art
Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge – review
In Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge, Hannah Star Rogers challenges the traditional dichotomy between art and science, arguing that they share common approaches to knowledge-making. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and using compelling examples, Star Rogers illuminates the overlapping characteristics – such as emphases on visualisation, enquiry and experimentation – of the two knowledge domains, writes Andrew Karvonen.
Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge. Hannah Star Rogers. The MIT Press. 2022.
Find this book: 
Art and science are often described in oppositional terms. Artists engage in subjective, creative, right-brain activities to produce beautiful objects while scientists use their left-brain skills in objective and methodical ways to improve our collective understanding of the world. In Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge (The MIT Press, 2022), Hannah Star Rogers challenges and disrupts these dichotomies through a detailed examination of how art and science intermingle and influence one another. She argues that we should set aside the long-standing assumptions about the differences between art and science, and instead recognise their common approaches to knowledge-making.
[Rogers] argues that we should set aside the long-standing assumptions about the differences between art and science, and instead recognise their common approaches to knowledge-making.
Rogers draws upon Science and Technology Studies (STS) theories and methods to interrogate the overlapping knowledge communities of art and science. Just as STS has been used to destabilise scientific and technological knowledge practices since the 1970s, she argues that it can also be directed towards art and art-science practices. Her social constructivist lens draws upon well-known STS concepts such as Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker’s notion of interpretive flexibility, Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s emphasis on the power of classification, and Bruno Latour’s immutable mobiles to reveal the multiple ways that art and science are indelibly intertwined. She follows scientists and artists in their laboratories, studios and exhibition spaces to develop ethnographic evidence of the commonalities and synergies between their knowledge practices.
Just as STS has been used to destabilise scientific and technological knowledge practices since the 1970s, she argues that it can also be directed towards art and art-science practices.
Rogers’ first two case studies are based on archival studies of artists who contributed to scientific knowledge production. From the 1880s to the 1930s, the father and son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka used their artisanal expertise in glassmaking to represent wonders of the natural world, notably sea creatures and flowers. Rogers argues that these models were not simply representations of the natural world but contributed to scientific knowledge in substantive ways. As she writes,
To create three-dimensional, detailed representational objects, the Blaschkas had to do their own studies and observations, and in doing so they were creating new ways of knowing sea creatures that would otherwise have been represented by flaccid specimens in jars or two-dimensional drawings. The knowledge that these artisans created was a method of displaying the salient features of marine life to the satisfaction of the scientific community (47). In other words, the Blaschkas positioned themselves as co-producers of scientific knowledge and their models provided new ways of seeing and knowing the field of natural history.
The Blaschkas positioned themselves as co-producers of scientific knowledge and their models provided new ways of seeing and knowing the field of natural history.
The power of visualisation is reinforced in Rogers’ second case study of the renowned 20th-century photographer Berenice Abbott. In the 1940s, Abbott developed a photo-realist technique that could accurately depict physical science laws and principles. She worked in close collaboration with scientists to stage images of soap bubbles, magnetic filings, light traveling through prisms, and falling objects such as balls and wrenches. These images were prominently displayed in science textbooks and were used to inform the scientific literacy of the general public. The realist photos of Abbott and the lifelike glass sculptures of the Blashckas extend earlier STS scholarship by Latour, Michael Lynch, Steve Woolgar, and others on the centrality of images and models to scientific knowledge making while also highlighting their aesthetic achievements. These artefacts are simultaneously works of science and works of art.
The fourth case study of tactical media is an outlier in the book. Tactical media is a social activist movement that emerged in the 1990s as subversive individuals began to employ the World Wide Web for political messaging. Rogers describes various performative, ephemeral interventions to critique capitalism and challenge authority through disinformation, humour, playfulness, and creativity. The case study provides fascinating insights about how technical artefacts can be used to promote alternative ways of knowing, but the work of tactical media practitioners has tenuous connections to the art-science thesis in the rest of the book.
Bioartists shared laboratory space, techniques, and materials with scientists to do science while also critiquing it.
