Category: Book review

1969c

Mike Leggett

The Technique of the Film Cutting Room by Ernest Walter (1968)

A review for the Journal of the Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians (ACTT) of a Focal Press publication, the imprint servicing mainly amateur filmmakers and students. The article observed that the techniques described used methods that in the world of television were rapidly becoming obsolete. The publishers and friends of the author were so insenced by the line taken that the editor was forced to print a second review in the following issue. Such is the power of union members when behaving like the ruling classes.

2016

Mike Leggett

On Stage : the Theatrical Dimension of Video Image : Matilde Roman : Intellect, Bristol, and University of Chicago Press (2016)
(trans. Charles Penwarden, from On Stage: La Dimension scénique de l'image vidéo, Le Gac Press, 2012)

Between the original French title and the recent English translation of this lucid commentary, there are indicative shifts in meaning between the terms 'stage' and 'theatrical'. These point towards the nuanced domain of contemporary video installation where the audience are often given agency to determine the duration and quality of the encounter, not exactly actors or stage props nor seated audience; 'Far from acting in the space of the work, they are acted by it.'

 

2017-18

Mike Leggett

One and Five Ideas: on Conceptual Art and Conceptualism : Terry Smith : Duke University Press (2017)

and

Image and Text in Conceptual Art: Critical Operations in Context : Eve Kalyva : Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature (2016)

Reaction could be dismissive as there were careers and investments embedded in institutionalised structures where the role of the critic was to affirm or deny the efforts of the artist hero according to a historical sense of aesthetic revision; or in the context of Cold War politics, national prestige. Critical theory in practice became the antidote, where the context of production and its point of reception were considered a part of the artwork, thus placing meaning-making into permanently contested space. …. Creating interpretive space can be regarded as a radical assault on the sensibilities of gallery goers who, prior to a range of practices emerging under the rubric Conceptual Art, were attuned to the appreciation of an artwork rather than its interrogation. Both writers acknowledge the primacy of language as a component of the experience of art, having roots in the philosophical work of Wittgenstein among others. 

2018

Mike Leggett

Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above : Caren Kaplan : Duke University Press (2018)

The spectre of the aerial photograph, imaging the surface of the planet beneath, is riven with emotional response; as much for what is imagined than what is actually seen. Bombarded with looping footage of claimed precision interdictions, our lives and those of others are enmeshed with images that obscure and deny causation and affect. Wartime aftermath is the aphorism applied throughout this stimulating volume, specifically the technological approaches taken to envisioning warfare and the social outcomes following wars leveling affect.

2011

Mike Leggett

Lab Coats in Hollywood: science, scientists and cinema. David A. Kirby, MIT Press, Cambridge and London (2011)

From IBM to MGM: cinema at the dawn of the Digital Age. Andrew Utterson, BFI, Palgrave Macmillan.

The two Cinema titles have intriguing areas of overlap, containing the tensions and anxieties of not only their areas of focus but also in the approach taken to communicating such issues to a reading audience. The first examines how science in general including computers, is represented within the dream machine and the second, how computers are both represented and used for the manufacture of predominantly, popular entertainment. 

In Leonardo June 2011

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)