W. J. T. Mitchell: Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present

From the University of Chicago Press: The phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies. Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.



From Wikipedia: William J. Thomas Mitchell (* 1942) is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of Critical Inquiry, and contributes to the journal October. His monographs, Iconology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994), focus on media theory and visual culture. He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that, essentially, we must consider pictures to be living things. His collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2006.





From the University of Chicago (faculty profile): W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His publications include: "The Pictorial Turn," Artforum, March 1992; "What Do Pictures Want?" October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative (1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).

Lauren Redniss: Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout

The New York Times recently said this about the book:

The graphic-novel genre is no longer young, but it retains, like Drew Barrymore and certain indie bands, a quirky and semi-adorable glow. Its fragile vibe is Etsy, not Best Buy. Attacking a pile of graphic novels is not unlike chucking a sackful of baby pandas into a river. If many graphic novels are, as Barack Obama put it about Hillary Rodham Clinton, likable enough, few are knotty works of art, things you’d eagerly give to both the sulky teenager in your life and your grandmother who reads serious nonfiction and thinks comics are infra-dig. Few zigzag toward the earth like mid-August lightning. The tail end of 2010 has delivered such a keeper, however, in Lauren Redniss’s graphic biography, “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.” Here’s to hoping it doesn’t get lost amid the grog and tinsel and pay-per-view screenings of “Elf.”

Read that New York Times piece here.

Jennifer Homans: Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

The book and author were recently the subject of a WHYY Radio program-episode of Fresh Air. On the webpage for the show, this was said about the book and subject:

In her new book Apollo's Angels, historian Jennifer Homans — a former professional ballet dancer herself — traces ballet's evolution over the past 400 years, and examines how changes in ballet parallel changing ideas about class structure, gender, costume, the ideal body and what the body can physically do. The book chronicles ballet's transition from the aristocratic courtier world in Europe through its place as a professional discipline in the Imperial Court of Russia, and finally as a technique performed on stages throughout the world. Ballet's origins, Homans explains, grew out of the Renaissance court cultures of Italy and France. Dancers would perform at the royal courts — and then invite the audience members to participate.

Read that full Fresh Air transcript here. Read an excerpt from the book, here. Listen to the podcast of the show, down below.



The Guardian recently said this about the author and book: Jennifer Homans's history of the art, culture and political context of ballet is like a beautiful painting in a slightly askew frame. She is a former dancer who trained at the School of American Ballet in New York, and was the wife of the historian Tony Judt, who died in August. She exchanged the stage for academia two decades ago but one can still tell from her prose the kind of dancer that she was: meticulous, devoted and, au fond, profoundly romantic. Read that Guardian review, here.

Holiday Books: Curiosities from The New York Times By KATHRYN HARRISON Published: December 3, 2010

Bullfighting. Flamenco. Religious pilgrimage. On the face of it, little in Lena Herzog’s earlier monographs prepares her audience for LOST SOULS (de.MO ­design, $54), photographs taken in “cabinets of curiosities,” collections of anatomical specimens dating back to the 17th century. But if the denial of death inspires the making of a photograph, fixing a moment so that it never ends and freeing its subject from the annihilation of time, preserving a fetus in a bottle answers a similar impulse. Enlarge This Image From “Lost Souls”; courtesy of Lena Herzog Specimens from the University Museum of Human Anatomy in Turin, Italy. Restored to an indefinite amniotic bath of chemicals — at a time when microcephaly, conjoined twins, cyclopia and other congenital anomalies presented as many physical as spiritual questions — Herzog’s lost souls are those belonging to infants we call “unviable.” Never buried or laid to rest, they are lost in space as well as time, citizens neither of the underworld nor of our own, not dead but arrested on the cusp of living. They are imminent and never arriving, both mortal and immortal, barred, Herzog says, from “heaven, hell or limbo.”

Read the full NY Times feature on the incredible photo book, here. See also: Anatomical Preparations, Avian Anatomical Specimens in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, Descriptive Catalogue of the Anatomical and Pathological Specimens...

Beatles' Photographer Astrid Kirchherr Opens Up from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

This interview was originally broadcast on January 15, 2008. The book 'Astrid Kirchherr: A Retrospective' was published this week and examines Kirchherr's photographs she took both before and after working with The Beatles. Hamburg-born Astrid Kirchherr met The Beatles in 1960, before they were famous, when they came to perform in Germany. An art student in Hamburg, she took some of the earliest photographs of the group — now-classic shots that capture the foursome back before Ringo joined the band, back when Stuart Sutcliffe was playing bass. And Kirchherr has often been credited with convincing the band to adopt those iconic mop-tops.