Rogers’ fourth case study returns to the art-science knowledge nexus with an ethnographic study of SymbioticA, a laboratory for the biological arts at the University of Western Australia in Perth. She shadowed the activities of bioartists who collaborate with biotechnologists to develop interactional expertise and expand the knowledge domain of biotechnology. The bioartists shared laboratory space, techniques, and materials with scientists to do science while also critiquing it. As she notes, “Bioartists have seen themselves not as the mediators of scientific knowledge to the public but as the producers themselves” (145). The case study provides vivid examples of how artists and scientists contribute to the hybrid field of art-science in novel ways.
[Rogers] makes a compelling case for using exhibitions in art galleries and libraries to promote STS ways of knowing and to frame research activities as a collective intervention.
In her final case study, Rogers transforms from observer to action researcher by curating an art-science installation titled “Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures” at North Carolina State University in 2019 and 2020. The exhibition included objects with accompanying videos to create an open-ended, iterative, and interactive space where scientists, artists, and the general public could come together in a shared dialogue on biotechnology and society. She makes a compelling case for using exhibitions in art galleries and libraries to promote STS ways of knowing and to frame research activities as a collective intervention. As she notes, “Curators create new knowledge around objects by analyzing the layers of meaning added to them in different context[s]” (245).
While Rogers’ description of the curatorial process provides a titillating glimpse on how STS ideas can be mobilised in new ways, it also raises important questions about the role of the public in knowledge production processes. In the case study, she frames the public as critics rather than pupils of art-science knowledge production, but her description of the curated exhibit includes no evidence on how the public contributed to this shared dialogue. This omission highlights the long-standing challenge of transcending the boundary between experts and non-experts to co-produce knowledge through more democratic forms of engagement.
Rogers provides a wealth of compelling examples to reveal the networked production of art-science knowledge that enrols people, artefacts, and ideas in studios and laboratories through complementary modes of questioning and experimentation.
Overall, the case studies in this book illustrate how art and science are distinct yet overlapping knowledge domains with multiple commonalities. Rogers provides a wealth of compelling examples to reveal the networked production of art-science knowledge that enrols people, artefacts, and ideas in studios and laboratories through complementary modes of questioning and experimentation. The findings make a compelling case for how an STS perspective can be used to deconstruct and critique knowledge domains that extend far beyond scientific and technological development.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Museopedia on Wikimedia Commons.
New Painting — “Refaat Alareer”
New Painting — “Refaat Alareer”
I’ve got a new oil painting titled “Refaat Alareer”, for the Palestinian poet and teacher who was assassinated in Gaza by Israeli forces earlier this month.
The kite in the painting is a reference to the last poem ever shared by Alareer, “If I Must Die”:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.
______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
It’s Always Basel Somewhere
“That’s an awful lot of money to go into a shop,” my friend, a creative director and no stranger to event planning, mused as we traded Paris Art Week VIP passes like baseball cards. In a single, whirlwind long weekend last October, we wended around the aisles of no fewer than five art fairs: The Paris Internationale, THÉMA, Design Miami/, Offscreen, and, the main attraction, Paris+ par Art Basel…
“Necessary and Sufficient” Portraits of Philosophers
“Necessary and Sufficient Conditions” is a series of portraits of philosophers that was given that name because, in the words of the artist, “the idea is to include as little as possible in the portrait while still making it work as a representation of the person.”
Antti Kauppinen (Helsinki) makes the portraits “using a printed photo and a sharp knife.”
Below is a sampling:
There are about 3 dozen in total. He adds:
Because they’re so minimalistic, these pictures are suitable for mugs, t-shirts, stickers, slides, or even stencils for graffiti (that’s how I destroyed my Marx before taking a proper photo…). Many of these things can be ordered from an online photo service. In my experience, they make it easy for you to print your own photo on just about anything these days. Needless to say, please don’t use the pictures without proper attribution or for financial gain—and maybe send me a picture of what you’ve done!
You can see the whole collection here.
The post “Necessary and Sufficient” Portraits of Philosophers first appeared on Daily Nous.
