University of Chicago Press: New Titles from 'Reaktion Books'

Jan van Eyck

Craig Harbison — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The surviving work of Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1395–1441) consists of a series of painstakingly detailed oil paintings of astonishing verisimilitude. Most explanations of the meanings behind these paintings have been grounded in a disguised religious symbolism that critics have insisted is foremost. But in Jan van Eyck, Craig Harbison sets aside these explanations and turns instead to the neglected human dimension he finds clearly present in these works. Harbison investigates the personal histories of the true models and participants who sat for such masterpieces as the Virgin and Child and the Arnolfini Double Portrait.

This revised and expanded edition includes many illustrations and reveals how van Eyck presented his contemporaries with a more subtle and complex view of the value of appearances as a route to understanding the meaning of life.

Art Forgery

Thierry Lenain — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With the recent advent of technologies that make detecting art forgeries easier, the art world has become increasingly obsessed with verifying and ensuring artistic authenticity. In this unique history, Thierry Lenain examines the genealogy of faking and interrogates the anxious, often neurotic, reactions triggered in the modern art world by these clever frauds.

Lenain begins his history in the Middle Ages, when the issue of false relics and miracles often arose. But during this time, if a relic gave rise to a cult, it would be considered as genuine even if it obviously had been forged. In the Renaissance, forgery was initially hailed as a true artistic feat. Even Michelangelo, the most revered artist of the time, copied drawings by other masters, many of which were lent to him by unsuspecting collectors. Michelangelo would keep the originals himself and return the copies in their place. As Lenain shows, authenticity, as we think of it, is a purely modern concept. And the recent innovations in scientific attribution, archaeology, graphology, medical science, and criminology have all contributed to making forgery more detectable—and thus more compelling and essential to detect. He also analyzes the work of master forgers like Eric Hebborn, Thomas Keating, and Han van Meegeren in order to describe how pieces baffled the art world.

Ultimately, Lenain argues that the science of accurately deciphering an individual artist’s unique characteristics has reached a level of forensic sophistication matched only by the forger’s skill and the art world’s paranoia.

Chicken

Annie Potts — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

No creature has been subject to such extremes of reverence and exploitation as the chicken. Hens have been venerated as cosmic creators and roosters as solar divinities. Many cultures have found the mysteries of birth, healing, death and resurrection encapsulated in the hen’s egg. Yet today, most of us have nothing to do with chickens as living beings, although billions are consumed around the world every year.

In Chicken Annie Potts introduces us to the vivid and astonishing world of Gallus gallus. The book traces the evolution of jungle fowl and the domestication of chickens by humans. It describes the ways in which chickens experience the world, form families and friendships, communicate with each other, play, bond, and grieve. Chicken explores cultural practices like egg-rolling, the cockfight, alectromancy, wishbone-pulling and the chicken-swinging ritual of Kapparot; discovers depictions of chickenhood in ancient and modern art, literature and film; and also showcases bizarre supernatural chickens from around the world including the Basilisk, Kikimora and Pollio Maligno. Chicken concludes with a detailed analysis of the place of chickens in the world today, and a tribute to those who educate and advocate on behalf of these birds.

Numerous beautiful illustrations show the many faces (and feathers and combs and tails) of Gallus, from wild roosters in the jungles of Southeast Asia to quirky Naked-Necks and majestic Malays. There are chickens painted by Chagall and Magritte, chickens made of hair-rollers, and chickens shaped like mountains. The reader of Chicken will encounter a multitude of intriguing facts and ideas, including why the largest predator ever to walk the earth is considered the ancestor of the modern chicken, how mother hens communicate with their chicks while they're still in the egg, why Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece required him to play a chicken, whether it’s safe to take eggs on a sea-voyage, and how “chicken therapy” can rejuvenate us all. This book will fascinate those already familiar with and devoted to the Gallus species, and it will open up a whole new gallinaceous world for future admirers of the intelligent and passionate chicken.

British Comics

James Chapman — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

In this entertaining cultural history of British comic papers and magazines, James Chapman shows how comics were transformed in the early twentieth century from adult amusement to imaginative reading matter for children.

Beginning with the first British comic, Ally Sloper—known as “A Selection, Side-splitting, Sentimental, and Serious, for the Benefit of Old Boys, Young Boys, Odd Boys generally, and even Girls”—British Comics goes on to describe the heyday of comics in the 1950s and ’60s, when titles such as School Friend and Eagle sold a million copies a week. Chapman also analyzes the major genres, including schoolgirl fantasies and sports and war stories for boys; the development of a new breed of violent comics in the 1970s, including the controversial Action and 2000AD; and the attempt by American publisher, Marvel, to launch a new hero for the British market in the form of Captain Britain. Considering the work of important contemporary comic writers such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Ian Edginton, Warren Ellis, and Garth Ennis, Chapman’s history comes right up to the present and takes in adult-oriented comics such as Warrior, Crisis, Deadline,and Revolver, and alternative comics such as Viz.

Through a look at the changing structure of the comic publishing industry and how comic publishers, writers, and artists have responded to the tastes of their consumers, Chapman ultimately argues that British comics are distinctive and different from American, French, and Japanese comics. An invaluable reference for all comic collectors and fans in Britain and beyond, British Comics showcases the major role comics have played in the imaginative lives of readers young and old.

