Issue 7 | 2014

Table of Contents:

1. “Renaissance Robotics: Leonardo da Vinci’s Lost Knight and Enlivened Materiality” - Anne Pasek
2. “Architecture as a Monument or Instrument?: The Mundaneum Project and the Polemic between Karel Teige and Le Corbusier” - Jana Beránková
3. “Ash and Cinder: Photography, Film, and the Archive in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971)” - Kevin Chabot
4. “Sol LeWitt and Josef Albers: Parallel Squares and Kindred Concepts” - Morgan Ridler
5. “Seeing the Sentiment: Eighteenth Century Theatrical Portraiture and Garrick’s Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet” - Emily Leach
6. Review of Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) - Rachel Corbman
7. Alex Dodge Drawings

Complete Issue

Issue 7 of Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture brings together articles from a wide range of disciplines. In this volume, our contributors explore topics relating to Modernist architecture and political ideology; eighteenth-century theater portraiture and the aesthetics of “sentiment”; the experimental film of Hollis Frampton and aesthetic meditations on the archive; underexplored genealogies of postwar painting; and the relation of mechanical arts to materialist philosophies of the Renaissance period.

In “Architecture as a Monument or Instrument?: The Mundaneum Project and the Polemic between Karel Teige and Le Corbusier,” Jana Beránkova, a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, traces the virtually unexplored link between Teige and Le Corbusier. Beránkova delves into the misunderstanding between these two artists on aesthetics, constructivism, poetism, machinism and most recognizably form and function.

Kevin Chabot’s “Ash and Cinder: Photography, Film, and the Archive in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971)” approaches Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) as an example of the inherent tensions within the photographic medium as an indexical record of the past. Chabot, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, juxtaposes the deceptive qualities of film alongside its documentary nature, which is explored through Derrida’s notion of the archive.

In “Renaissance Robotics: Leonardo da Vinci’s Lost Knight and Enlivened Materiality,” Anne Pasek, a doctoral student in New York University’s Media, Culture, and Communication department, reads Rene Descartes’ philosophical dualism against and through Leonardo da Vinci’s earlier studies on robotics and human anatomy. Pasek’s article delineates an alternative history of Renaissance materialist philosophy that moves away from strict dualism towards a theory of enlivened materiality.

Morgan Ridler’s “Sol LeWitt and Josef Albers: Parallel Squares and Kindred Concepts” traces the evolution of Albers’s influence on LeWitt. Though rarely discussed because of their opposing conceptual concerns, Ridler shows the formal affinity of their work. Ridler, who is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, draws on LeWitt’s later homage to Albers to support her nuanced comparison.

Emily Leach’s “Seeing the Sentiment: Eighteenth Century Theatrical Portraiture and Garrick’s Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet” uses theatrical portraiture to theorize the effects of the long-eighteenth century’s “cult of sentiment” on the reception history of late-Renaissance drama. Focusing on David Garrick’s influential adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Leach, a Ph.D. student in English at Queen’s University, argues that theater portraiture from the play magnifies and distills the style and direction of Garrick’s adaptation.

This issue of Shift inaugurates our new “Reviews” section with Rachel Corbman’s review of Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Corbman’s review contextualizes Nash’s important work through recent debates surrounding bell hooks’ polemic against pop icon Beyoncé. Corbman, a Ph.D. student in Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University, takes us beyond the purview of the conventional book review as she contextualizes this recent work of scholarship through conversations trending in the classroom, in print, on blogs and social media.

In our seventh issue of Shift, we are excited to see the acceptance of material culture as a methodology that many scholars now utilize. It is the focus on the object or material cultural data and its shifting societal contexts that enable us to develop a richer historical record. For this issue, we have also invited Alex Dodge to illustrate the number with his drawings and prints. Machine-made and handmade, they allude to the history of printmaking, which was historically a method of mass production and now resides in the fine art world as well. Like the study of material culture itself, which aimed to expand the field of humanistic and aesthetic studies, and to incorporate the high and low in order to better understand our rich cultural traditions, the articles in Shift’s Issue 7 address under-discussed materials and unlikely pairings to further develop their topics outside of the hermeticism that characterizes so much of academia.