Rubbing/Loving: Do Ho Suh at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
The playful portrayal of architectural forms that characterises the work of Korean artist Do Ho Suh already enjoys global recognition. His emotionally charged sculptures and installations, which he often creates with the help of light, soft materials such as polyester fabric and mulberry paper, reveal a specific crafting technique, a particular way of dealing with implements, that is personal and sensuous. Examples include rubbing the papered walls of a replica of his childhood home in Seoul using his fingertips and stitching large pieces of fabric together by hand. But apart from Suh’s renowned treatment of textures and shapes, what is particularly evident in his new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) is his social awareness, a sensitivity perhaps most clearly expressed in his engagement with the age-old ‘structure versus agency’ debate.
Suh’s approach to the relationship between the individual and the collective, or between intimacy and the social, has been widely discussed in art blogs and magazines. Yet while most commentators focus on identifying the different aesthetic categories Suh mobilises, I believe that behind his creativity lies a powerful social analysis that has been much less examined. Although he is praised for his exploration of identity and individuality, Suh can be better read as a structuralist artist—one who not only acknowledges physical and social structures but attempts to remain within their forms. Suh’s structuralism does not underestimate agency, however. Instead, it provides a complex, layered representation of structures in which agency occurs in a more self-reflexive way.
As this text unfolds, I also maintain that Suh’s deconstructive intent, while nuanced, risks too much when presented in a primarily vivid, colourful and therefore consumable form. His immanent critique of architectural structures, in other words, unfortunately misses the chance to comprehend and reflect the totality of capitalist socialisation—what György Lukács, among other Marxist theorists, has called ‘mimesis’.
Image 1. Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013-2022 (Image by Christian Caiconte)
What strikes one immediately in the MCA exhibition is how prominent the notion of structure is in Suh’s art objects. I was prepared to spend some time contemplating the proposals of a well-known representative of Korean ‘anti-monumentalism’, but what greeted me instead was an inspiring obeisance to all that is durable, permanent and stabilising in life. On the first floor, for example, lay a one-to-one scale reproduction of Suh’s family home in Seoul (Image 1). The artwork is part of his Rubbing/Loving projects, painstaking endeavours in which he rubs pencil marks on paper sheets attached to the exteriors of buildings or the inner surfaces of rooms. The aim, he says, is to document the information of the spaces he once inhabited.
In the case of the replica of Suh’s childhood home, which he began in 2013, one can see the memories of his formative years imprinted materially on mulberry paper using only graphite and his fingertips. In an exercise of memorialisation, then, Suh has fabricated a sort of religious offering to a part of his past—a past, it should be noted, permeated by the figure of his father. What an ingenious synthesis it is for representing that sometimes painful longing for the original home! By slowly and carefully rubbing his family home, Suh loves it once more—now, however, with a sense of how impossible it is to perfectly recreate such vanished intimacy. I agree with the guest curator of the MCA exhibition, Rachel Kent, when she says that time and duration are not only important but central components of Suh’s oeuvre.
According to Suh, having to move between living spaces and countries subjects him to ‘constant recalibration’. One could argue that this permanent state of change, this restlessness, provides the ‘substance’ of his artistic mastery. It would be problematic, however, to read the artistic form given to this experience of recalibration in celebratory terms—as, say, a joyful demonstration of free agency. In Suh’s words, the act of peeling the traced paper from the covered walls is reminiscent of the skinning of an animal, which necessarily involves notions of pain and death. Transmuting heavy and well-delimited objects into a foldable and transportable version of them would therefore seem, for Suh, to be an open process of reconciliation.
Suh recognises that he is subject to the spaces he occupies. The architectural compositions that have stabilised his life threaten to disappear (they will eventually ‘die’); thus he laboriously replicates them in order to pack them up and display them elsewhere. Here we are dealing with a form of practice that is not to be confused with that form of agency that stands for undisturbed action and consciousness. Rather, this practice is highly comprehending of other bodies, human or non-human; it is a practice-cum-ritual that is much more accustomed to slowness and repetition than to novelty and contingency. The dynamic of rubbing, skinning and rebuilding that make up Suh’s aesthetic ‘agency’ ultimately allows for the slow emergence of an artistic self—a particularity that is deeply cognisant of historical experience, and of universality.