Derek Jarman

Michael Charlesworth — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Derek Jarman (1942–94) is known as one of Europe’s greatest independent film-makers; his films call into question and reconsider the nature of filmmaking itself. But, as Michael Charlesworth shows in this new biography, Jarman was also a painter, writer, gardener, set designer, and an influential campaigner for gay rights and other social causes.

Charlesworth discusses the entire diverse range of Jarman’s works in order to provide a thorough portrait from childhood to his untimely death. Charlesworth is the first scholar to properly integrate Jarman’s paintings and writings with his films, demonstrating the strong connections between his varied areas of artistic practice. He also draws invaluable insights from Jarmon’s extraordinary series of journals that offer a look into the nature of the society in which he lived, as well as his own creative process. And through the thoughts and memories of Jarman’s friends, Charlesworth reveals how Jarman was an important voice on behalf of many—one who espoused love and friendship, while fearlessly campaigning for the virtues and the value of art in an often hostile and unappreciative political and social atmosphere.

Fresh in its conclusions and engaging in style, Derek Jarman is an accessible and thought-provoking analysis of Jarman’s phenomenal creativity and a perfect complement to Jarman’s works.

Mahatma Gandhi

Douglas Allen — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

The idea of nonviolent resistance is still as essential and almost as radical today as it was when Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) first pioneered in India the protest of political tyranny—in his case against British colonialism—through massive displays of civil disobedience. Gandhi’s ideas of peaceful protest went on to inspire the marches and sit-ins of the American Civil Rights movement and continue to be the foundations for political and social demonstrations around the world.

This biography by leading scholar Douglas Allen presents a new and challenging approach to understanding Gandhi’s life—the time in which he lived, how he shaped history, and how his philosophy and practices can be reformulated in ways that are significant and effective today. Allen analyzes his continuing relevance by addressing key issues of truth and ethics, violence and nonviolence, equality and freedom, as well as ideas of exploitation, oppression, religious conflict, and environmental crises.

Allen provides a much needed new perspective on Gandhi that allows us to rethink our basic values and priorities. By helping us understand Gandhi’s life and message, he creates a new paradigm for evaluating truth, nonviolence, peace, and morality; and he offers new criteria for assessing our modern approach to standards of living, development, progress, and meaningful human existence.

Philosophy of Sport

Steven Connor — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

While previous writing on the philosophy of sport has tended to see sport as a kind of testing ground for philosophical theories devised to deal with other kinds of problems—of ethics, aesthetics, or logical categorization—here Steven Connor offers a new philosophical understanding of sport in its own terms. In order to define what sport essentially is and means, Connor presents a complete grammar of sport, isolating and describing its essential elements, including the characteristic spaces of sport, the nature of sporting time, the importance of sporting objects like bats and balls, the methods of movement in sport, the role of rules and chance, and what it really means to cheat and to win.

Defined as games that involve bodily exertion and exhaustion, sports simultaneously require constraint and the ability to overcome it. Sport, argues Connor, is a fundamental feature of modern humans. It is shown to be one of the most powerful ways in which we negotiate the relationship between the human and natural worlds. Encompassing a huge range of different sports, and enlisting the help of Hegel, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, Ayer, Deleuze, and Serres, A Philosophy of Sport will inform, surprise, and delight thoughtful athletes and sporty philosophers alike.

Photography and Archaeology

Frederick N. Bohrer — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Photographs preserve the past, while archaeology unearths what has been preserved. Put together, photography and archaeology bring the past into the present, making its image available for a wide audience. In Photography and Archaeology, Frederick Bohrer examines some of history’s most famous archaeological excavations, as well as lesser-known finds, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Bohrer examines the ways these sites have been represented in photographs and shows how the development of photography in the nineteenth century brought archaeology to the attention of the public.

Uniting the histories of both photography and archaeology, Bohrer explains how what we know of the history of archaeology has been related to how it has been photographically represented and circulated in scholarly papers, personal accounts, scientific archives, museum catalogues, and other formats. He discusses archaeological examples and images by photographers including Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, John Beazley Greene, and Ernst Herzfeld, as well as more contemporary photographers such as Aaron Levin, Roger Wood, and Marilyn Bridges. While photography seems to guarantee documentary objectivity, Bohrer argues that it also fundamentally alters the archaeological object, transforming it into a work of art.

Beautifully illustrated with archaeological images, many published here for the first time, Photography and Archaeology will be of interest to anyone captivated by both photography’s and archaeology’s ongoing engagement with the past.

Photography and Ireland

Justin Carville — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Outside of Ireland, ideas of Irish photography center around picturesque tourist views of the emerald green of the Irish landscape and photojournalistic representations of The Troubles. Justin Carville sets out in Photography and Ireland to change this perception, to give attention instead to depictions of its social transformations, political upheavals, and geographical reimaginings as a colony, nation, province, and sovereign state.

As Carville demonstrates, photography not only has documented these transformations but has also helped shape how Ireland is viewed, both by itself and the rest of the world. Photography and Ireland explores the role of the photographic image in the colonial and postcolonial visual cultures of Ireland from the nineteenth century to the present day, and it emphasizes the transnational dimension of photography in Ireland, including foreign photographers who have contributed their images to the cultural imagination.

Accessibly written and accompanied by a wealth of images, including commercial portraits and landscapes, ethnographic photography, photojournalism, and documentary works, Photography and Ireland explores the formation of an indigenous photographic culture in Ireland through a number of interrelated themes.