An international engine of innovative scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences
Art historian Amy Knight Powell details the genealogy of the box as a frame, a window, and a container in art. She writes:
In “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), Clement Greenberg compares the easel picture, disparagingly, to a box-like cavity cut into the wall. In this essay, I argue that late medieval panel paintings—which indeed often took the form of boxes—show Greenberg to be justified in making this comparison, if not in doing so disparagingly. But what Greenberg failed to fully acknowledge is that the easel picture had already long tried to escape this condition through the opening of the metaphor of the window. Failing to recognize this earlier effort to escape the material conditions of the box, many modernists and postmodernists, like Greenberg, attempting to move beyond the easel picture in the name of an art undivided from life, have unintentionally upheld the easel picture’s own escapist ideology.
Vol. 148 No. 1, Fall 2019
Table of Contents
"Do we have a problem with time?" ask the editors of the 2016 special issue Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts. The issue explores "time-based art" across several disciplinary formations, including performance and visual media, sound, dance, and political resistance.
In her essay in number 139, Debarati Sanyal analyzes practices of resistance as seen through film and photography set in the Calais's “jungle” refugee encampments, which were razed in 2016 by the French government. She discusses the interplay of humanitarian compassion and securitarian repression in the destruction of the camps, nuancing the view of borderscapes as sites of total biopolitical capture, and of refugees as “bare life.” Making a profound case for both art and resistance, "Calais’s 'Jungle': Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance" is a compelling and visually stunning read.