Image 2. Do Ho Suh, Basin, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2015 (Image by Christian Caiconte)
The MCA exhibition starts, unusually, on the third floor, where Suh’s smaller artworks are located. Here, colourful reproductions of quotidian objects offer an expansion of, or introduction to, the schema that dominates the first floor. One room, for example, showcases a collection of household objects stitched in blue-coloured fabric, including a toilet, a basin (Image 2), a medicine cabinet and a stove. They are ‘specimens’ (Specimen is the name of this series of artworks): scale replicas of items once contained in the New York apartment that Suh occupied for eighteen years. The apartment was both home and studio: his ‘first and last place’, as he puts it, in that city. Again we see Suh’s struggle to understand what life as ceaseless movement means, and how to make sense of painful spatial irregularity.
It is here, in this dark room filled with blue objects, that Suh’s symbolic system is brought most fully into focus. Here the evanescent quality of diasporic living is boiled down to a variety of commodities traversed by a single structuring concept. Each of these products is, of course, physically different from the others, and also unique according to its constant domestic use. But they all equally belong to a definite system, a definite organisation of diverse objects, situations and experiences. By artistically reproducing these objects in ‘ghostly’ materials, Suh appears to be trying to rescue some permanence from them, shielding their organisational form from their actual impermanence in a creative way.
In 2013, Suh’s aesthetic practice led to him being named The Wall Street Journal’s Art Innovator of the Year. Although in many respects Suh is deserving of such a title, one must be careful to specify where exactly his innovation resides. If the analysis considers the art innovator to be an embodiment of newness—that is, basically as an individual who manages to surprise with something new—then it will miss the preponderance of the old, of what ‘has already been’, in Suh’s art. Similarly, an assessment of Suh’s career on the basis of a rough description of the ‘balance’ between the ego and its social context in his art would be unsatisfactory, as argued above. In my view, Suh is an innovator precisely because he challenges the very idea of innovation, an idea that in his hands takes the radical form of a new disposition towards the past—a new relationship with (rather than a revolt against) a fragmented past. For example, in contrasting individual and communal identity as we see in Image 3, Suh starts with an ode to the latter, not the former. His particular artistic identity acquires presence, and gains conceptual weight, by recognising the relevance of the mediations imposed by architecture, history and community.
Image 3. Do Ho Suh, Uni-Form/s: Self-Portrait/s (My 39 Years), 2006 (Image by Christian Caiconte)
***
In critical social theory there is no rubbing or embroidery, but there is something conceived of as the difficult apprehension of the development of society in thought. The addition of the word ‘immanent’ to this practice would represent the aspiration to keep thought as close as possible to the movement of society. That said, would it be too far-fetched to maintain that there is a striking resemblance between the method of immanent critique and Suh’s art?
In a sense, it is no coincidence that the aesthetic concept of mimesis, introduced earlier, is of special interest in the domain of Marxist aesthetics. Even Sohn-Rethel, who concerned himself mostly with issues of epistemology and methodology, set as the basis of his reasoning the essential historical problem of the division between head and hand in the production of knowledge in capitalism. The integration of both aspects in a single epistemological framework thus becomes analytically desirable, even if the theoretician/artist of society knows very well that subjecting the head to the empirical chores of the hand is a time-intensive undertaking, and one almost forbidden in a social system dominated by the imperatives of productivity and efficiency.
Image 4. Do Ho Suh, Hub, 310 Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London N1 7ST, UK, 2015, and Hub-1, Entrance, 296-8, Sungbook-dong, Sungboo-ku, Seoul, Korea, 2018 (Image by Christian Caiconte)
Image 5, Do Ho Suh, Staircase-III, 2010 (Image by Janet Burstall)
Curiously, the most popular works in Suh’s exhibition have been the most colourful ones. Walking through and around them, attendees (including me) enthusiastically posed next to them and took photos from a distance. Such bodily displays of sympathy are surely an integral dimension of the act of appreciating installation art. The wall notes for these vivid installations, however, contained an interpretation of just this activity: they described Suh’s intention to provide these large reproductions with movement made possible by the viewers themselves. Labels for the artworks in the Hub series (Image 4), for example, indicated that Suh’s spaces were ‘realised as fluid, to be moved through with one’s body’. The label to the installation Staircase-III (Image 5) quoted Suh directly: ‘fabric architectural pieces dealing with one-to-one space are about the body, and about using your body to experience space’.
