Ada Hondius-Crone

D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), whose final shape was taken during the First World War, inevitably deals with such modern crises from the problems of human relationships to the degeneration of culture and society. In the process, the novel brings to the fore an apocalyptic vision of the decadent Western civilization. In the novel, Lawrence, an amateur painter himself, takes issue with many artist characters and art schools such as primitive art, Impressionists, Bloomsbury, Futurism, Asian art etc. Many debates on art objects are connected with the criticism of life and society set in an atmosphere of cultural turbulence. Lawrence criticizes a group of degenerate London artists―Gudrun Brangwen, Julius Halliday―for their sensualism manifested in their worship of primitive art. He also criticizes Futurism for its cerebral emphasis and mechanism. Loerke’s industrial art is portrayed as an extreme version of the mechanical dehumanization of art; thus, his art epitomizes all the terror that Lawrence felt about modern art and the negative cultural forces behind it. The author tries to find an alternative trend of vital art in the Third World art such as Chinese painting or African fetishes, as opposed to the degenerate Western art. However, the novel also reveals a limit of Lawrentian cultural critique in the form of Eurocentric biases. For example, Rupert Birkin, the hero of the novel, argues that he can capture the essence of Chinese culture by copying a picture of geese. The grounds of his overbearing confidence in the knowledge of the other are neither verified nor deconstructed. Both Asian and African art works are appropriated to represent some oppositional principle to what Birkin believes to be the defects of Wetern culture. In this sense, it seems that he sets out to respect the other but ends up absorbing it into the frame of the same. However, Lawrence does not always totalize his aesthetic vision. Although he was certainly subject to Eurocentric backsliding, Lawrence tries to keep alive his spontanenous and multi-faceted aesthetic response towards the European and non-European artworks. Overall, Lawrence’s aesthetics in Women in Love, manifests itself as the significant attempt to a cultural critique which responds to, and incorporates the counter-cultural perspective of artworks and life.

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

Orientalism is historically understood as a cultural phenomenon of 18th and 19th century Europe, when Western artists emulated Asian culture and aesthetics in their work. In 1979, Edward Said’s Orientalism first introduced a post-colonial critical analysis to the European, Western portrayal of Eastern cultures in the Middle East. In spite of the perceived progress since the publication of Said’s book, the underlying principles of Said’s Orientalism critique are still widely applicable to modern visual art in 2023. This study is a fresh look at the persistence of Orientalism in contemporary Asian art. Research will show that Orientalism is not just a historical phenomenon, but an ongoing unsavory, and harmful reality in today’s art world. Using data and examples collected from contemporary sources, I will examine and analyze the artwork of visual artists and art institutions in Western countries that reflect Orientalism in their portrayal of Chinese and East Asian cultures.

In the last two decades, Southeast Asian contemporary art has secured its place in the global art world, becoming a fixture on the latter’s expanded exhibition circuits and a promising ‘emerging market’ for investors. This consolidation has engendered a burst of scholarly activity, in line with the improving prospects of Asian art history generally and notwithstanding a lack of dedicated academic structures where the region is concerned. But if Southeast Asia has firmed as a framework for organising contemporary art, it has not been favoured as a basis for interpreting or historicising it. As knowledge production in the region has surged, regionalism has waned. In this article, I review the historiography of Southeast Asian contemporary art to reveal a discontinuity between its pioneers, who were regionalists, and a new historicism whose premises are basically nationalist. Reflexive consciousness of region – and of contemporaneity as a regional phenomenon – is advanced as an under-utilised interpretive device and a bulwark against hegemonic and monolithic art histories.

