Visual Culture

This chapter looks at books published in the field of visual culture in 2013 and 2014. The six distinctive titles are connected broadly by the theme of movement or mobility, significant in terms of: critical shifts of definition; physical motion and its obverse, stasis; the relation of moving to seeing; fantasies of mobility; the global movement of images, people and objects, restricted or otherwise; the mobilization of images in response to global and political issues; and the capacity of images and objects to move us their viewers. These issues play out across the titles discussed, but the discussions are divided into three subsections: 1. ‘Moving Modernism’ reviews Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art and Caroline Evans’s The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929, two altogether different books with striking correspondences, not least in providing counter-histories of modernism in which motion and/or stasis play a central role. 2. ‘Animating Possibilities’ reviews The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish by Marquard Smith and Lewis Johnson’s edited collection Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture, both concerned with the traps and transformative potential of mobility. 3. ‘Zones of Conflict and Contact’ reviews Martin Jay’s and Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Empires of Vision: A Reader and T.J. Demos’s The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. These two books elucidate the ways in which looking and images are mobilized in historical and contemporary imperial contexts, situations often defined by the controlled movement of people and goods.

Aesthetics · Art · Fantasy · Literature · Modernism (music) · Political science · Politics · Relation (database) · Sociology · Theme (computing) · Transformative learning · Visual arts · Visual culture · Art, Politics, and Modernism · History · Law