react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

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 power of mimicry to produce new configurations of the macabre and otherworldly. Relatedly, processes of aesthetic reproduction addressed in this compilation also reveal class, race, gender, and cultural identity as factors shaping the form in which the “spirit” emerges in the shadow of political action. Contributing authors address the modern and contemporary eras, engaging with a range of topics from Black life in the Bay area and anti-racism, to monsters in Spanish art, anti-totalitarian politics, cosplay, and the aesthetics of queer Chicana zines, as well as National Socialist black metal bands. Contradictory and subversive ways of knowing and being emerge through these studies as they integrate the supernatural and immaterial into art historical discourse, allowing us to recognize the spirit in the shadow.