had not been explored in the practice of in painting precisely for that reason. Scholars often used the phrase 'reinvention of the Chinese landscape' to describe and define Lo Ch'ing's work and his motivation behind it, and it's not entirely correct. To put it in correct historical term, however, it was not the artist who industrialized the landscape, not to mention one can easily argue that the urban landscape of Taiwan is one that is drastically different than landscapes in China. Lo Ch'ing's work has a heightened sense of awareness in its presentation of any subject in this matter, and that Lo Ch'ing's work is very conscious of the environment that its content was derived from. Urbanity, interestingly enough, would be an idea that is in opposition to the tradition of Chinese literati landscape painting, for it means the destruction of nature.

Radical political shifts that raged throughout Cuba in the 1950s coincided with the development of Cuban geometric abstraction and, notably, the formation of Los Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters). The decade was marked by widespread turmoil and corruption following the 1952 military coup and by rising nationalist sentiments. At the same time, Havana was undergoing rapid urbanization and quickly becoming an international city. Against this vibrant backdrop, artists sought a new visual language in which art, specifically abstract art, could function as political and social practice. Concrete Cuba marks one of the first major presentations outside of Cuba to focus exclusively on the origins of concretism in the country. It includes important works from the late 1940s through the early 1960s by the twelve artists who were at different times associated with the short-lived group: Pedro Álvarez, Wifredo Arcay, Mario Carreño, Salvador Corratgé, Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, Alberto Menocal, José M. Mijares, Pedro de Oraá, José Ángel Rosabal, Loló Soldevilla, and Rafael Soriano. Many of the group's members had traveled widely in the preceding years and corresponded with those at the forefront of European and South American abstract movements.

This essay explores Vermeer’s painting known as A Woman with a Lute as a visual poem on amorous and artistic longing. A closer look at its key elements—from the musical instrument being tuned by the lady to the map on the wall behind her—shows that this seemingly unmediated view into a private world is as engaged with ideas as Vermeer’s more overtly allegorical compositions. Most notable among these ideas are the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the notion that every record of the present is a form of “history,” and that the art of painting is no less eloquent in its silence than its sister arts of music or poetry. Ultimately, as in many other images of solitary females, the artist pulls us into a circle of desire, effectively turning us from beholders to coparticipants in a “composition” whereby the absent comes back into presence.