Month: January 2018

2014

Mike Leggett

Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual 

Rod Stoneman 
Black Dog Publishing, London (2013)  192 pp., col. b/w illus. $US30 (pb)   ISBN 978-1-908966-05-6

The management of mediated culture lies at the core of this account, with divergences, asides and footnotes, occasioned with a certain jocularity somehow added to quite horrifying topics; “….an unseemly interest in consumer goods”, said of a looting Soviet soldier. The anecdotes which leaven these accounts successfully record the fleeting thoughts we share, here captured by a retentive and practised commentator of the passing scene. (in Leonardo Digital Reviews)

2014

Mike Leggett

Re-collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory
Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England.
297 pp., b/w illus. 
ISBN: 9780262027007 (hc)

Referencing artists from the late 20th Century, methods of storage, emulation, migration and reinterpretation employed are assessed in relation to particular artworks that have suffered from obsolescence, within analogue structures (from Flavin to Nam June Paik), and digital systems, (Silicon Graphics-based works by for instance Char Davies). The test for suitability of these methods is whether one or a combination will maintain the fundamental quality of the aesthetic experience as defined by the artist, with little or no concession made to the shortcomings of the tools employed to recreate that experience. (in Leonardo Digital Reviews)

2014

Mike Leggett

Cinema of Actuality : Japanese avant-garde filmmaking in the season of image politics
Yuriko Furuhata
Duke University Press, Durham and London, England.
(2013) 266 pp., b/w illus.  
ISBN 978-0-8223-5490-1 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8223-5504-5 (pb)

The Japanese word eizo is central to an understanding of the significance of the interventions made into the cultural life of the nation by a relatively small grouping of artists and writers working between the 1950s and 1970s. Traditionally used as a phenomenological term in science and philosophy the character employed connoted shadow or silhouette, later shifting to signify optical processes. Like the Greek term tehkne, creativeness and the tools used to achieve the outcome is relative, nuanced and complex. (in Leonardo Digital Reviews)

 

2013

Mike Leggett

Walking and Mapping : Artists as Cartographers
Karen O'Rourke
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England.
328 pp., b/w illus. 
ISBN 978-0-262-01850-0 (hc)

Both senses of the term mapping are caught up in a detailed hagiography of artists who, in one way or another, engage with movement through space, mainly as walkers. Records of the experience, both by participants and the inventors of the artworks are mapped across a time spectrum both contemporary and historical.' (in Leonardo Digital Reviews) 

2013

Mike Leggett

The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France by Tom Conley
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2011
392 pp., illus. 98 b/w. 
ISBN 978-0-8166-7448-0.
The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science and Culture by SueEllen Campbell
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011
334 pp. 
ISBN 978-0-520-26926-2; ISBN 978-0-520-26927-9.

'The self-made map approach to writing of the 16th Century, created for the first time a spatiality of narrative, a form that was perfected not in the 19th Century novel but through the development of narrative in 20th Century cinema, a subject about which the author is also a recognised contributor.
Conley's book is an engrossing read because to this reader, so much was new and expressed in such fulsome and scholarly detail.' (pub. Leonardo Digital Reviews)