Abstract In the Lives and his posthumously published Ragionamenti, Giorgio Vasari describes captive and subservient figures using the terms ‘prisoner’ (prigione), ‘servant’ (servo, -a), and ‘slave’ (schiavo, -a). This essay considers his differential application of these words and articulates a rationale for his usages. ‘Prisoners’ are figures with bindings, and frequently their meaning is allegorical. ‘Servant’ is a neutral term often used for biblical figures. Vasari takes recourse to the word ‘slave’, which unambiguously denoted an enslaved status, when writing about figures that he understood to be either African or Turkish. Vasari refers to ‘unmarked’ white figures only as ‘prisoners’ and ‘servants’; his racialised usage of ‘slave’ reflects the predominance of Black Africans and Ottoman captives among enslaved populations in mid-sixteenth-century Italy. He developed his lexical system through collaboration and dialogue, and it continued to be used by Italian writers in the seventeenth century, after which it lost its sway.
Abstract This essay examines an underanalysed aspect of Marianne North’s oeuvre: her representations of Hindu worship. North’s visual and textual account of the ancient Indian rock-cut temple of Karla contributes to our understanding of the historical development of an antagonistic colonial politics of vision, providing important insights into how British artists and writers actively understood and utilised vision as a means of asserting power and control over Indigenous populations. This essay also asks what is at stake when the purveyor of the antagonistic and competitive gaze is a white British woman surrounded by Indian men. On one hand, North’s painting and account of Karla provide a salient counterpoint to Mary Louise Pratt’s conceptualisation of the ‘feminotopia’, presenting the ancient temple as a site for female self-realisation and empowerment. On the other, a close analysis of this work within the context of colonial preservationist practices and British travel discourse reveals that North’s painting countered colonial preservationist practices and European picturesque traditions. It exemplifies Lisa Lowe’s conceptualisation of the heterotopic space as a site for the multiplication, interpenetration, and potential transformation of opposing discursive articulations.
Abstract In 1923, David Bomberg arrived in Palestine on commission for the Zionist Organisation (ZO) to create artistic renditions of Zionist projects. During his time in Jerusalem, Bomberg seemed to abandon modernist experimentation in favour of a far more traditional style. This move intensified when Bomberg abandoned the ZO commission and started working for Ronald Storrs, the Governor of Jerusalem. Bomberg painted the views of Jerusalem in a manner that embodied the British Mandate’s highly politicised vision of itself as a benevolent guardian of the region. British mandatory officials embraced his landscapes, devoid of human figures and rich in architectural detail. Examining the details of Bomberg’s time in Palestine, compared to British cultural politics and representations of the city by local Jewish and Arab artists in the 1920s, demonstrates how Bomberg’s work satisfied the vision of the British Mandate and contributes to the comparative study of the art of Mandatory Palestine.
Abstract This essay reconsiders Lee Bontecou’s early sculptures of birds in relation to emerging ideas about the planetary — and interplanetary — scale of human activity. Produced in Rome between 1957 and 1958, Bontecou’s bronze and terracotta birds — assemblages of fractured surfaces and exposed cores — reference grounded birds driven to extinction by human exploration and overconsumption, such as the dodo, moa, and great auk. Citing H. G. Wells’s fiction, bird dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, and Cold War weapons systems, I argue that Bontecou’s heavy, clunky birds resist fantasies of the ‘conquest of space’ by reminding viewers of colonial predation and ecological dislocation. While often framed as expressions of space-age awe and wonder, Bontecou’s better-known ‘swallowing’ reliefs (as Donald Judd called them) of the 1960s are best understood next to the flightless birds: both address a world-eating drive that risks self-devouring.
