Cultural Arts Books

The premise of Mapping the Cultural Space of Journalism is that the boundaries of journalism are socially-constructed, and do not rest on any essential elements. Winch's research shows that journalists try to "construct" boundaries by arguing both within and outside the journalism profession that journalism has essential, distinctive characteristics--and that it is different from entertainment.
Recent disputes regarding the proper role of journalism are discussed in several chapters, and will spark interest in many readers. For instance, one of the chapters examines discussions among journalists about the newsworthiness of allegations of womanizing by Bill Clinton which were raised by Gennifer Flowers during the 1992 presidential election. Another chapter examines the uproar over a 1992 Dateline NBC story about exploding GM pickup trucks in which sparking devices were used to insure fiery video footage. Another chapter shows how early television journalists felt pressure to make their genre of news more entertaining and easier to digest (and hence, more profit-centered), than traditional forms of journalism.
Although the information is presented as scholarly research, the subject matter will interest non-academics alike, and Winch's (my) writing style is very readable.

Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Emily Braun's fascinating book takes on a complicated and vexing task: to address and possibly redress mainstream art historical neglect of the Fascist artist Mario Sironi. What are we to do with artists who are relegated to the art historical limbo reserved for "embarrassing cases"? Sironi's work is difficult to gauge in tone and importance, and it often evades classification within the taxonomies of modern art and of Fascist cultural projects. He is an artist who could only be redeemed if there were some way of considering him as just a modernist, whose politics don't matter. But Sironi is not easily cast as that kind of innovative, idealistic, utopian abstractionist of the kind who served the Left; he is no El Lissitsky or Rodchenko. Nor is any narrative of victimization possible: he was never punished by the regime that he supported, and he never repented of supporting it. Mussolini, who recognized that Fascism must seem to be anti-ideological and therefore could not have one official "style," was Sironi's unwavering protector. Braun plots Sironi's career within a meticulously researched intellectual history of Fascism and its permutations, always reading one through the other. Sironi is situated amongst writers and hangers-on and propagandists and events, and psychobiography is plotted against the politics.
Art historical study of Sironi is bedevilled by the diversity of his production: easel painter, muralist, sculptor, designer, graphic artist and propagandist, he idiosyncratically worked his way through four decades of dominant styles and modernist modes. He functions as a kind of ideal specimen who is at the same time unconvincing, like a composite character of a modernist artist invented for an historical novel. Beyond that, his Fascist politics were his Fascist culture: Sironi produced brutal, violent, political cartoons as well as "timeless" monumental classicising art. Braun's study is invaluable because it unflinchingly takes the whole range of Sironi's work into account.

This is an ambitious and persuasive account of an artist whose work and after-effects can only be falteringly and equivocally approached. It brilliantly sets the scene for a reconsideration of Italian Futurism and its status within the history of twentieth century art.

- From review in "Quaderni d'italianistica" (Summer 2002)

If you collect amate art this book is essential. For collectors of outsider art Professor Cowan provides an economic and cultural insight into the motives of the artists and the integral role they play in the culture. Highly readable, with wonderful anecdotes, what could be a dry subject is transformed into a page-turner.

This is a phenomenal book,one of the first of its kind. A collection of essays on body decoration and alteration that is cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, covering tattoo, scarification, painting, etc. I wrote my Master's thesis on tattoo histories and trajectories, and relied on these essays for secondary sources, pictures and illustrations, and for inspiration.

This is a delightfully rendered collection of short pieces/lectures by a thinker that few have surpassed in sheer range and raw intellect and at this price one would be foolish to not add it to your library.

I've now used Taylor's book for two years in my class. The seminar explores race and the western literary aesthetic. Thanks to Clyde Taylor's deft analysis of how, why and where race is reified in American literature and film, I can spend less time detailing it in class.
Well-written and informative, the writings make for excellent discussions.

Michelle Lamb Discher

The Material Image is concerned with cinematic adaptations of two-dimensional art images, ranging from tableaux vivant to painting, photography, and even literary images, and their impact on narrative and spectator response. When these two-dimensional forms are introduced into the temporally active space of moving pictures, the result is a more complicated visual representation that invites increased spectatorial awareness of the filmic image as a constructed representation rather than as a "true" reflection of reality. The two-dimensional image either textures the narrative, increasing symbolism and visual depth at the moment of representation, or stultifies the narrative, rupturing the illusion of the film text as reality. Peucker also discusses moments of "collapse of the image with the real" (192) that seem implicitly to follow from tromp l'oeil painting, such as when actors break the imaginary fourth wall of the set to address the audience directly, or when the image becomes so compelling that the spectator is somatically affected by it.

Peucker begins with a chapter on the aestheticization of surfaces (drawing from the visual theories of Bazin and Kracauer discussed in her introduction), and quickly moves into subsequent discussions on the role of visual signification in narrative film and its ability to represent reality intertextually by displaying still and moving images, sound, and writing on the screen. Later chapters focus on methods of using static images either to create distance or to draw the viewer into the film, classical and counter- cinematic techniques of representing space and the body, and the visceral impact of layered, fragmented, and mediated film images. While Peucker investigates film's capacity to excite both visceral and cognitive responses from its audience, ultimately her concerns gravitate toward the body as the site of reception for cinematic images that represent violence, the erotic, and the abject.