But this body-assisted deconstructive narrative is unconvincing. I prefer to think that the structure made up of Suh’s multiple aesthetic techniques and symbols does not ‘bow down’ to the public but rather requires from it an appropriate attitude. Let us explain the two key elements of this attitude. First, most of Suh’s art calls for the avoidance of immediate enjoyment; the minute details of objects, rooms and buildings highlighted by the rubbing of surfaces or sewing of fabrics cannot be grasped primarily through arbitrary stimulation of the senses. The indispensable attention needed to capture intersections, fissures and gaps necessarily ties the mind to time—and to a fairly extended amount of time. Second, given their highly mediated nature, Suh’s art pieces mandate a sustained reflection on the state of affairs in contemporary society.
This is, needless to say, also intrinsically intertwined with the current condition of our own personal lives. Hence these two elements challenge the thesis that Suh’s installations are defined by the use of the audience’s bodies to achieve their fluidity or manipulability. In this view there is little room for that ‘gentle gesture of rubbing’, that repetitive act that speaks of a different form of experiencing space and time. How can this problematic thesis, then, be part of Suh’s own discourse? I can offer a succinct answer based on Suh’s decision to use stunningly bright colours and visibly lightweight, ‘airy’ materials: this is the point where his artistic practice reveals the co-optation of capital, the secret coercion of society’s objective compulsion to produce surplus value.
As the Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han would say, a work of art’s rush to stimulate and immediately amaze quickly leads to its de-mystification—to the loss of what makes it unique in the eyes of the observer. Standing in front of pop-coloured art, the observer has no mystery to unearth through contemplation at a distance; all content is already there, presented in the most banal way possible in order to trigger a quick succession of photos, maybe one or two recordings, and then a final ‘Wow!’. Left only with a fleeting feeling of satisfaction, observers soon become bored, compelling them to continue consuming other, similar artworks. As Han sees it, this form of relating to the ‘aesthetics of the smooth’, this historically specific performance, is already presupposed in the famous sculptures of Jeff Koons, which could explain their cultural appeal:
In Jeff Koons’s work … there exists no disaster, no injury, no ruptures, also no seams. Everything flows in soft and smooth transitions. Everything appears rounded, polished, smoothed out. Jeff Koons’s art is dedicated to smooth surfaces and their immediate effect. It does not ask to be interpreted, to be deciphered or to be reflected upon. It is an art in the age of Like.
Suh’s Hub series and Staircase-III also deliver a confusing message. In them, the examination of social dilemmas is drowned out in the gratuitous cheerfulness of the polyester cloth he uses. There his analysis fails to appear intact at the sensory level of sight, for this level has already been reserved for the instantaneous stimulation of bodies through colour. In Suh’s celebration of easy bodily experience, then, he is apparently unaware (or perhaps he is not) of the fact that such physical movement, this determinate use of art, is ultimately subjected to capital. A leisurely generation of a dialogue with the artist’s (and society’s) history is simply not possible due to this subjection of body and mind to consumption. But does this mean we should relinquish the categories of body and colour as proxies of motion or change? Is there perhaps an alternative access to motion—a different form of engagement with it that does not succumb to the homogenising process of profit-making?
A good start, I believe, would be to strive to evade the fetishism of pure materiality—that is, the idea that there is some concrete, ‘real’ body that can be disconnected at will from the determinations of its social context. In its purity and autonomy, in other words, this ‘fluid body’ is not dynamic at all, but only a highly static idealisation. The defence of the alleged existence of this realm of thought-free substances is actually careless in our present time. Take, for example, the pervasiveness of the BeReal form of expression, or the ChatGPT form of communication: the use of these digital platforms is also supposedly unaffected by ‘unproductive’ subjectivities, ideologies or dogmas. But the facticity of their use is nonetheless an abstraction, and, in its indifference to the richness of the hesitating body or the ambivalent mind, a most violent one. In this regard, let us repeat once again one of the maxims of Marx’s revolutionary epistemology, in the words of value-form theorist Moishe Postone: ‘[for Marx] use-value is not outside of the forms; it’s not an ontological substratum beneath the forms’.
