Recent reactreview items

BOOK REVIEW: Joseph Godlewski, The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Despite how they are sometimes articulated, histories are rarely singular stories. Shaped by overlapping social, political, and economic forces, dynamic cultural geographies, and historical agents with conflicting interests, histories are stories with a nearly endless capacity for telling and retelling. The historian’s challenge is to tell these stories without foreclosing this complexity. In The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra, Joseph Godlewski confronts this challenge by adopting a theoretical framework of entanglement to analyze the spatial history of Calabar, a port city in southeastern Nigeria, from the sixteenth century to the present. Refusing a singular understanding of Calabar’s history, Godlewski uses entanglement to tell a history of linkages, between local and global, past and present, spatial and socio-political, that presents the spatial history of Calabar as one of multiple intersecting temporalities and geographies. Drawing upon a wide range of archival...

Scallop-Bound Sea-Mosses and the Tensions of Local Sentimentality, Natural Theology, and Oceanic Imperialism

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bound to one another by a single strip of umber ribbon, three pairs of inscribed Atlantic scallop shell-bound pressed seaweed albums rest in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Algae, also named ‘seaweed’, ‘sea moss,’ or the romantic if scientifically inaccurate ‘ocean flowers,’ in the nineteenth-century came to be understood as simultaneously ancient, ubiquitous, divine, and curious. It became a fascinating material for early naturalists to collect and for Victorian coastal visitors to lovingly dry and press into delicate albums. As environmental anxieties over increased industrialization, resource exhaustion, and climatic instability in the Victorian period surface in coastal New England, this small, handheld set of three scallop-bound seaweed albums represent a single group’s position within these webs of theoretical discourse. I argue that ecological practices of algae collection formed spaces where gender boundaries could be both enforced or transgressed,...

Kaleidoscope Urbanism: Envisioning the Local in Santa Barbara, California

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How do we imagine the places where we are? How do we construct them and construct images from them? Drawing on a diverse set of scholars whose work draws attention to the local as a theoretical apparatus for art and architectural history and practice, this volume centers histories of, and critical approaches to, local placemaking and its imaginaries. The city of Santa Barbara, where a critical mass of our editorial team is located, underpinned developmental conversations for this issue, implicit in the way we posed questions about the local, the contingent, the vernacular, and the small. Here, we take local architect Jeff Shelton’s underpass renovation project on lower State Street as a point of departure for imagining beyond an apparently unified vision of “beautiful” Santa Barbara. Through the project’s playful destabilization of Santa Barbara’s “California Spanish” style, the plurality of the town comes into view, shattering its unified aesthetic vision into disarranged...

To Remain Fixed Upon the Paper: Antonio Nessi’s Lake Como Photographs

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Faye Dowling asks what historiographies can be revealed in the unstable ontology of a lakebed. Her approach to Mexico City’s Lake Texcoco is mediated by Colombian artist Adriana Salazar’s multimedia project, including a 2014 field photograph of the empty basin. Salazar’s work reveals an alternate ethnography, allowing the lake to divulge its multiple temporalities and celebrating what Dowling refers to as the unanchored and indeterminate qualities of a lake. In this response, I use Dowling’s idea of the unstable lake to place Lake Como, the alleged birthplace of landscape photography, as a site resistant to fixity through the photographs of Como resident Antonio Nessi.

Trace, Place, Belonging: Socio-spatial Entanglements at Tulare Lake, California, and Lake Texcoco, Mexico City

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tulare Lake, California, once the central source of water for the San Joaquin Valley, has reemerged in the popular imagination as a haunting reminder of California’s changing relationship with water, environmental extraction, and regional identity. During the unprecedented rains of 2023, Tulare Lake expanded to fill its nineteenth century perimeters and reached media attention as “a phantom lake,” returning to claim its ancient land after years of colonization. The socio-spatial phenomenon of Tulare Lake is a story that can be traced back centuries through entangled livelihoods, infrastructures, farming and folklore. This article discusses two dynamic ethnoarcheological models enacted at Tulare Lake, California, and the analogous contested site of Lake Texcoco, Mexico City, which reactivate a migratory potential of place-making, territorialization, and archival practice. In the multi-temporal epistemologies of these charged and complicated sites, their work demarcates the lakebed...

Housing, Class, and Care: Community-Engaged Fieldwork in Examining Neighborhood Care Practices

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Milwaukee, residents discuss and formulate care for their neighborhood as a counternarrative to the dominant stereotypes that are sadly perpetuated in ungrounded studies of urban problems that fail to give real people agency. Urban Milwaukeeans’ histories are overshadowed by towering narratives of urban racial segregation, freeways demolition, deindustrialization, and most recently, housing crises and police brutality. Those narratives exist within a network and continuous timeline of neighbors gathering to address these problems by activating spaces in which to share food, supplies, stories, support, and strategies. Care is important as a foil––but it cannot be romanticized. It emerges from local histories, cultural values, and social hierarchies. In order to expand the study of neighborhood care, I call attention to how it is situated in local histories and social values. This article explores this formulation of neighborhood care through a case study from my dissertation...

Housing Histories: Autoconstruction and Architecture in Benedict Canyon

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In a 2021 retrospective of Wallace Neff’s long and prolific career as a residential architect, historian Eleanor Schrader praised him for “[his] ability to combine Spanish, Tuscan, Mediterranean, Islamic, and other design elements […] seamlessly into something he called ‘The California Style.’” Neff gained recognition for his celebrity commissions, many of which were located in the picturesque Benedict Canyon, a luxury Beverly Hills neighborhood with mature trees and winding streets.

The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara hosts an archive of Neff’s work, which is integral to Southern California’s canon—a canon shaped more by the industrial wealth of Hollywood elites than by the agricultural enterprise of migrant workers. Yet, Benedict Canyon was named by and for Edson A. Benedict, a farmer whose family made settlement on the land and built a house thereon. This paper uses land entry files—in other words, U.S. General Land...

Civilizing the Sea: Juliette Fish’s Sea Moss Album in a Changing California

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Arranged to take up the entirety of the page, the delicate tendrils of seaweed specimens look as if they were fresh from the seawater of the Pacific Ocean they emerged from some 150 some years ago. Carefully laid out and adhered to paper, their colors are a gradient of reds and soft pinks. Looking closer, some of the delicate ends of the preserved plants are yellow. These striking pieces of unidentified marine algae were collected on the coast of California between 1875 and 1886 in an area called Mishopshno by the Chumash, and renamed Carpinteria by the Spanish in 1769. The preserved “sea moss,” as they were often called at the time, are part of a larger album created by Juliette Fish. Born in Iowa, Fish traveled with her family at the age of sixteen to the newly formed state of California via covered wagon in 1862. She began her practice of “seaweeding” around 1865. Fish gathered these marine plants on her family’s land on the beach in Carpinteria, which was later acquired...

