Best of
Museology
2018
Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating
Maura Reilly - 2018
galleries are female, but over two-thirds of students enrolled in art and art-history programs are young women.Arranged in thematic sections focusing on feminism, race, and sexuality, Curatorial Activism examines and illustrates pioneering examples of exhibitions that have broken down boundaries and demonstrated that new approaches are possible, from Linda Nochlin’s “Women Artists” at LACMA in the mid-1970s to Jean-Hubert Martin’s “Carambolages” in 2016 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Profiles key exhibitions by pioneering curators including Okwui Enwezor, Linda Nochlin, Jean-Hubert Martin and Nan Goldin, with a foreword by Lucy Lippard, internationally known art critic, activist and curator, and early champion of feminist art, this volume is both an invaluable source of practical information for those who understand that institutions must be a driving force in this area and a vital source of inspiration for today’s expanding new generation of curators.
Recreating an Age of Reptiles
Mark P. Witton - 2018
How do you go about recreating the anatomy and behavior of a creature we've never seen? How can we restore landscapes long lost to time? And where does the boundary between paleontology—the science of understanding fossils—and artistic license lie? In this outstanding book, Mark Witton shares his detailed paintings and great experience of drawing and painting extinct species. The approaches used in rendering these impressive creatures are discussed and demonstrate the problems, as well as the unexpected freedoms, that paleontological artists are faced with. The book showcases more than 90 scientifically credible paintings of some of the most spectacular animals in the Earth's history, as well as many less familiar species.
Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices
Catherine Russell - 2018
Noting how the film archive does not function simply as a place where moving images are preserved, Russell examines a range of films alongside Benjamin's conceptions of memory, document, excavation, and historiography. She shows how city films such as Nicole Védrès's Paris 1900 (1947) and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) reconstruct notions of urban life and uses Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) to draw parallels between critical cinephilia and Benjamin's theory of the phantasmagoria. Russell also discusses practices of collecting in archiveological film and rereads films by Joseph Cornell and Rania Stephan to explore an archival practice that dislocates and relocates the female image in film. In so doing, she not only shows how Benjamin's work is as relevant to film theory as ever; she shows how archiveology can awaken artists and audiences to critical forms of history and memory.