My favorite chapters were the ones on Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Haneke. In her readings of Hitchcock's films, she explores the relationship between two-dimensional art and death (death as the body's collapse into the world of stasis). She studies Hitchcock's preoccupations with still-life images and surrealism, bodily fragmentation, taxidermy, doubling, the use and placement of mirrors, characters' gazes both within and out of the filmic frame, and the self-reflexive inclusion of cameras in his films. Her second chapter on Hitchcock further explores the impact of characters' gazes into off-screen space, effecting the interpellation of the spectator and causing a figurative collapse between the image and the real.

In her reading of Kubrick's The Shining, Peucker observes the relationship between the hotel's photographs or figurative memory, and the return of the repressed elicited by the family's isolation within the disturbed psyche of the eerily expansive hotel. The space of realism within the film text begins to dissolve into the realm of the phantasmagoric as Jack's experiences collide with his imagination of the hotel's former "life." The still photographs of wild hotel parties from an earlier part of the century seem primed to burst into animation again, but with the emergence of festivity comes violence. Peucker remarks on the juxtaposition between the static photographs and the uncanny materiality of this violence, between Jack's deranged facial expressions and his later frozen grimace in the snow.

The book's longest chapter on Michael Haneke--the one I was reading for-- looks at his entire corpus as a postmodern experiment in bourgeois melodrama and family violence. Peucker argues that Haneke's work explores violence not by making a spectacle of it, but by launching an "assault" on the spectator's senses, including his use of sound and narrative suggestion. In some cases, as in Funny Games, the camera's gaze is carefully averted from violence, so that the most violent scenes of the film are mediated through sound rather than sight. Peucker quotes Haneke in saying that he feels this method of portraying violence actually creates a more powerful audience response than the recycling of overused spectacles of murder and mutation. In Benny's Video, the visual experience of violence is not averted but mediated by an extra layer of video footage, so that the real documentary footage of a pig slaughter unfolds within the diegesis of the film at a second remove--on one of Benny's video tapes, which he obsessively plays again and again. When he later brings a girl to his bedroom and murders her, Peucker remarks that the video transforms from a representation of violence to a source of violence. Benny actually tapes this second murder as well, and the tape later serves as legal evidence against him.

In keeping with the trajectory of her thesis, Peucker argues that while Haneke claims to engage his audiences in a participatory and self-reflexive relationship with his films, his films actually provoke a stronger visceral than cognitive response. However, other aspects of her analysis reveal the director's strong appeals to audience cognition, such as Haneke's signature use of the "rewind" effect in his films. In Benny's Video, Benny plays the film of the pig slaughter forwards and backwards voyeuristically; the fragmented and mediated video image continually reminds the audience that the slaughter is not happening in (Benny's) "real time" and thus allows the audience a certain contemplative distance from the image. In addition, Peucker comments on the film 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, in which black-outs in the film text rupture the diegesis and prevent the viewer from re-assembling the fragments of the text into a coherent whole. In one scene, the cinematic frame includes the image of a ping-pong ball machine, which keeps thrusting balls at the camera lens (and hence at the audience). Peucker points out that the ping-pong ball machine is in a sense a mirror image of the camera (both shooting at each other). Here, "the film sets up a mirror relation between character as both player and spectator (who receives images/Ping-Pong balls), and the spectator of the film. Hence, the point at which the film's spectators are most aware of themselves as corporeal is also its most self-reflexive moment, a moment when the film points to its apparatus" (Peucker 140). While Peucker doesn't discuss the opportunities this cinematic self-reflexivity provides for viewer reflection, her reading of the scene clearly implies that the film is constructed to provoke thought as well as feeling. She writes off these experiments as "lip service... paid to self-reflexivity" (132), but she simultaneously claims that "Haneke's films wrest their spectators from passivity by preventing the tears that melodrama seeks to solicit" (156).

I highly recommend The Material Image to anyone interested in film studies or visual theory. The book is unabashedly theoretical without alienating readers who lack a strong background in film theory. Peucker also makes it easy for students to excerpt relevant chapters and save the rest for later.

This is a terrific book, probably the first to try to apply schizoanalysis to visual culture. While many books have been written exploring Deleuze's two books on cinema and examining their implications for film studies, surprising little has been said about the application of Deleuze and Guattari's two volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The result is that writing on Deleuze and cinema tends to be a continuation of a familiar set of patterns for writing on cinema and not the radical breakthrough it could be. What Pisters does is show how by mixing the film studies elements of Deleuze's cinema books with the schizoanalytic elements of his collaborative books with Guattari you can really begin to do something quite new in thinking and writing about cinema. Ultimately what this means is she shows how to think about cinema in terms of desire and not pleasure.

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Editor Jane C. Desmond brings together a collection of provocative essays analyzing ballet, modern, and post-modern dance from feminist and multi-cultural perspectives. Some prominent topics include: 1) The male gaze and dance performance; 2) Objective versus subjective performance; 3) Michel Foucault's Docile Body Theory and Dance; 4) Gender difference and aesthetic virtues; 5) Nationalism versus the racial "other"; 6) Combining the universal and the personal through autobiographical performance.