Contemporaneity (E-Journal)
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Sacred Substantiations: Lincoln Casts and Statuary in the American Imagination
Full text linkOn March 31, 1860, Abraham Lincoln waited in the studio of Leonard Wells Volk as a plaster mold hardened around his face and head. After one hour, Volk removed the mold; he later repeated the process for Lincoln’s hands. The resulting life casts elicited profound emotional reactions in those who saw them. Augustus Saint-Gaudens recognized and capitalized on their invaluable status as candid indexes of Lincoln’s likeness in his 1887 Chicago monument, Abraham Lincoln: The Man. In the words of sculptor Lorado Taft, “It does not seem like a bronze. . . . One stands before it and feels himself in the very presence of America’s soul.”
It was also Saint-Gaudens who amplified the casts’ influence through the manufacture of a prized series of thirty-three bronze replicas. The actual and imagined characteristics of these casts—their sense of possessing a “soul,” and their physical manifestation of Lincoln’s touch—all warrant consideration of their place within the larger tradition of holy relics. This paper posits the Lincoln casts as “contact relics” and establishes the generative potential of such a numinous categorization for American audiences, especially in the wake of the Civil War. Volk’s direct impressions of Lincoln’s visage and hands provided the “blueprints,” so to speak, for an astonishingly wide variety of sculptural manifestations—from the iconic Lincoln Memorial (1920) by Daniel Chester French to Abraham Lincoln (1917) by George Grey Barnard. This essay argues that the cultural impact of this sculptural genealogy is largely indebted to the casts’ material substantiations of Lincoln’s bodily presence and touch. Indeed, by situating these objects between medieval and modern modes of viewing, it will become clear that the casts, as progeny of the original life molds, afforded an affective, even remedial, authenticity for subsequent Lincoln monuments in the American imagination
Are Indians in America\u27s DNA?
No full textA conversation between Dr. Monika Siebert and Marina Tyquiengco on:
Americans
National Museum of the American Indian
January 18, 2018–2022
Washington, D.C.
Monika Siebert, Indians Playing Indian: Multiculturalism and Contemporary Indigenous Art in North America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015
Saints, Miracles and the Image: Healing Saints and Miraculous Images in the Renaissance
Full text linkBook Review: Sandra Cardarelli and Laura Fenelli, eds., Saints, Miracles and the Image: Healing Saints and Miraculous Images in the Renaissance. Tournhout: Brepols, 2017. 318pp; 87 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Hardcover €120.00 (9782503568188
Fujiwo Ishimoto Exhibition: From Marimekko Flowers to Ceramic Fruits in Dialogue with the Rinpa
Full text linkExhibition Review
Exhibition catalog: Yoshinao Yamada, Fujiwo Ishimoto: From Marimekko Flowers to Ceramic Fruits. Tokyo: Wacoal Art Center, 2018. 23 pp. ¥1,188
Exhibition schedule: The Museum of Art, Ehime, October 27 – December 16, 2018; Hosomi Museum, Kyoto, March 9 - April 21, 2019; Spiral Garden, Tokyo, June 19 – June 30, 2019. 
Raphael and the Redefinition of Art in Renaissance Italy
Full text linkBook Review: Robert Williams, Raphael and the Redefinition of Art in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 314 pp.; 113 b/w ills. Hardcover $105.00 (9781107131507
Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany
Full text linkBook Review: Robert Maniura, Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 276 pp.; 59 b/w ills. Hardcover $99.99. (9781108426848
Erratum to: Miramontes Olivas, A., & Garcilazo, G. (2019). From Axayácatl to El Chapo: Rethinking Migration and Mexico’s War on Drugs in Gabriel Garcilazo’s Dystopic Magical Codex. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 8, 98-118. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2019.284
Full text linkErratum to: Miramontes Olivas, A., & Garcilazo, G. (2019). From Axayácatl to El Chapo: Rethinking Migration and Mexico’s War on Drugs in Gabriel Garcilazo’s Dystopic Magical Codex. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 8, 98-118. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2019.284
The original publication of this article included a misspelling of Gabriel Garcilazo\u27s name in its title, incorrectly spelling Garcilazo\u27s last name. The original article has been updated to reflect this change
The Canaries of Democracy: Imagining the Wandering Jew with Artist Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer
Full text linkTimelessness and Precarity in Orientalist Temporality: Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s Aesthetics of Disorientation
Full text linkThe Hourglasses (2015), by French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, features five large hourglasses displayed artifact-like upon a table. As one would expect of an hourglass, these glass sculptures can be inverted to measure out time. This, though, is where convention ends, as these are filled with couscous, not sand. Unlike sand, couscous cannot measure time consistently and the inversion of any one of these five hourglasses results in a different measurement of time. In effect, they disorient any linear notion of temporality, raising the specter of Orientalism and its fantasy of a timeless East. Mehdi-Georges works in a diverse range of media including performance, sculpture, installation, and self-portraiture. Dealing with race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, identity, and representations of Islam and Catholicism, his work performs the instability in all these categories by critically complicating fantasies of “East” and “West” without relying on a mere binary reversal of meaning. Contextualizing his work within a larger history of Orientalism, my argument begins first with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” composed in 1817, followed by an analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalist paintings before leading to a concise discussion of contemporary Orientalism in art and art discourse. My analysis then circles back to the artist’s work to insist that Orientalism’s fantastical invocation of the East remains a disabling presence in the contemporary imaginary. Orientalism’s temporality, as glimpsed obliquely from Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s hyphenated identity, is likewise rendered unstable in his work. As seen in The Hourglasses, his work produces what I call “an aesthetic of disorientation,” predicated on the artist’s embodied cultural hyphenation, which renders the Orientalist fantasy of the East absurd through its own tropes of representation. By bringing queer theory and disability studies to bear on his work, I show how his practice engages with Orientalism’s temporality to open up new possibilities of perceiving the world
Hemispheric Conversations: Exploring Links between Past and Present, Industrial and Post-Industrial through Site-Specific Graffitti Practice at the Carrie Furnaces
Full text linkIn this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen Cohen, Shane Pilster, Rivers of Steel, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, and the American Studies Association. Named “Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project” we used international collaboration between artists in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and León Guanajuato Mexico as a platform for conversation about how to reimagine our shared urban spaces. In a political moment that might be a cause for despair, collaborative art practice in urban space can serve as one vehicle to reignite our shared sense of possibility and energy