Diffracting Place: A Critical GeoExt Mapping of Glenferrie

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Digital methods like Geographic Information Extraction from Texts (GeoExt) promise novel perspectives on place by liberating spatial data from unstructured text. Yet their chain of abstractions relies on assumptions that seem fundamentally opposed to critical understandings of place as porous, contested and always in excess of its representations. This paper focuses on the place of Glenferrie: the area I grew up in in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s perspective of diffraction, and Sophie Niang’s method of scavenging, I use Glenferrie to articulate a method for representing places that repurposes existing processes for text analysis and GeoExt, without reducing the complexity and chaos of place. This mapping exercise explores the tension place exhibits between global/local, universal/particular and objective/subjective binaries to uncover the contradictory landscape of indigenous, colonial and immigrant histories of Glenferrie, while also revealing...

Starting Nuclear: Towards Multidirectional Sites & Intersectional Care

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nestled between two University of Chicago buildings, stands Henry Moore’s bronze sculpture, Nuclear Energy, which commemorates the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s scientific achievement of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Placed purposefully on the site where the creation took place, the sculpture not only signals a direct locally minded recognition of its spatial history but remains inextricably linked to global sites elsewhere through its implicated technological and discursive resonance that has transpired since the proliferation of atomic as well as nuclear matters. Since the monument’s positioning on the institution’s campus in 1967, the piece of public art has been returned to and activated by a wide range of artistic and civic communities. This paper introduces how these ensuing interactions, those between the monument and its visitors, can alter the evolution of a public work of art’s cultural heritage. It is simultaneously the sculpture’s attachment...

Community Formation: Public Art, Classrooms, and Museums as Anchors of Collective Thought

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This response article expands Lucas Gómez-Doyle’s discussion of Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy (1967) by examining how multidirectional cultural sites generate forms of community through sustained engagement with material objects. While Gómez-Doyle emphasizes the sculpture’s capacity to connect multiple histories, geographies, and political concerns, this essay shifts attention toward the social processes that emerge around such activations. Drawing on museum studies and a pedagogical exercise conducted within the Art, Design & Architecture Museum Internship Program at UC Santa Barbara, the article argues that monuments, classrooms, and museums can all function as infrastructures for collective reflection. Across these distinct settings, objects and sites become anchors through which individuals gather, interpret shared experiences, and negotiate unresolved histories together.

Memory's Typography

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the architectural material dissolution but ontological liveliness of Casa Galamba in São Pedro de Moel, Portugal, through a dual narrative that operates simultaneously on physical and epistemic planes. On the material level, we document concrete dissolution—salt corroding concrete, wood surrendering to Atlantic moisture, tiles cracking under winter storms. On the epistemic level, we reveal how this decay symptoms a deeper erosion: the loss of "sufficiency literacy," the existential know-how of inhabiting limits as plenitude. Through ethnographic documentation across three generations, we trace temporal compression from 120 to 15 annual days of occupation, a pattern often misread through market logic as economic failure. Yet a methodological rupture—occurring precisely when the guardian daughters' testimonies revealed love as epistemological practice—transforms our analysis. What conventional economics interprets as financial naïveté reveals itself as sophisticated...

EXHIBITION REVIEW: Shigeko Kubota at Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, Beacon

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mountains, rivers, screens, wires…the natural and the video mechanic activate one another in Shigeko Kubota’s (1937-2015) video sculptures. The Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation’s Workshop and Video Artspace in Beacon, New York presented a selection of six works made between 1976 and 1996 during its open studio exhibition in Upstate Art Weekend from July 17 to July 21, 2025. The exhibition highlights Kubota’s formal and conceptual innovations in presenting natural landscapes through television monitors and sculptural forms. The assortment of landscapes shown narrate Kubota’s journey of place-making as she moved from her birthplace Niigata, Japan to Tokyo, and later, New York City.

Tradition and Transformation: Co-Designing with the Fishing Communities of Nyandiwa

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the rapid transformation of many Sub‑Saharan African villages into emerging small urban centres, focusing on the case of Nyandiwa, a fast‑growing settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. Despite its demographic expansion and its role as a service hub for surrounding rural areas, Nyandiwa remains an informal and unplanned settlement, where traditional social structures coexist—often uneasily—with the pressures of urbanisation. The article presents a participatory design experience developed within the Master’s Thesis Laboratory Architectures for Developing Countries at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, directed by the author. Over the past decade, the Laboratory has engaged students in co‑design processes with local communities across Sub‑Saharan Africa, in partnership with NGOs and municipal institutions. In Nyandiwa, this approach led to a series of design proposals, including a project dedicated to the fishing communities whose...

react/review vol. 6, imagining the local

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Full volume

Housing Histories: Dreams Built Upon Dismantled Dreams

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The historiography of Southern Californian architecture is marked by divergent interpretive frameworks, oscillating between celebratory narratives and noir critiques. Historians and architectural historians have long grappled with the region’s heterogeneous built environment, shaped by successive waves of settlers, immigrants, and, more recently, exiles and émigrés who made California their adopted homeland. Despite their differences, most accounts underscore the state’s stylistic pluralism and the incorporation of diverse architectural vocabularies drawn from multiple cultures and geographies into its cultural landscape.

Scans, Residues, Misrecognitions and Other Materialities of Loss

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shifting economic and political conditions in many urban areas have resulted in queer spaces disappearing at an increasing rate. These bars, clubs, bookstores and other architectural environments occupied by various members of the LGBTQ2SIA+ community are central to a history of sexuality. Their subsequent absence signals a potential erasure of significant aspects of personal and collective memory. As a response to this slow loss, Berlin-based artist and architect Author 2 has employed architectural scanning technology to create highly detailed, digital models of various edifices, interiors, public spaces and monuments in the German city. The three-dimensional models are then processed as key components of two parallel projects: a website that enables visitors to explore a selection of spaces paired with recorded interviews and a virtual reality (VR) artwork animating the architectural archive. In this conversation, Busch discusses the ongoing project Scanning the Horizon alongside...

react/review vol. 5, from ephemeral to obsolete: the vanishing historical object

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Full issue

Denial and Dissolution – Architecture’s Futile Battle Against Entropy

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Architecture’s fate has been sealed, and our continued resistance to its destiny of demise has led designers and engineers onto a path of forging local order at the price of global disorder. This disorder does not remain constrained to new corners of space, however. It haunts us from afar, promising to creep back and reclaim the places we’ve thought to made our own. Lessons from Native People, avant-garde Japanese modernists, and even Burning Man artists show us how we can embrace ephemerality and plan for a more cyclical architecture that’s better attuned to the planet’s energy flows. A high-level trajectory is proposed to help steer us away from the cliff of irreversible climate collapse, but it requires us to relinquish contemporary conceptions of how architecture ought to be built.

Living documents: the role of audience members in the (after)lives of participatory and ephemeral art practices

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Participatory art is characterized by a certain openness, inviting members of the audience to fill in the gaps of a work of art that is initiated by one or more visual artists. Processes of interaction, collaboration, and co-production are at the heart of this type of art practice, which started to flourish for the first time—at least in the western world—in the so-called long sixties (starting in the late 1950s and ending in the early 1970s). These temporary processes do not necessarily bring about tangible end products that can or should be preserved for the future. Participatory art projects tend to be focused on the here-and-now and the generated results are mostly characterized by mutability, multiplicity and ephemerality.