Download the related podcast here. Check the full feature out, from the NPR Fresh Air website, here. See also: Yesterday: The Beatles Once Upon a Time, When We Was Fab, Hamburg Days

"Patti Smith's 'Just Kids' Wins Nonfiction Award" from NPR's Morning Edition by LYNN NEARY

Rock musician Patti Smith is now a literary star. Her memoir about life in New York City in the 1960s, Just Kids, won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The literary awards were handed out Wednesday night in New York City. Lord of Misrule author Jaimy Gordon won for fiction. NEARY: The most emotional moment of last night came when Patti Smith won the non fiction award for her memoir "Just Kids," about her lifelong friendship and early love affair with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith said she promised Mapplethorpe she would write the book the day before he died of AIDS. Ms. PATTI SMITH (Author, "Just Kids"): I was the only one that could write it really, since we grew together, we evolved as artists together. And he could also trust that I would present him to the world as I knew him, which was as an artist, a loving friend; mischievous, generous, kind, funny and beautiful. So I did my best. NEARY: In accepting her award, Smith recalled the time when she was a young girl, new to the city, working at Scribner's Bookstore and dreaming of writing her own book one day.

Download the podcast here. See also: Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future, Auguries of Innocence: Poems, Early Work: 1970-1979, Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Vanished Venues: Max's Kansas City from WNYC's Soundcheck by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

From the mid-1960s to the early '80s, Max's Kansas City was an artists haven that welcomed Andy Warhol, writer William S. Burroughs and musicians like the New York Dolls and Madonna. As part of this week's series on New York's bygone concert halls and nightclubs, we look back at Max's, its legendary back room and its generous bar tabs. We talk with Steven Kasher, gallery owner and editor of the photo book Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll.

Listen to the podcast here. Download the podcast here.

Vanished Venues - Gone But Not Forgotten from WNYC's Soundcheck by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

The idea for our Vanished Venues series came from the new Max’s Kansas City book, which got me thinking about all the great old music clubs that dotted the landscape here in NY and are with us no more. It’s not that I’m nostalgic – no venue was more important to my teenage self than CBGB’s, but by the time of the club’s much-covered demise, its heyday was long past and it was surviving on tourists and its old reputation. But remembering these places is useful for a number of reasons. Places that became centers of live music were cultural markers of New York, reflecting the city’s evolving population, politics, and economy; and besides, it’s a great excuse for each of us to remember why and how we fell in love with live music to begin with.

Listen to the show here. Read the full feature here.

Charlie Rose's Wednesday, September 15, 2010 Conversation with Annie Cohen-Solal

CHARLIE ROSE: Annie Cohen-Solal is here. She is a writer, and a
teacher and a culture historian. In 1985 she made a name for herself when
she published "Sartre, a Life," a well-regarded biography of the famous
French philosopher. She then arrived in New York in 1989 as a cultural
counselor to the French embassy.

Then she met art gallery legend Leo Castelli. He became her mentor
and her friend different. She’s now written a biography about him called
"Leo and his Circle, the Life of Leo Castelli." I’m very pleased to have
Annie Cohen-Solal back at this table. Welcome.

Watch the interview here. See also: Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Lives of the Left), Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, Charlie Rose with Raymond Kelly; Edward Said; Annie Cohen-Solal (November 20, 2001)

"Street style from The Sartorialist" from PRI's The Sound of Young America

Photographs from the popular street fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist, now published in a new book. One of America's most popular fashion bloggers, Scott Schuman is the creator of the street fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist. His new book of the same name collects some of his favorite photos from the blog. His subjects range from Hasidim on the streets of New York to garment industry insiders in Milan. Schuman worked in the fashion industry for some time before picking up a camera. He owned a showroom that sold fashion collections into major department stores. By the time he was a teenager, Schuman knew he wanted to work in fashion, and while he was limited by geography, he was able to pursue his passion through the retail side of the business. "Where I grew up in Indiana, there was no fashion business, there really was no fashion. So, the romantic idea of that world was great. I loved the romance of that kind of idea. I didn't know any designers growing up. I didn't know what that lifestyle was like.

Download The Sound of Young America podcast here. Of course, all of the fashion blogs are ablaze and giddy over the book. For example, the Fashion Bomb blog, blogged this:

So any of my friends will tell you that I have a serious weakness for fashion and literature. My shelves and drawers are overflowing with clothes and tons and tons of books on anything from art and history to fantasy. Whilst perusing the selection at W.H. Smith, a local English bookstore, I was of course driven to distraction by all the amazing offerings in the fashion section. I’ve been a fan of the Sartorialist‘s blog for a long time, and see Scott Schuman at every fashion week. Though I could just as easily look at all his hottest street looks online, I decided to pick up his book…and couldn’t put it down.

Check that post out, here. See also: FASHION BLOGS, Characterising Successful Fashion Blogs and Their Evaluation Metrics, Photo Fashion Book - Rosemount Australian by Fashion Media, Blogs: Slashdot, Blog, Bloggingheads.tv, Xanga, Digg, Gucci Gang controversy, Sousveillance, Fashion blog, EPIC FU, History of blogging