Monthly Archive: February 2015

Nihonga (literally “Japanese painting”) is a term that arose in 1880s Japan in order to distinguish existing forms of painting from newly popularized oil painting, and even today it is a category of artistic production apart from contemporary art at large. In this sense, nihonga is the oldest form of a broader worldwide category of “tradition-based contemporary art.” While nihonga was supposed to encompass any form of “traditional” painting, however, in practice it was held together by a recognizable style. When nihonga stopped fulfilling certain material or stylistic criteria, it ceased to be distinguishable from the rest of artistic production. … Read more

Olga’s Notes is a script for a movie. This project tells a story composed of various collected notes, written mainly while reading Al-Hilal magazine (an Egyptian publication from the 1960s), thinking about the disciplined body, labor, and nation-state building through dance.

This article comparatively discusses the 14th International Architecture Biennale of Venice, directed by Rem Koolhaas, and the pilot exhibit and architectural design of Louvre Abu Dhabi undertaken by Jean Nouvel, in the context of recent big art events and world museums. Curatorial, historiographical, and installation strategies in these venues are differentiated in order to think through the question of displaying a global history of architecture. I make a distinction between the curatorial practices carried out in the Fundamentals and Absorbing Modernity sections of Venice’s Central and National Pavilions as curator-as-author and curators-as-chorus, which I map onto recent historiographical and museum … Read more

This introduction and commentary on Saloua Raouda Choucair’s article “How the Arab Understood Visual Art” (translation by author in this issue) sets the context in which a private rebuke Choucair addressed to a former colleague for his ethnocentric cultural criticism became a quasi-manifesto for art (and social) modernism. It inventories the conceptual shifts Choucair pursued in her reevaluation of cultural criticism: shifts in the approach to time, matter, visuality, and Arabness. It explicates the lessons Choucair learned from Sufic Arab science, math, and philosophy (particularly Alhazenian optics) toward extracting an essentialist view of matter, which allowed art a serious public … Read more

This article examines conflicting racial, archaeological and art historical interpretations of Olmec art produced in the United States in the early 1960s. It inscribes shifting approaches to the study of monumental Olmec art by figures like George Kubler within the contexts of violent modernization of the Olmec ‘heartland’ of Veracruz and Tabasco, the politicized display of this artistic tradition in museums and traveling exhibitions, and the unstable horizons of U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations during that period.

This introduction and commentary on Saloua Raouda Choucair’s article “How the Arab Understood Visual Art” (translation by author in this issue) sets the context in which a private rebuke Choucair addressed to a former colleague for his ethnocentric cultural criticism became a quasi-manifesto for art (and social) modernism. It inventories the conceptual shifts Choucair pursued in her reevaluation of cultural criticism: shifts in the approach to time, matter, visuality, and Arabness. It explicates the lessons Choucair learned from Sufic Arab science, math, and philosophy (particularly Alhazenian optics) toward extracting an essentialist view of matter, which allowed art a serious public … Read more