To a certain extent, one needs to accept that these so-called ‘participatairy’ artworks—i.e. works that are both participatory and airy (or ephemeral) in nature—are no longer there and can, in the traditional sense, not be preserved,...

Spaces of Labor in the Social clubs of British India: Obsolescence in Denial

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This piece will discuss obsolescence in objects, spaces, and labor practiced within spaces of luxury and exclusivity – the British clubs in India. Certain practices and rituals employing gongs, bells, and servants-in-waiting were constructed to maintain racial, and classist differences in colonial India, continue into the 21st century. This paper asks why colonial practices do not easily become obsolete?

Front Matter

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter

Ripples of Loss: On Ephemerality, Obsolescence, and the Archive at the Abbey of Saint-Denis

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to the volume

Memory, experience and consumption. The printed and illustrated ephemera of the Archivo Profumo (Buenos Aires, 1910-1980)

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since the nineteenth century and with greater intensity in the twentieth century, an ephemeral graphic imagery invaded everyday life on a previously unknown scale. These objects printed on paper with generally industrial techniques emerged linked to the daily, administrative, economic and pedagogical dimension of urban life and the consumer society of industrial capitalism. Often destined to be discarded after a specific use, some of them remained in public or private collections and were preserved for their symbolic, aesthetic or emotional value. In Argentina, the vast majority of these prints have been lost, neglected, or found in fragmented collections, rarely known, dispersed in sets grouped by their use or theme. They have been rejected by high culture and relegated by academic research. However, these devices, as part of the common graphic heritage, shaped the visual and material culture of the past, and treasure experiences and a collective social memory. For these reasons,...

An Archive within an Archive or, Archive as Repertoire

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Diana Taylor defines the archival “as documents, maps, literary texts [...] all those items supposedly resistant to change” (19), and the repertoire as “[enacting] embodied memory [...] all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (19-20). The archive is marked by human intervention; the decisions about what is preserved circumscribe the finder’s agency and their means “to find out” (20). In turn, the “being there” of repertoire animates and amplifies this archival non-neutrality. But, some performance artifacts seem to resist this compartmentalization, functioning as a singularity of archive and repertoire and in doing so, cease to be “well-behaved.” This essay will examine the “unruliness” of Baccio Cecchi’s Descrizione dell’ apparato e de gli’intermedi fatti per la storia dell’ Esaltazione della Croce (1592) as it oscillates between archive and repertoire. Ostensibly a description of a temporary theatre and the intermedi performed between the...

Trending Today, Forgotten Tomorrow: The Ephemerality of AI- Generated Art on Civitai

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In early 2024, the Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow became infamous for its lackluster execution. Promised an immersive adventure, visitors instead encountered a dark, poorly decorated warehouse with minimal set design and dubious use of AIgenerated visuals.1 Guests, and soon the internet at large, criticized the event for its lack of effort and creativity. While initially amusing, this uninspired production could be indicative of a broader trend: the rapid, superficial production of content driven by generative AI and the consequences of overreliance on AI without thoughtful human input.

Pineal/Perineal: The Anthropological Divide at Monkey Hill

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines Monkey Hill, a hamadryas baboon enclosure built in the 1920s at the London Zoo. Georges Bataille’s experience staring across at the baboons during a visit in 1927 inspired writings in which the upper parts of the primate body—the mouth, the face, the pineal gland—represented humanity, and the lower parts—the ano-genital or perineal regions—symbolized a base and contemptible animality associated with the baboons. This human-animal binary is reflected in the architecture of Monkey Hill. Its large, waterless moat divided the baboons from the zoo’s human visitors, operating as a management device to maintain distance between humans and other animals. Despite efforts to distance humanity, encounters like Bataille’s reveal the fragility of the human-animal divide. The paper thus explores notions of civilization and animality and how this dichotomy is constructed and maintained.

The Body and the City: Walking Barcelona with las Milicianas and Eileen O’Shaughnessy

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In her recent book on Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a British logistics worker with the Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista (POUM) during the Spanish Civil War, Anna Funder examines a passage from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in which Eileen sits alone in the Hotel Continental's lobby at night. Located on the major promenade of Las Ramblas in Barcelona, the hotel occupies a central location in a zone scarred by conflict and was a site of skirmishes during the war (1936-1939), acting at various moments as an avenue for collective movement, a no-man’s-land in street battles, and a space to be defended. Thinking about Eileen moving through the city, I respond to Anderson-Cleary’s discussion of representations of women by the Spanish left to consider how we might imagine milicianas and other women active in the war as being present on the frontlines and the city streets together.

Red Tide and the Anthropological Divide at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this issue, Corey Ratch explores the less permeable divides at Monkey Hill, the London Zoo’s early twentieth-century baboon exhibit. Surrounded by unjumpable ditches, it forcefully articulated human/non-human distinctions. Just as Monkey Hill put human interventions in the natural world on display, so did a mass fish die-off in Lake Merritt. The August 2022 red tide algal bloom siphoned enough oxygen from the water to litter Lake Merritt’s edges with the asphyxiated bodies of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. In the Anthropocene and the era of human induced climate change, clear anthropological divides are unsustainable.

Skating the Surrounds: Chemi Rosado-Seijo’s El Bowl in La Perla, Puerto Rico

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2006 artist Chemi Rosado Siejo completed construction of El Bowl, a public structure with a dual function of a swimming pool and skate ramp in the La Perla neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico. This article draws upon histories of urbanism and site specific art to examine the history of the structure and its site, located outside the colonial walls of the city. Looking to the development and visibility of the neighborhood since the site’s construction, Jekabson argues that El Bowl is a structure that simultaneously disrupts and supports the growing pervasiveness of media tourism in Puerto Rico.

A Hybrid Avant-Garde: Kati Horna’s Balance between Artist Autonomy and Political Engagement

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912–2000) produced visual materials for the anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica/National Labor Confederation-Iberian Anarchist Federation). From 1937 to 1938, she created photographs, photomontages, and collages that contain anarchist intonations. However, Horna’s own humanitarian-feminist voice can still be heard and recognized beyond the immediate goals of the organization. She was able to achieve this by combining Constructivist and Surrealist formal elements with a theory espoused by Lajos Kassák (1887–1967), the founder of Hungarian Activism, to create a heterogeneous artistic practice which extended beyond the traditional borders of a singular avant-garde movement. Horna inherited the belief from Kassák that artistic autonomy and politically engaged art can coexist, without allowing one to engulf the other. Her hybrid...

Front Matter

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

volume 4 | subversion zones

Dreaming Out Loud: Aphantasia and the Contingencies of Artistic Imagination

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cole Graham’s article “Inefficient, Unsustainable, and Fragmentary: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies” prompts us to consider disability as one of the precarious, suspended, and contradictive subversion zones that this volume explores. Framed through the lens of a cultural-critical disability model he calls sitpoint theory, Graham demonstrates how Robert Rauschenberg's Combines disrupt spatial, bodily, and sociocultural hegemonies, thus challenging existing ableist power structures and introducing the potential for new ways of living that do not center around conventional notions of ability. What if we were to apply Graham’s sitpoint theory to other modalities of disability or neurodivergence?