Abstract This essay examines J. M. W. Turner’s portrayals of the keelmen, river workers who ferried coal from Newcastle to the River Tyne’s estuary. When Turner visited the district, railways and steamers were threatening their employment, prompting strikes and riots that were severely repressed. In the watercolour Shields, on the River Tyne (1823), Turner highlights the communal labour practices that allowed the keelmen to resist rising fossil-fuelled technologies. He returned to the subject in Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835), a canvas commissioned by a Manchester cotton industrialist deeply involved in mechanisation and labour unrest. Here, Turner invokes the keelmen’s dissolution while insisting on the working body’s disruptive force within a sublime industrial scene. By tracing shifting forms of human action and visibility across media, this essay argues that Turner’s Tyneside views reveal overlooked histories of agency and dispossession within coal-fired modernity.
Abstract This essay identifies a defining moment in the intertwined histories of portraiture and selfhood: the emergence of the celebrity portrait in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. At its centre is a new phenomenon: sitters who failed to recognise themselves in their portraits and reflected, with unprecedented length and depth, on the experience. Focusing on Denis Diderot’s response to Louis-Michel Van Loo’s portrait, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s to Allan Ramsay’s, the essay argues that celebrity transformed portraiture from affirming social identity within fixed hierarchies into a paradoxical enterprise that promised to reveal authentic interiority, while turning the self into a spectacle for mass consumption, creating irresolvable tension between inner self-conception and public image. Diderot’s ambivalence exposes the self as multiple and performative; Rousseau’s rejection reveals anxiety about authenticity and exposure. Their divergent reactions — contrasted with David Hume’s pragmatic embrace of relational identity — show how portraiture became a critical site for negotiating selfhood in the emerging economy of celebrity.
Abstract In the summer of 1990, American feminist artist Nancy Spero came to Derry, Northern Ireland, to install her mural Notes in Time on Women Part II in the heart of the Bogside area of the city. Made while the Troubles were ongoing, this installation in a charged public space on a wall which had previously been used for republican murals led to dissent from local residents who objected to this intervention into the community’s space. Thinking through the implications of the dispute, and looking to the role of the Orchard Gallery and Derry Frontline: Culture and Education, this essay considers how the project highlights the intersection of feminism, social justice, and institutional ambitions that were at work in Derry in the 1990s, exploring how art was seen by politicians, curators, and artists as a way to impact the experience of local communities and develop conversations about representation, justice, and equality.
Abstract This special issue examines art-historical research focused on the polar regions. We ask what implications follow for the field of art history when scholars and artists look towards the far north and far south. While the biases of the disciplinary gaze from and towards Europe, Britain, and the USA have been challenged and decentred for some time, the many recent innovations in circumpolar art history are more than an augmentation of the geographical and cultural ‘coverage’ of art history, significant as that expanded inclusiveness is. Studies of the visual understandings of the poles are pressing in the context of ecocritical art history and important for the globalisation of the field as a whole. Equally important is a careful looking at the specific visual — and more broadly, media — contexts produced in and about these zones by Indigenous peoples, colonisers, and visitors, past and present. In tilting the axes of analysis towards the polar south and polar north, we ask what this reorientation means for conversations within these focus areas and with other, still-dominant geographical and national focuses in art history. How can art historians acknowledge climatic and cultural differences near the poles while avoiding the environmental determinism and polar exceptionalism that tinted most earlier accounts?
Abstract Artist Tristan Duke shares insights from his interdisciplinary research-based practice at the intersection of art, science, and environmental action, through his experimental photographic series Glacial Optics. Travelling from the melting glaciers of the Arctic to the wildfire-scorched landscape of the American West, and into the ice core archives of climatological laboratories, Duke uses ephemeral ice lenses, crafted from glacial ice, to capture haunting portraits of climate change. Through research encompassing the alchemical history of ‘burning glasses’ made from ice, the science of paleoclimatology and glaciology, and the cosmic data from an observatory built inside a glacier beneath the South Pole, Duke explores glacier ice as a lens through which to understand our world. By recasting the technology of the lens as a part of nature, this photo-essay invites a decentred, post-anthropocentric perspective, positing nature not as a passive object but as an active subject bearing witness to the climate crisis.