Along with the new issue, we are excited to launch a co-hosted forum on the topic of digital archives in collaboration with H-Net Network on Material Culture. The forum opens with an article on “The Information Needs of Doctorate-Holding Scholars Relating to Images on the Websites of Collections of Classical Antiquities” by Sarah Vela of the University of Alberta and follows with invited and open-forum responses.

Andrianna T. Campbell is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Dia Art Foundation in 2014- 2015, the American Philosophical Society Library Fellowship in 2015, a Society for the Preservation of American Modernist Publication Grant in 2014, the Dean K. Harrison Fellowship in 2008-2013 and the prestigious Graduate Teaching Fellowship from 2010-2013. She specializes in American art and art of the Americas in the modern and contemporary period. Currently Andrianna is the co-editor of Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture and she is a contributor to Artforum.com. She earned a BFA in Printmaking and a concentration in Art History from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). As a student, she was awarded the Andrew Mellon Fellowship from the RISD museum. Subsequently, Andrianna was the Assistant Curator at Forbes Inc. where she handled an international art collection. For over four years, she taught art history and a seminar about collaborative practice at Parsons, The New School for Design.

Rachael M. Wilson is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literatures at New York University. She is a recipient of the Henry M. McCracken Graduate Fellowship (2009-2014), the NYU Predoctoral Summer Fellowship (2014) and the Digital Commons Initiative Grant (2013). She was a finalist for the 2013 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Grant for independent arts writing on her blog, Most Perfect World (www.mostperfectworld.com). In 2011-12 she was a graduate fellow in the IFA-GSAS Forum on Forms of Seeing. Rachael is currently co-editor of Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual Material Culture, and she is also a founding co-editor and co-director of the Organism for Poetic Research. Rachael’s writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series, Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and Propeller magazine. Rachael’s research focuses on the intersection of aesthetics and poetics in the modern and contemporary period (U.S. and Europe). Her dissertation studies author-artist collaborations of the late-twentieth century.

 

Host Institutions

New York University
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Editorial Board

Joaquín Barriendos, Columbia University
Sharonah Esther, SUNY (Stony Brook)
Helen Fielding, Western University
Michelle Hamilton, Western University
M. J. Kidnie, Western University
Mary McLeod, Columbia University
Karla McManus, Concordia University
John Melillo, University of Arizona
Thy Phu, Western University
Spencer Pope, McMaster University
Laura Portwood-Stacer, New York University
Allison Sherman, Queen’s University
Taryn Sirove, Carleton University
Gregory Snyder, CUNY
Christine Sprengler, Western University
Eric Weichel, Queen’s University

Editorial Committee

Hilarie Ashton, English, CUNY
Tenann Bell, Decorative Arts and Design, Bard
Kristen Gaylord, Art History and Archaeology, NYU IFA
Phillip Griffith, French, CUNY
Andrew Kuech, Politics and Historical Studies, New School
Ariane Lebot, Cinema Studies, NYU Tisch
Dana Liljegren, Art History, CUNY
Tina Montenegro, French, NYU
Amber Moyles, Modern Art, Columbia University
Lauren Wolfe, Comparative Literature, NYU
Laura Yoder, English, NYU
Allison Young, Art History, NYU IFA

Reviews Editor

Colin MacDonald, English, CUNY

Steering Committee

Mary Eileen Wennekers, English, Western University
Daniel Martin Benson, French, New York University
Jon Weier, History, Western University
Luke Arnott, Media Studies, Western University
Amy Gaizauskas, Art History, Western University

Faculty Advisors

Katherine Manthorne
Lytle Shaw

Co-Editors

Andrianna Campbell
Rachael M. Wilson

Website Design

Alex Dodge

Shift Logo

Alex Dodge

Funding

A sincere thank you for your generous support of Shift.

Department of English at New York University