Inefficient, Unsustainable, and Fragmentary: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg’s Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin’s choice of the word “embarrassingly” was telling; the problem the Combines presented was that they were not private when good sense said they should be. This spilling over of the private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This article, however, suggest a supplementary reading of Rauschenberg’s Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg’s Combines are debased, and if one’s experience of them is bodily, then their association...

Introduction: Inhabiting the Uninhabitable at Oakland’s Wood Street Encampment

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

From 2013 to 2023, the unhoused residents of West Oakland’s Wood Street encampment constructed a sprawling informal neighborhood from the city’s vast material and spatial excess. They built and furnished myriad shanties, tiny homes, and shacks from items cast off by Oakland’s middle and upper classes and by the industries surrounding the city’s massive port. It was common to see tarps and banners used as shading materials, fastened to utility poles and chain link fences. Forklift pallets became picket fences demarcating yards. Structures made from plywood and discarded furniture populated the shade beneath freeway.

For Play and Pleasure

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A review of Kris Lemsalu's sculpture 'Chará,' exhibited in Vienna's Graben from August to November 2023. This public sculpture, made of steel and pigmented synthetic resin, explores the themes of feminine pleasure and joy. It was commissioned by KÖR to enhance Vienna's public spaces and serves as an art installation that engages the public in a dialogue of mythological and contemporary feminist narratives. The review highlights the sculpture's material attributes, its connection to ancient myths like vagina dentata and Baubo, and its societal impact.

Insights from Ecology for Health: Design Guide for Fostering Human Health and Biodiversity in Cities

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As cities globally aim for healthier environments and confront biodiversity threats, integrating nature into urban settings becomes crucial for various ecosystem services and ecological functions. Urban green spaces, with features like trees, water elements, and green roofs, play a vital role in supporting biodiversity and human health. However, designing such spaces involves navigating tradeoffs, such as balancing recreational needs with wildlife habitat preservation. To address this challenge, the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) developed Ecology for Health, a science-based urban design guide. This guide, accessible on SFEI's Making Nature's City Toolkit website, merges biodiversity research with the health benefits of green spaces, aiming to enhance urban community well-being.The guide offers strategies across three scales: urban planning, site design, and detailed design and management. It synthesizes three decades of global research on urban greening, human health,...

react/review vol. 4, subversion zones: bodies and spaces at the threshold

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Full issue

Against 'Nomadism' as Analytic: Pilgrimage Tents at the Hajj Terminal and Mary of Victory, Wigratzbad

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Alida Jekabson’s “Skating the Surrounds: Chemi Rosado-Seijo and El Bowl in La Perla, Puerto Rico” deals with the tension between the local and the global. She engages with Miwon Kwon’s book One Place after Another, which argues that starting in the 1990s, some artists “are attempting to reinvent site specificity as a nomadic practice.” El Bowl demonstrates how a site-specific artwork can become valorized globally, perhaps in part for its very specificity.

I'd like to take up the particular manifestation of tension between local and global exemplified by pilgrimage. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s (SOM) Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1975-81) and Gottfried Böhm's pilgrimage church Mary of Victory in Wigratzbad, Germany (1972-6) could be seen to engage some of the dynamics that Kwon calls “nomadic.” I will suggest, though, that pilgrimage is a more appropriate lens through which to view such structures, because it engages with the actual...

“From Palestine with Art”: Dreams of Sovereignty and Acts of Resistance at the 2022 Venice Biennale

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For the 59th Venice Biennale, curator Nancy Nesvet and the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge, Connecticut, organized the Collateral Event “From Palestine with Art” at the Palazzo Mora (European Cultural Center). “From Palestine with Art” presents the work of nineteen contemporary Palestinian artists who invite audiences to imagine a new landscape and way of life in a liberated Palestine. The exhibition interweaves moments of joy with themes of struggle, resistance, and injustice. The artists and curators turn away from gratuitous images of suffering and violence to embrace creative forms of fighting and solidarity where happiness and presence is a radical act of resistance. As Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land and execute unprovoked military actions against unarmed civilians, the exhibition shows that Palestinians are still here. Their presence, even if far from the Biennale’s main events, is a visual argument for liberation, while its physical distance is indicative...

Author & Editor Biographies

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Author & Editor Biographies

Collapsing Autopia: Feliza Bursztyn’s Chatarras

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In “Confection and the Aesthetic of Collapse,” Ashleigh Deosaran situates Vasquez La Roche’s multimedia artwork within Trinidadian history by setting the farcically conciliatory colonial discourse about the region’s sugar plantations and its workers, found in prints and postcards dated from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, against Vasquez La Roche’s prescient performance. The artist’s engagement with an aesthetic of collapse is described as threefold by Deosaran: a physical collapse of sculptures that melt and become undone; a temporal collapse, as he substantiates the continuities between the colonial archive and contemporary culture and its biases; and a conceptual collapse, conceiving aesthetics for a decolonial, post-capitalist future where the rusting ruins of historical violence attest to the failure of ideologies of empire. Deosaran’s aesthetic of collapse is a productive framework in observing the work of another Latin American artist, sculptor Feliza Bursztyn...

Black Magnolia: Counter-Narrating a Plantation Tourist Site

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How did Magnolia’s former slaves and those workers who were born after abolition face tourism’s exploitative conditions through life-affirming acts of resilience and resistance? The paucity of surviving testimonials from these subjects makes answering this question rather difficult, as does the contrasting abundance of archival evidence attesting to the brutality of slavery and its afterlives. With due caution, I counter-narrate Magnolia from the perspectives of its Black workers, approximating their lived realities from records and research on other enslaved and freed subjects, and projecting their subjective experiences back into period accounts and historical images of the estate. I pay particular attention to how they inhabited the landscape to their benefit, managed interactions with tourists, and created bonds of support amongst one another. With the site’s workers as my guides, I endeavor to uncover Black Magnolia.

The Lure of the Lash: Spectacular Violence and White Ethnonationalism at an Australian Convict Site

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like the transformation of a rice plantation and site of Black enslavement into an English-style garden discussed by Connor Hamm in this volume, the Port Arthur Penal Settlement in southeastern lutruwita/Tasmania has navigated the process of reinventing a site of involuntary and often brutal labor as a tourist destination, a transformation already underway at its closure in the late-nineteenth century. However, while U.S. plantations suppress their violent histories through reinvention, Australian penal settlements instead offer up their brutality as spectacle. If Hamm’s exploration of the Black history of Magnolia Gardens troubles romanticizing it as a space of white leisure—as surely it must—how can such revelry in spectacularized violence against convict bodies coexist with the meticulous unearthing of their stories? I suggest that the answer lies partly in the historically specific form of white ethnonationalism that has grown up around convict narratives in Australia,...