Thus, in Suh’s artistic elaborations the new gradually emerges from a radical and immanent way of approaching the structure of his life, as well as the structure of capitalist society, even if, as discussed above, his aesthetics is not immune to the influence of global capitalist tendencies in art consumption and production. On the Australian website ArtsHub, national visual arts editor Gina Fairley notes pointedly that exhibitions today seem eager to propose a fashionable ‘interactive immersion’ for visitors. As a result, she says, ‘we are almost starting to teeter into a zone of entertainment rather than genuine connection’. But I also follow Fairley’s view that Suh’s colourful installations are not completely subsumed under the prerequisite of rapid stimulation. On the contrary, far from simply entertaining his audience, Suh assembles a collection of art objects that testify to his complexity as an individual. Some of these objects transgress established forms of critique, while others make questionable concessions to the identity-autonomy-contingency discourse so ubiquitous today.
Overall, then, Suh does invite us to rethink the relationship between structure and agency, and in a novel way that neither romanticises the disadvantaged position of the subjects of capitalism nor absolutises the structure that these same subjects have constituted. Moreover, while his work may not neatly embody that higher aesthetic attitude that Lukács speculated on as the mimetic reflection of social reality, it nevertheless aptly illuminates crucial historical transformations rarely addressed elsewhere with such resolution. It is my hope that these considerations contribute to a renewed interest in research on the structural dynamic of capitalism, especially in the present art-intellectual setting in which mere reference to ideas of structure or form is met with disdain and haste.
A Carnegie Hall Concert Series Designed for Mental Health
Imagine you go to a concert at the esteemed Carnegie Hall in New York. Instead of sitting in a chair, you are invited to make yourself comfortable on soft floor cushions or a yoga mat. Rather than being shushed, you are encouraged to connect with your neighbor. And at the moment when the first musical notes would normally sound, a host invites you to breathe in and out mindfully. Even the lighting is softer and warmer.
“We hung fabric to make the space more inviting and cozy,” says Sarah Johnson, director of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute (WMI). “Given everything that people are navigating in today’s world, we wanted to intentionally craft a communal musical experience to maximize the health benefits of attending a performance.”
Premiering earlier this month, Carnegie Hall’s ongoing series of 16 Well-Being Concerts isn’t only designed to entertain — it aims to deliver tangible health benefits. According to a sweeping 2019 World Health Organization report, making and listening to music is associated with reduced stress, anxiety and loneliness.
“We’re trying to really hold the space for the audience to have as fruitful of an experience as possible during the concert. It’s a really cool way to dig into the meaning of the content.” Credit: Fadi Kheir
The report — along with findings that a significant percentage of Americans who suffer from anxiety and depression don’t receive adequate care — inspired the series of performances. Some are open to the general public, while others are curated for specific audiences such as health care workers, veterans or people impacted by the justice system.
“We started to wonder, what could we do?” Johnson says of the series’ genesis. “How could we create an opportunity for people to maximize the potential well-being impact of a live musical experience?”
When vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles starts singing the first tunes of “Conscious Mind,” some listeners close their eyes to focus on her crystal clear, soulful voice. “Love the world” is the refrain. Charles and her husband, pianist Jarrett Cherner, finished writing their album Tone during the pandemic. “Trying to cultivate loving kindness and mindfulness during these trying times,” Charles remembers. “And then sharing that loving kindness outward into the world. We could never have known at the time how well it would fit into this space now.”
Use the player above to experience a Well-Being Concert curated with music from the artists in the series.
Both the artists and the attendees say they experience the Well-Being Concerts quite differently from your typical performance. Instead of watching the artists on an elevated stage, the attendees are on the same level and form a circle around the performers. “It feels much more connected,” is how Charles describes the difference. “We’re trying to really hold the space for the audience to have as fruitful of an experience as possible during the concert. It’s a really cool way to dig into the meaning of the content.”
Carnegie Hall piloted the Well-Being Concerts this spring mainly for health care providers and people impacted by the justice system. The response was so enthusiastic that the Weill Institute expanded the series for this season.
