'Art History' tag archive

Symptoms of the image

Reivew of Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images
Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media, trans. Nils F. Schott (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 391pp., £121.00 hb., £30.00 pb., 978 0 23118 792 3 hb., 978 0 23118 793 0 pb. Emmanuel Alloa’s Looking Through Images is an exceptionally ambitious book that attempts nothing less than rethinking the fundamental […]

Cracks and crevices

Reivew of Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images
Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 232pp., £85.00 hb., £28.99 pb., 978 1 35012 920 7 hb., 978 1 35012 9 221 pb. These notes are from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C Minor, written between 1804 and 1808. Even listeners who do not read music can easily recognise the melody. […]
Musical notation

Knowing looks

Reivew of Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself
Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 278 pp., €22.00 pb., 978 3 94336 597 9 Tom Holert remarks near the beginning of Knowledge Beside Itself that art has traditionally been defined in contradistinction to knowledge, at least scientific or systematic knowledge. How then to understand the proliferation of […]
Photo of a photo of a white brick modernist building

Protests against reality

Reivew of John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art
John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). 300pp., £17.99 pb., 978 1 64259 131 6 This book is a significant contribution to the Marxist reflection on art. This is not a ‘Marxist history of art’, but a Marxist book about art, composed of various essays, some of a general theoretical character, and […]

Ghosts in fishnets

Reivew of Elizabeth Otto, Haunted Bauhaus
Elizabeth Otto, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019). 282pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 26204 329 8 I once heard the artist David Shrigley remark that the reason he became an artist was due to an adolescent fascination with art students, particularly those at the […]