Un-Mapping Water Labor: Quantitative Slippages in Occupied Cairo

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like any doctoral student, I wanted to write a compelling dissertation with meticulous archival research. The archive is often defined as the state’s official depository of administrative documents. In my case, the National Archives in Egypt has somewhat mythic status: an object of perennial desire that can prove frustratingly difficult to access. And yet, there is a frequently expressed fear among students that a dissertation written without this experience is insufficient. I had plans to use the National Archives to reconstruct a history of urban water. Instead, things turned out differently. When Covid-19 hit in 2020 I had a two-year-old son, and my daughter was born in July of that same year. Caring for young children among myriad covid restrictions foreclosed a return to Egypt, official security clearances in hand or otherwise. It was imperative at that stage to make new plans.

Introduction: fields of force

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent zine of short stories, poems, and artwork entitled FORCE/FIELDS published by feminist micropress Perennial Press, the editors asked readers to interrogate the “force fields” that exist around and within us, defining a force field as “a barrier that protects someone or something from attacks or intrusions.” While “force” can be interpreted as a physically tangible or more abstracted form of power at work, “fields” denotes a spatial, geographical, and temporal demarcation of such forces’ claim to authority. These might manifest in visible, concealed, or transitory forms, such as the materiality of architecture that shapes and constrains action, less visible infrastructures of surveillance, or more ephemeral strategies of performance and practice that resist or transform existing spaces. Whether fixed or fleeting, we are attuned to the gaps and malleability of fields of force that offer opportunities to reconstitute how power is embedded in space, place, and landscape.

All Along the Bell Tower: An Analysis of Surveillance and Affect on the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Black and Brown students at JHU were, and continue to be, disproportionately impacted by surveillance architecture and security technology built into the campus environment. Protest messaging including “shut down the plantation, cancel the Hopkins private police!” and “surveillance won’t give us safety” touch on the impact of these small forms of violence experienced by marginalized students, yet frequently disregarded by the perpetrating institution. By exploring affect theory, architectural history, and art-making practices, this project analyzes objects that produce everyday forms of surveillance on JHU’s Homewood campus and the representational objects that can emerge from them. Through the production of mixed media photographs centering the campus’s architectural elements as subjects, I propose an alternative way of seeing without spectacle to work through these weighted affectual experiences.

react/review vol. 3, fields of force: navigating power in space, place, and landscape

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Full issue

At Home in the Wild: Race, Power, and Domesticity in the Transatlantic Wallpapers of Zuber & Co.

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On July 24, 1833, French painter Jean-Julien Deltil (1791–1863) sent a letter to wallpaper manufacturer Jean Zuber (1773–1852) of Rixheim, Alsace. The two men were working on a new project together: wallpaper featuring landscapes of the United States, with which Zuber intended to bolster his company’s sales in the latter country. For this design, Deltil planned four scenes focused on New York, West Point, Boston and Niagara Falls. The descriptions of the scenes, which were to be composed of physical landmarks, forms of transport, and various groups of people, betray Deltil’s intention to use spaces and visual signifiers easily associable with the American continent from a European perspective, even if such designs implied taking liberties with geographic and scientific accuracy. Despite Deltil’s single written mention of Black figures, the actual designs also reveal the artist’s determination to use Black figures as props in his compositions. Engaged in social interactions, these...

Churches in a Secular Skyline: Fields of Force and Urban Change

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The editors of the zine-style volume FORCE/FIELDS that inspired the theme of this current issue define a force field as “a barrier that protects someone or something from attacks and intrusions.” They ask “[w]hat are the force fields we hold up? What are the force fields we fight against?” Alexander Luckmann’s “Skyscraper Churches and Material Disestablishment at the Fifth Churches of Christ Scientist” demonstrates that certain New York and San Francisco churches do not fight against, but rather participate in dominant fields of force. They do so through “material disestablishment,” the handing off of real-estate dealings to developers and accepting visual integration into the secular skyline. Far from oxymorons, pitting the incentives of private capital against religious missions, skyscraper churches indicate an alliance. I argue that through this alliance, skyscraper churches uphold fields of force that exacerbate socioeconomic disparity in U.S. cities.

Doorway to Dissidence: The 1979 Doors Exhibition in the GDR

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In October of 1979, a group of eight German Democratic Republic (GDR) artists in their twenties organized an exhibition designed to reflect the sentiments of their generation. It took place on a year that would mark the 30th anniversary since the formation of the GDR. Held at the Leonhardi-Museum in Dresden from October 27- November 11, the Doors Exhibition [Türen-Ausstellung] overwhelmingly represented experiences of being caught at a threshold—enclosed, separated, and alienated, yet on the edge of possibility, openness, and connection—as metaphorized through the everyday structure of the door. How was it that the symbol of the door came to hold such significance and potential at the time?

Surveillant Movements: Policing and Spatial Production in East German Housing

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the Stasi’s housing district surveys as a particular genre of East German state surveillance and explores the spatial modes and strategies through which East German state power operated in housing settlements. Analyzing the ways the East German secret police reproduced and used the built environment, I demonstrate that East German architecture both facilitated and complicated methods of state surveillance, ultimately resisting the panoptic aspirations of state power. I thus argue that Michel Foucault’s analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which continues to be one of the leading models for interrogating the relationship between architecture and surveillance, does not fully elucidate the spatial practice and efficacy of surveillance in the GDR.

Views of a United Nation

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this issue of react/review, Thomas Busciglio-Ritter addresses the production and distribution of wallpapers such as “Views of North American” in the nineteenth century, arguing that they are intertwined with a history “of racially charged representation” that constructs and validates a white aristocratic identity. I shift viewpoints to consider elements of this wallpaper that construct and attempt to validate the identity of a nation. From this vantage point, I argue that the Zuber & Co. wallpaper “Views of North America” is representative of a strategic fragmentation of conflict in pursuit of establishing a heritage for the newer nation, the United States. The wallpaper’s eventual installation in the White House in the 1960s showcases a political technique that uses representations of technological and social landscapes to obscure conflicts of exploitation and dispossession. This technique is related to the pursuit of constructing a shared heritage that...

A Gendered Response to a Watchful Gaze

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are constantly under the rays of the spectator’s eyes, an inevitable consequence of modern urban life with high demand for the rhetoric of safety and security under the disguise of omnipresent surveillance systems. Expanding from contributing author Sophia-Rose Diodati’s spatial analysis of “affect arrays” and surveillance of racialized bodies, this response aims to situate Diodati’s analysis alongside nineteenth-century Iranian palatial towers in order to highlight the intersection of gender politics and power relations in the surveilled body.

Alternative Modes of Mapping

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Nathan Shui’s essay on the 2013 Beijing Queer Film Festival considers a new geography for queer spatial tactics of interpolation. A documentary still-frame included in the author’s essay displays a collage of photographs, blue lines, and other symbols affixed to what seems to be a typical road map of Beijing and surrounding areas. These annotations serve to make queer space visible while simultaneously obscuring official or government-approved modes of interacting with the city. For me, this brings critical attention to any map’s discursive obstruction. Maps are not neutral depictions of fact: like any representation they are selective and rhetorical.

