Art

Man in the Middle: Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin at the Salon of 1833 and the Problem of the Juste Milieu

In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-ridin...
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In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-riding knight who despatches a sea monster prior to rescuing her, but at a plump male figure resolutely oblivious to his neighbour and her peril. The juxtaposition of Bertin’s self-confident gaze and relaxed body with Angelica’s vulnerable nakedness could be read as an exercise in iconographical incongruity, if not a moment of curatorial mischief (Fig. 2). But whatever the explanation for the painting’s current display, it is hard not to regard this as a dramatic fall from grace for a work that had occupied the ‘place of honour’ when first shown at the 1833 Salon, and attracted voluminous coverage in the press. Bertin’s relegation to the upper reaches of the Sully Wing is consistent with the assumption that its standing as a work of art has been compromised by the received idea that it is, above all else, a social document: an archetypal image of the newly dominant bourgeoisie of early nineteenth-century France.2
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Virtual connectedness in times of crisis: Chinese online art exhibitions during the COVID-19 pandemic

When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center...
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When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center, by M WOODS, and by independent curator Yu Minhong – and explores how they communicate ‘being-in-common’ (a concept by Jean-Luc Nancy) in the online realm; it also proposes alternative forms of cosmopolitanism that do not rely on physical mobility. The exhibitions are analyzed using visual and discourse analysis and supported by semi-structured in-depth interviews with the curators. This study shows that a cosmopolitan art world does not need to rely on physical travel if connectedness is understood as being-incommon rather than meeting-in-person, digital technology is mobilized effectively, and cosmopolitanism is grounded in a relocalization. In an era when the global art world is looking for ways to reinvent itself and the mobility system on which it operates, the article contends that it would do well to look to and learn from the example of Chinese online exhibitions.
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IMAGES FOR INSTRUCTION: A MULTILINGUAL ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SULTANATE INDIA

When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa...
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When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa, the Miftāḥ is the only known illustrated Persian dictionary (farhang) in the Islamicate manuscript tradition. For its fifteenth-century makers, the Miftāḥ was a wholly new text, written in 1468–69 by Muhammad ibn Muhammad Da⁠ʾud Shadiyabadi. The Miftāḥ required its artists to search for and codify visual representations of particular words from canonized manuscript genres such as the Islamicate cosmography (ʿajāʾib al-makhlūqāt) or works of belles-lettres (adab). This process of selectively adapting from an array of genres in order to create a new one, namely the illustrated farhang, would have allowed artists to experiment with the Islamicate manuscript tradition in India. By illustrating definitions, the Miftāḥ also became a manual on literary and visual languages for students in the fifteenth century. This article demonstrates that the book was conceived as a didactic work intended to educate members of sultanate society.
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CAMERA, CANVAS, AND QIBLA: LATE OTTOMAN MOBILITIES AND THE FATIH MOSQUE PAINTING

As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featu...
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As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featured in tents, wall paintings, and architectural decorations; new and “neo” architectural styles spread via world expositions and cityscapes; depictions of buildings and landscapes reconfigured wall paintings, tombstones, ceramics, textiles, and cutout paper (ḳāṭʿı) works.1 The long tradition of depicting the Islamic holy cities also responded to these artistic and cultural changes, and images energetically circulated across different regions in shorter periods of time.2 Even though Mecca and Medina are physical places, their depictions—and by extension, the holy cities themselves—effectively traveled to far-flung audiences.
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Dreaming A Public Poem

The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset...
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The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset letters on superimposed plexiglass sheets that provide a third dimension of depth. One day, looking about in the street, I thought, “If I can place letters on these surfaces, then I can ‘write’ on the street, as well.” I quickly discovered the cheap, light, industrial material of polystyrene which could be easily cut into letter shapes—the size of the human beings who occupy the streets—and thus enter into a dialogue with them and the urban space. At first, I placed the letters and words at strategic sites of the city, but soon I found that carrying them with a team was more eloquent, like a hand holding a pen moving across the page. I often used a classic concrete poetry device, the permutation and recombination of letters, in choosing a mother-word or matrix that could be broken up into other words and then form phrases—even entire sentences—as we moved along, like text passing across a giant electronic screen where one or two words may appear at a time, and a sentence is eventually formed.
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John Møller’s ‘Photographic Memory’ – Professional Photography of Greenlandic Inuit and Danish Administrators at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Unconditional hospitality: art and commons under planetary migration

In both European and non-European cities, public spaces are formed by racist and segregative politics that influence everyday life. Planetary migration flows and recently implemented border politics tend to leave the most vulnerable in precarious conditions, not only in the case of migrants/refugee...
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In both European and non-European cities, public spaces are formed by racist and segregative politics that influence everyday life. Planetary migration flows and recently implemented border politics tend to leave the most vulnerable in precarious conditions, not only in the case of migrants/refugees but also in the case of citizens. This article focuses on how artistic methodologies in the context of migration/refugeehood can experiment with “alternative modes of existence”. How can newly imagined modes of co-existence contribute to the creation of minor public spaces as well as the transformation of institutions? How can public art construct different and diverse guest-host relationships? How can artistic research and actions reveal precarious labour conditions, stage radical discursive debates, and transform existing institutional practices? This article is based on theoretical discussions of commoning and decolonization practices. It will focus on the art and activist practices, and analyse such, of Al-Madafeh/Living Room (Sandi Hilal, Stockholm) and The Silent University (Ahmet Ogut), and others.
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Angels with Guns: A Memoir on Guy Brett (and David Medalla)

In the mind of anyone who knew them and their work, the British art critic and curator Guy Brett and the Filipino mixed-media and performance artist David Medalla formed a pair. Which is why, though it might sound awful, I was not overly surprised by the news that Guy had died (February 2, 2021) jus...
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In the mind of anyone who knew them and their work, the British art critic and curator Guy Brett and the Filipino mixed-media and performance artist David Medalla formed a pair. Which is why, though it might sound awful, I was not overly surprised by the news that Guy had died (February 2, 2021) just over a month after David (December 28, 2020). It was as if the former had waited for permission to die from the latter. Guy had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the end of 2013, and the deterioration of his health had accelerated in the last months of his life. As for David, it was Guy who had informed me of his stroke in his letter of April 25, 2018. He added: “I was profoundly shaken up by the whole event. I felt the vulnerability of David who I had all always thought was invincible.”
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