Radio Benjamin
Reviewed By Anna-Verena Nosthoff Walter Benjamin. Radio Benjamin. Edited by Lecia Rosenthal. Translated by Jonathan Lutes with Lisa Harries Schumann and Diana K. Reese. London and New York: Verso...
View ArticleBuilding Zion
Reviewed by Dai Newman Thomas Carter. Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 408pp. The standard narrative of the settling of the...
View ArticlePay for Your Pleasures
Reviewed by Kirin Wachter-Grene Cary Levine. Pay For Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Hardcover. 211 pp. Cary Levine’s first...
View ArticleInternal Frontier
Artwork By Kasia Ozga Artist’s Statement: Non-EU immigrants to France seeking long-term residency permits are required to obtain x-rays in order to be cleared for processing. Every day, the government...
View ArticleSeeing / Being Seen
Artwork By Justin Nolan Seeing / Being Seen is a reflection on tourism, spectacle, and surveillance. The ubiquity of cameras at cultural sites like Times Square has shifted the memorializing function...
View ArticleThe Color of Silence
Artwork By Shalom Gorewitz Artist’s statement: Hidden Revelations “Vision begins with a fault in this world’s smooth facade.” -Howard Nemerov I’m staring at a blank wall. There is a window in...
View ArticleKnit for Defense, Purl to Control
Written By Jacqueline Witkowski “Sometimes the war news seems so abstract and it’s hard to imagine what it’s like for soldiers—knitting helped make it real to me.” 1 Left in the visitor’s notebook,...
View ArticleArt Documents: The Politics of Visibility in Contemporary Photography
Written By Jayne Wilkinson Photography has long been regarded for its power to make visible and to document the unseen and the unknown aspects of our world. As the technological force par excellence of...
View ArticleAfterthoughts on Queer Opacity
Written By Nicholas de Villiers What can a celebrity body be if not opaque? And yet what if the whole point of celebrity is the spectacle of people forced to tell transparent lies in public? We have...
View ArticleThe Problem of Nonhuman Phenomenology: or, What is it Like to Be a Kinect?
Written By Anne Pasek New materialism presents an ambitious revision of key philosophical and political concepts, most notably that of the divide between human and nonhuman agents. In order to move...
View ArticleOpacity and Sensation in Reynier Leyva Novo’s Historical Installations
Written By Guillermina De Ferrari In revolutionary Cuba, history is never about the past. In the early days of the Revolution, state-sponsored cultural production paid much attention to the nineteenth...
View ArticlePerforming the Document in Francis Alÿs’s Re-enactments (2001)
Written By Emily Rose Lyver-Harris On November 4, 2000, Francis Alÿs illegally purchased a gun from a shop in downtown Mexico City. [1] He then left the shop, loaded gun in hand, and walked through the...
View ArticleContributors / Issue 22: Opacity
Issue 22: Opacity (Spring 2015) Guillermina De Ferrari (PhD Columbia University) is professor of Spanish and Director of the Center for Visual Cultures at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She...
View ArticleIntroduction / Issue 22: Opacity
Discourses of cybersecurity, legalities of foreign and domestic surveillance targets, terrorist margins crashing in the imperialist center, and metadata lead to calls for greater transparency, but for...
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