Confection and the Aesthetic of Collapse: Luis Vasquez La Roche’s Sugar Cane Field Performances

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Contextualizing Luis Vasquez La Roche’s work through a now-rusting refinery perimetric to his interventions, I argue that reading his performances through an aesthetic of collapse can reframe decay as a productive and promising force. In her review of Brian Meeks’ text on political revolution in the Caribbean, Maziki Thame has suggested, “there is potential in collapse, in hegemonic dissolution, in disorder.” Following Meeks’ recognition of the “implicit potential for a democratic renewal” amid political tumult, Thame suggests that crisis and collapse can herald equitable Caribbean futures rooted in revolutions that impel “radical change, the actual turning of things upside down.” Taking seriously this potential, I propose that an accompanying aesthetic of collapse, defined through Vasquez La Roche’s practice, allows us to embrace the inevitable literal collapses of colonial and capitalist infrastructures and envision through conceptual collapse the potential for post-decay renewal.

Front Matter

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Volume 3 | fields of force

In/Visibility: Beijing Queer Film Festival and Alternative Queer Space

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Founded in 2001 by Chinese film director Cui Zi’en and students from Beijing University, the Beijing Queer Film Festival (BQFF) is China's longest-running independent film festival centered on queer media and visual culture. In this article, I approach the BQFF by focusing on the issue of queer visibility, a particular mode of queer self-manifestation that fluctuates between the states of concealment and disclosure—a contingent condition of existence that undergirds how sexual minorities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) negotiate and navigate power despite their culturally and politically constricted existence. I explore how the Festival contributes to disrupting state power without using overtly aggressive tactics. I argue that the astonishing longevity achieved by the BQFF organizers necessitates further scholarly attention to the cultural and political efficacy of an ambiguous queer visibility as enacted by the Festival tactics.

Skyscraper Churches and Material Disestablishment at the Fifth Churches of Christ Scientist

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“What is ‘religion in plain view’ when it doesn’t ‘look like’ ‘religion’?” I propose that both the Canadian Pacific Building and 450 O’Farrell use a strategy I call “material disestablishment,” in reference to Promey’s concept of “material establishment,” to downplay their religious aspects. Although W. L. George may have correctly noted religion’s diminished visual prominence, this need not mean that religion has disappeared from the American city. Urban religious power is sometimes exercised subtly; it is a force field that is often intentionally obscured. I propose that hybrid religious and rental buildings blur the boundaries between sacred and “secular” and lend support to the argument that, despite an immense increase in religious choice, our age is not necessarily irreligious. In this article, I explore and trace the genealogy of this notion, specifically in Christian Science and then extending to an Episcopal church.

A Nationally Rooted Response to Chauvinism

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

To contemplate Antonio Saura’s monster paintings is to ponder over the most appropriate grid of analysis to make sense of some of the most enigmatic artworks in the history of modern art. These paintings, which in Saura’s own words, are “loaded with an air ofprotest,” could be read in relation to the dictatorial regime imposed by General Francisco Franco in Spain from 1939 to 1975. Yet in “PaintingViciously: Antonio Saura’sMonsters and the Francoist Dictatorship (1939-1975),” Claudia Grego March points to the issues that come with such an assumption: the artist vehemently rejected the view that his monster series was about the misery and suffering caused by the Spanish civil war and its subsequentposguerra. In the light of this seemingly apolitical declaration, a potentially promising avenue of interpretation for the monster paintings is one which takes into account Saura’s stay in Paris from 1954 to 1955. It was in the French capital that Saura engaged with, and permanently integrated...

Introduction: the spirit in the shadow

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Volume two of react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture explores the spiritual, monstrous, cosmological, and otherworldly within or as forms of political action or resistance. Considering how spiritual themes are entangled with political action or resistance invites new attention to a range of subtle distinctions between manifestations of the “spirit,” whether as methodology, content, and/or the effect of a work. Reproducibility, with its attendant notions of mimicry, copying, and dissemination, also emerges as a key analytic in the contributions to this journal. These ideas are reflected in DJ Morrow’s balloon recreation of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son, which appears on this volume’s cover. Like the original on which it is based, Morrow’s piece engages with the monstrous and the political in a moment of crisis. However, its playful use of an everyday medium simultaneously veils and unveils the violence of the scene, demonstrating the...

Considering Afrofuturism and the Built Environment

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As Angela Pastorelli-Sosa demonstrates in her essay on artist Sydney Cain in this volume, Afrofuturism centers Blackness and Black experiences while sharpening the contours of our imaginations by bridging different temporal planes. Pastorelli-Sosa indicates that Afrofuturism is a powerful tool for an artist’s imagination, and is used to wade into the possibilities of multiple futures and pasts. She artfully demonstrates this feature of Afrofuturism by highlighting how Cain’s spiritual labor allows for new experiences and engagements with the present and the past. Through the process of material extraction, Cain’s drawings become a channel for ancestral intervention. They pull an “invisibilized” people from the past, allowing them to surface in a present landscape, thereby altering our understanding and relationship with space and time.

Sydney Cain’s Spiritual Refusals amidst the Afterlives of Slavery

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sydney Cain (she/them) is a young, Bay-area based artist whose multimedia works on paper explore Black ancestral memory, transformation, and spirituality. Using a process of reduction, Cain moves small particles of elements such as chalk and graphite in a circular motion to surface shapes and figures. These figures are often faceless and incomplete; their blurred silhouettes evoking traces, incomplete memories, and ghostly presences. Cain refers to these figures as ancestral spirits, and their graphite and chalk as ciphers that assist in decoding “unseen realities.” The artist's discussion of these zones of liminality, and their commitment to rendering these ephemeral, ancestral forms provoke the questions: what does it mean to make legible something which we feel is always there? What does it mean to make your ancestors visible, to conjure them within an aesthetic realm? This paper will explore Cain’s interest in spirituality and ancestral memory through Refutations (2018-...

Front matter

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Volume 2 | the spirit in the shadow

Plenary Affections

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our societal fascination with fans is nothing new. In response to the emergence of mass print culture, affective engagement with “objects of devotion” within communities infused cultural products with renewed meaning. What is a fan, and what types of objects are interesting to them? And how might fan studies help us to think productively in art history? Mia Uribe Koslovsky’s study “Saints and Zinesters,” which examines the twin devotions of fandom and religion, offers some insightful interventions by attending to the practice of reinterpretation, knowledge production, and the nature of devotion itself.