In this lavishly illustrated volume, Laura Lee introduces the art of Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, which has soared to global fame with its electrifying immersive and interactive installations. The first of its kind, Worlds Unbound: The Art of teamLab provides a comprehensive overview of teamLab’s artistic vision and achievements from its beginnings to its twentieth anniversary in 2021, and illuminates the remarkable scope of teamLab’s groundbreaking art and its fundamental contribution to the pivotal field of new media art. This original new book, the first scholarly monograph on this popular group, unpacks the popularity and success of the digital immersive environments created worldwide by the Tokyo-based collective, teamLab, from multiple perspectives and addresses the lack of critical appreciation of their work. The book includes an extensive interview with teamLab. teamLab launched in January 2001 with five members and now comprises more than 600 individuals in a multidisciplinary collaboration of engineers, computer graphics animators, mathematicians, graphic designers, architects, artists and computer programmers. The digital art collective has attained international celebrity for its electrifying installations that transcend boundaries between gallery, public space and popular entertainment and, judging from press coverage, ticket sales and prolific production, it seems clear teamLab’s success is only on the rise. In 2018, the collective opened the MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless, a massive technological environment in Tokyo that recorded 2.3 million visitors in its first year of operation – the world’s largest annual number of visitors of any single-artist museum. The same year saw numerous other high-profile immersive exhibitions, including teamLab: Massless in Helsinki, Au-delà des limites in Paris, and teamLab Planets TOKYO, a second exhibition in Tokyo. These were quickly followed by two new museums, teamLab Borderless Shanghai in 2019 and, in 2020, teamLab SuperNature in Macao. The vast sea of selfies that have emerged from these venues index the collective’s soaring global popularity. At the same time, teamLab’s works have found art market success and have been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and they are part of the permanent collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and Amos Rex in Helsinki, among numerous others. This canonization of teamLab’s art belies the fact that the group did not have a traditional gallery start, and in fact teamLab has always engaged in software development and corporate work, in addition to creating artworks. The collective thus boasts an enigmatic status, spanning conventional categories and defying traditional art world pedigree. In so doing it has produced a tremendously rich body of work that speaks to several overlapping issues pertinent to contemporary art while advancing a unique artistic vision. Primary readership will include artists, art historians and visual studies scholars who are particularly interested in the most recent media art and Japanese contemporary art. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars working in Japanese art, global contemporary art, digital art, augmented reality, expanded cinema and installation art and related fields. It will also be of more general interest to those who have visited, or hope to visit, teamLab environments worldwide.

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

A fascinating exploration of the private and public worlds of Molly Dewson, America’s original female political boss. In the first biography ever written of Dewson, Susan Ware not only examines her political career as a trusted member of the Roosevelt team throughout the New Deal but also considers how Dewson’s fifty-two year partnership with Polly Porter and her woman-centered existence strengthened her success as a politician. “Susan Ware’s excellent biography of Molly Dewson restores one of Franklin Roosevelt’s chums and an irrepressible battler for women in politics to her proper place in the history of the New Deal.”—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “Rich, readable, and intriguing biography.”—Estelle B. Freedman, Women’s Review of Books “Readers should welcome Ware’s spotlight on Dewson, which widens to disclose wonderfully human views of FDR and Eleanor and brings to life many virtually forgotten feminists of an era that threatens to fade into gray.”— Publishers Weekly “Provides a lively and refreshingly concrete sense of everyday activities in reform and political circles. A wonderful account of the model of a modern political woman.”—Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Times Literary Supplement Susan Ware is assistant professor of history at New York University, where she also coordinates the Women’s History Program.

In some domains, women may not have had a Renaissance, as Joan Kelly suggests in a 1977 article that transformed forever the way that critics study the history of women (Kelly 1977, cited under Monographs). Nevertheless, important historical and sociocultural phenomena such as the advent of print, humanism, religiously inspired educational campaigns (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic), and the impact of the Italian Renaissance on France’s cultural and intellectual life provided French women from the aristocracy and the upper-bourgeois milieu with unprecedented opportunities to acquire literacy, to argue and promote causes dear to them in literary salons that they themselves ran, to circulate their manuscripts among friends, and even to enter into the public world of print. Granted, French women of letters had to be inventive in order to maneuver within male-authored literary conventions, circumvent gender strictures, and establish a public, intellectual life in a society often hostile to their aspirations. But their early steps in the area of cultural expression were great, and their contributions as writers of nearly every literary form, as generous patrons of literature and the arts, and as producers of books are noteworthy. This article deals with these different aspects of 16th-century French women’s involvement in writing. Since the early 1990s, scholarship on French women and writing has been dominated by edited collections of essays organized around a particular theme or a particular line of inquiry. Most of these works compile the proceedings of international, interdisciplinary, and, more recently, transhistorical and cross-cultural conferences. Monographs that have appeared so far are traditionally more general in scope. Quite remarkable is the recovery of a number of female-authored texts since the early 1990s, and the greater availability, thanks to several publishing firms and collective scholarly efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, of well-known women writers as well as less familiar ones in the form of critical editions (scholarly or student oriented), bilingual editions and English translations to address the needs of the ever-growing field of interdisciplinary studies, anthologies containing textual extracts from a wide variety of women’s writings and genre-based anthologies, and digitized libraries and websites of all sorts. Remarkable as well is the growing number of dictionaries and encyclopedias that pay tribute to early modern women and their creativity.