Black Metal, White Supremacy, and Fraught Masculinity

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In a political momentwhen extreme right ideology seems to proliferateinpockets of the United States and Europe, it is timely to consider how an underground subculture like black metal could be susceptible for appropriation by white supremacists. Jillian Fischer’s article in this issue of react/review examines the ethnoracial symbolism ofNational Socialist black metal (NSBM) vis-à-vis early black metal and Nazi propaganda. However, her iconographical and lyric analysis should also be considered within the broader constellation of identity that undergirds these identitarian-based politics

react/review vol. 2, "The Spirit in the Shadow" (2022)

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Full issue

Reflections on Haunting the Canon: The Super-phenomena in Art

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In December 2020, the Vatican unveiled its annual nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square. Headlines across conservative Catholic newspapers quickly latched on to what many observers described as “shockingly unconventional”: nineteen monumental ceramic figures, including an astronaut, a cyborg, and a turkey-dinosaur chimera, surrounding a covered sculpture of the infant Christ. The sensationalized convergence of otherworldly and religious subjects was a means to reflect on the 2020 Art History Graduate Student Association’s 45th Annual Symposium Haunting the Canon: The Super-phenomena in Art, which likewise examined manifestations of the supernatural. The paranormal is important for the study of art and culture not simply because they elicit new and diverse aesthetic categories, but also because as a strategy, they offer insight into major socio-political and environmental problems shaping the present. This paper traces the development of the symposium’s theme and...

Pagan Metal Gods: The Use of Mythology and White Supremacy National Socialist Black Metal

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Black metal’s relationship to National Socialist and other radical right ideologies makes up a complicated nexus of historical and musicological narratives. Scholars such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Keith Kahn-Harris, and Jeffery Kaplan have traced some of the histories of radical right groups both within the black metal scene and as movements more broadly. However, the question of why black metal has been especially susceptible to appropriation by those with neo-fascist and radical right viewpoints has been less considered. In this article, I will argue that the black metal scene has been appealing to national socialist group members through a shared interest in paganism and mythology. Through an analysis of album art and lyrics of three national socialist black metal (NSBM) bands¾Burzum, Graveland, and Der Stürmer¾I will demonstrate how a shared interest in paganism and pre-Christian mythology allows NSBM artists to place themselves within a historical lineage of national...

Author & Editor Biographies

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Author & Editor Biographies

Painting Viciously: Antonio Saura’s Monsters and The Francoist Dictatorship (1939-1975)

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In 1950s and 1960s Europe, painting monsters was trendy. From Enrico Baj’s nuclear creatures to Jean Dubuffet’s ghostly portraits, and passing through Asger Jorn’s graffiti-like beasts, monsters became one of the most popular pictorial elements to convey the existentialist mood of the Post-World War II period. In this article, I address how the Spanish informalist painter Antonio Saura followed such trend. The painting of monsters was an idiosyncratic trait of Saura’s oeuvre, but also a way to ideologically discredit the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). The painter’s “cruel look,” as Saura himself called it, became a plastic strategy that allowed him to renegotiate some of the ideological cornerstones that the Francoist regime promoted as the essence of Spain’s national identity and its cultural tradition. As I show, by deforming Spanish historical figures, artworks, and sacred images, Saura battled the colonial, catholic, and obscurantist interpretation...

Saints and Zinesters: Fandom and Legacy in the Zine St. Sucia

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article considers how the visual discourse in the printed zine St. Sucia (2014-2018) materializes the performed identity-making essential to young feminist queer Latinas in the twenty-first century. Founded by artists and friends Isabel Ann Castro and Natasha I. Hernandez, the South Texas-based zine forms a multi-authored space where queer feminist Latinx simultaneously embrace and rewrite familiar cultural codes. Through the figure of the fan, i.e. a passionate devotee, this article analyzes the zine’s subversion of La Virgen de Guadalupe.

By using a fandom methodology to understand St. Sucia’s engagement with La Virgen’s iconography, this article analyzes the cofounders’ personal reiterations of the cultural figure of La Virgen de Guadalupe—a strategy implemented by their queer Chicana artistic predecessor Judy Baca in the work Las Tres Marías (1976). In dialogue with Baca’s strategy, which it both honors and complicates, the...

Crafting Interiority, or the Evolutionary Objectivity of Vibrating Worlds: An Introduction to Adolf Behne’s “Biology and Cubism” (1915)

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sublimating the transgressive atrocities of modern warfare in an enigmatic text written within a year of the outbreak of WWI, art historian and architectural theorist Adolf Behne (1885-1948) takes recourse with humanity by tracing the uncanny thresholds between the human and non-human as proliferated by contemporary theories of biology. Disguised as a manifesto-like book review of biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s Building Blocks of a Biological Worldview (1913), Behne’s “Biologie und Kubismus” (1915) engages Uexküll’s pluriversal worldview to complicate straightforward dualisms between artifice and nature, subtly imbricating the geopolitical and biopolitical spheres with the expressions of modern art. Dismantling impressionist art as lacking external-natural parallelism, Behne’s text champions expressionist art, whose forms and shapes evolve organically from a biologically-encoded creative interiority, as “true” art. A critical introduction to the author, text,...

Front matter

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Volume 1 | Representation, Materiality, & the Environment

Flux: The Ontological Status of Inflatable Forms

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The formulaic “reveal, make manifest, extend, relate” encapsulates the simultaneous material and immaterial ontological status of inflatable architectures investigated by Katarzyna Balug in “Outside of Architecture: Between Mediating and Navigating the Air.” What does it mean to reveal the environment and how does this disrupt and contribute to our experience of spaces? With Balug’s discussion of Graham Stevens’ architecture—alongside correlating moments in the history of science, technology, space travel and flight—it becomes clear that at the core of this examination is the embodied, sensory experience of entering and inhabiting these inflatable structures. The phenomenological is intrinsic: how our relationships with the tangible materials framing the bubbled construction is enmeshed and mediated by the invisible properties providing the form constituting the contained architecture.

react/review vol. 1, "Representation, Materiality, & the Environment" (2021)

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Full issue

Introduction: Representation, Materiality, & the Environment

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

react/review is a journal shaped by reactions. To react is to act in response, to reflect and return to a first actor. The term is active and encompasses the spirit of lively discourse and critical engagement. Perhaps it carries a connotation of hastiness, but we contend that this temporal association locates us firmly in the present. We envision this journal as a reaction to research trends and current global events, but we employ the term to also signal the discursive element of this project. In other words, react/review is a responsive journal. Our inaugural volume adopts the symposium’s theme: “Representation, Materiality, & the Environment.” This topic considers the way environments, landscapes, and the natural world have been represented by artists and architects as a means to ritualistic, scientific, political, leisure, or spiritual ends.

EXHIBITION REVIEW: Toward Our Digital Futures, a review of @socialdistancegallery

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Our engagement with art has fundamentally shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic. As museums and galleries shut down or severely reduced the number of visitors to contain the spread of the virus, the in-person viewing experience of art was but another halted aspect of daily life. Increasingly, the art-viewing public turned toward Instagram and other visual social media platforms. Long used by artists for networking and to reach a wider audience for their work, Instagram has emerged as a pivotal resource (especially for young artists) to connect in a time of limited in-person interaction. For graduating BFA and MFA art students, this has meant the loss of their thesis exhibition. This event is a rite of passage in one’s career, and the culmination of years of work. To alleviate this loss, Professor Benjamin Cook of the Art Academy of Cincinnati created the Instagram account @socialdistancegallery. Boasting over eighteen thousand followers, the Social Distance Gallery has hosted...

Improvising Field Research in COVID-era Hackerspaces

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hackerspaces and makerspaces are community-oriented technology and art workshops facilitating new forms of public life and filling infrastructural gaps in cities (but for the sake of brevity, I refer to both as hackerspaces here). My dissertation project aims at understanding how hackerspaces relate to the built environment and how they create new imaginaries of citizenship in U.S. cities like San Francisco and Detroit. Here I reflect on some of the challenges I faced researching these spaces as they constantly adapted to unaccommodating city environments before and during the pandemic. During my field research, I had to learn to follow them through their various improvisational strategies.

Crafting Environmental Citizens

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I never intended to devote my doctoral studies toward the environment. When I began my Ph.D. in California in 2015, my research interests pertained to questions of materiality, queerness, sexual futures, and craft. For me, the process of a dissertation continues to be an endless lesson in the art of letting go and allowing for change and the unexpected. During the summer of 2018, I embarked on a three-week research trip across the southwestern United States. At the Ceramic Research Center (CRC) on the campus of Arizona State University and the archives of the New Mexico Museum of Art, I hoped to find a few gems that would bolster my project on queer craftspeople in the American West, AIDS, and the potentiality of tactility and the surface of an object as a site for sexual expression. I found nothing. During the 937-mile drive through deserts and red rock mountains from Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, I agonized over what to tell my advisor.

You Can Be Sure of Shell: Oil, Empire, and Landscape in Interwar Britain

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

During the 1930s, Royal Dutch Shell Oil commissioned a group of prominent artists and designers to create posters for a nationwide advertising campaign in Britain. The slogans ran “To Visit Britain’s Landmarks, You Can Be Sure of Shell”; “Everywhere You Go, You Can Be Sure of Shell”; “See Britain First on Shell”, all of which were set against painted backgrounds of rivers, fields, churches, and castles. Through the latter half of the interwar period, these large posters traversed the nation stuck to the sides of the trucks that delivered Shell oil.The broadsheet images acted as peripatetic windows onto the historic buildings, landscapes, and scenic villages of Britain, encouraging motor travel by reinforcing a sentimental connection to the British landscape. Yet in doing so, the series elided the reality of the landscape as a site of ideological conflict. In the decades following World War I, this space had become disturbed by political upheaval and placed at the center of...

Revolution, Renewable: Subsoil Political Ecologies in Rivera’s Song of the Earth

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This paper argues that in centering the interior of the earth as crucial to the political goals of the revolution, Diego Rivera contests not only the ownership of subsoil resources, but also capitalist epistemologies of the subsoil and their understanding of the relationship of the subsoil to social and political ecologies. In The Song of the Earth and Those who Till and Liberate It, the liberation of both people and the earth are cast not as linear teleologies with fixed endpoints, but rather as cyclical temporalities of constant renewal. These cycles are depicted not as parallel, but rather as interdependent life cycles of a larger ecology; the resulting deaths of the West wall’s revolution are figured as elemental geneses of the East wall’s cycle of organic life. The Chapingo murals thus reveal an important complexity to Rivera’s revolutionary ideology: a belief in the mutual dependence between environmental sustainability and the equitable distribution...

The Landscapes & Material Culture of Empire

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tobah Aukland-Peck’s essay offers a fascinating inquiry into empire through posters and seashells, seemingly mundane objects tied to a complex history of travel, advertising, oil, and empire. No longer solely the domain of Romantic painting wistfully imagining the expanses of empire under the guise of a serene landscape, this paper focuses on an aspect of material culture not often studied. Aukland-Peck argues that the “bucolic” domestic landscapes pictured throughout a number of posters advertising Shell’s enterprises neglected to depict the ravages wrought on the landscape by empire and capital in an effort to achieve material and corporate gain at a moment of Britain’s anxiety about its own status. Focusing on posters with their catchy phrases designed to foster interest in Britain, Aukland-Peck shifts our way of thinking about the proliferation of empire towards the innocuous nature of cost-effective, reproducible media. The “visual responses to war within the pastoral...

The Future that Lies Beneath

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today, there is wide (though contested) consensus that a materialist vision of nature will likely lead to our collective demise. Without sacrificing historical specificity, Kuipers provides timely insights on Rivera’s animistic approach to geology, which, as she eloquently demonstrates, did more than pay tribute to indigenous myths. The economic practices Rivera depicted on the walls of the chapel at Chapingo’s Autonomous University were, in his mind, not just functional activities, but social actions sustained by interrelations and spiritual significance. By situating the human rapport with nature within a metaphysical stream that irrigate cycles of life and death, he charted possibilities and opportunities that deserve our attention today.

Outside of Architecture: Between Mediating and Navigating the Air

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This paper unpacks the changing logics of flight, from the hot air balloon to the 1969 moon landing, which mirror the larger transition to narratives of control during the modern industrial era. Then, it explores a blind spot in architectural historiography that left inflatable forms out of architectural scholarship since the 1980s, despite their being prominent in the decade before. Finally, the project deploys recent insights from media studies, a discipline that evolved from critical theory to address communications media and technologies in the 1960s, and more recently focuses on the materiality of such media, to trouble architecture’s disciplinary limits and to demonstrate how the logics of the flying balloon illuminate the inflatable anew. Along the way, the work of artists and architects like Graham Stevens, whose texts and structures deploy scientific principles to reveal and embody a human entanglement with elemental forces, grounds the exercise.

BOOK REVIEW: Christopher P. Heuer, Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Christopher Heuer's Into the White attends to phenomena that so often mark conclusions or dead ends in art history rather than beginnings: absence, loss, disintegration, the unseen, and the unknown. Opening with Martin Frobisher's ill-fated 1578 voyage from England in search of a northwest passage to Asia, Heuer introduces readers to chronicler Thomas Ellis' attempts to illustrate an iceberg. The resulting images of this "great and monstruous peece of yce" near abstraction, and deftly exemplify the core concerns that thread through the rest of the book. As Europeans explored, documented, weathered and succumbed to the Arctic, the resulting images and texts spoke back to European crises of the day: Protestant iconoclasm, the epistemological limits of the image, and the relationship between the unseen and the unknown. The project of visualizing the non- or poorly-visible, Heuer argues, resonated with Protestant arguments about the dangers of the image, the reification of...

Landscapes of Elision: Nostalgia and Imperial Networks

Wed, 5 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A striking aspect of Aukland-Peck’s piece is the way it traces a connection between naturalism and environmental exploitation via imperial networks. By grounding the discussion of Shell’s advertising campaign in a discussion of its historical emergence as a company trading in exotic seashells from across the British empire linked to existing domestic interest in seashells and fossils by naturalists, Aukland-Peck establishes naturalism itself as part of the lineage of Shell’s exploitation of imperial networks for later intensified forms of environmental extraction. There is no overstated claim here however: the move from seashells to oil and kerosene is clearly an economic one, with a kind of nostalgia for the oceanic constituting a thread of continuity with Shell’s seashell-trading origins, most obviously in the company name and logo. However, the connection between British domestic interest in the natural landscape through collecting and landscape painting and the growth of...