“As soon as I walked into the room, I felt my heart rate going down,” one attendee noted after a performance. “I felt my breathing coming back. And it just continued throughout the event.” Credit: Fadi Kheir
It hosted the first Well-Being Concert of this season on November 11 for health care workers at New York City’s public hospitals, because of the “acute challenge for the health care world in the last few years,” Johnson explains. “We’ve all been so fragmented and pulled in a million directions, the events are meant to offer relief.” The audience was capped at 100 people to create a sense of intimacy.
Both Johnson and strategic advisor Ian Koebner take care not to stigmatize or exclude any attendees. “We take an expansive approach because we’re all swimming in very stressful, isolating waters, and we can all stand to be supported more deeply,” says Koebner, who also hosted the first Well-Being Concert. At the beginning, he invites the audience to breathe mindfully and introduces a very simple form of mindfulness meditation, though he avoids using the word meditation so as to not feed into any preconceived notions.
Crushed by negative news?
Sign up for the Reasons to be Cheerful newsletter.
[contact-form-7]
“As soon as I walked into the room, I felt my heart rate going down,“ one attendee noted after a performance. “I felt my breathing coming back. And it just continued throughout the event…When I left, there out on the street, everything was a bit brighter and calmer and nicer.”
One nurse said after the event, “I wasn’t aware it was possible to be in a space that felt so peaceful in this city.”
Carnegie’s series isn’t the first to address mental health through performance. The United Kingdom pioneered a program called Arts on Prescription as psychosocial support for patients experiencing loneliness or social isolation. The program has run for more than two decades and shows benefits for mental health, chronic pain and the management of acute and chronic illnesses.
“Arts in general, and music in particular, can be very therapeutic,” Koebner says. “Reflective group listening in a concert setting can have a positive physiological, psychological and social impact. For instance, the stress hormone cortisol decreases. Researchers have measured a decrease in anxiety and depression.”
“The programs have an effect on us as well,” says the organizer. “We who do this work are changed by it, too.” Credit: Fadi Kheir
Koebner worked for ten years in arts-based conflict resolution before joining Carnegie Hall. A licensed acupuncturist, he has a PhD in healthcare leadership from UC Davis, where he was also the director of integrative pain medicine. This career path led him to wanting to “be a partner in addressing the burden of chronic pain and loneliness.” He quotes studies that found listening to music can “reduce symptoms of depression, increase well-being through the creation of social connection and provide an important resource for self-development, recovery and quality of life among individuals with long-term illnesses.”
The concert series is “an artistic exploration as well as a laboratory,” according to Koebner. Its impact will be evaluated in cooperation with The Berkeley Social Interaction Lab at UC Berkeley. Under the guidance of psychology professor Dacher Keltner, the researchers study the experience of live concerts with a randomized controlled trial about the impact of the season.
The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall has more than 14 years of experience with presenting concerts in diverse and often high-stress public spaces, including hospitals, senior care residences and schools, as well as with people experiencing homelessness. “We want to think about how to support well-being concerts outside of the very kind of rarefied air of Carnegie Hall,” Koebner says.
For instance, the WMI has been offering a program called Musical Connections in maximum-security correctional facilities like Sing Sing. Sarah Elizabeth Charles has served as a vocal coach for women at New York’s jail on Rikers Island as part of the Weill Institute’s Lullaby Project, writing lullabies with and for young mothers. Charles calls the experience of bringing her music into prisons “life-changing.” The Lullaby Project explores what role music can play in mitigating stress for expecting families and new parents, proving that music “can spur language development and moderate stress.” It also helped Charles work through her own miscarriage and pregnancy.
“The programs have an effect on us as well,” Johnson says. “I found the concert really helpful to me personally. It was quite peaceful, lovely and contemplative. We who do this work are changed by it, too. With this work, there is the potential for 360 degrees of impact.”
The response to the first Well-Being Concerts has been encouraging, but the organizers know that mental health challenges are rarely resolved with one performance.
“The concert felt very healing,” one attendee said after one of the pilot concerts in spring. “But I’m very aware that I am now going back out onto the streets of Gotham.”
Johnson’s team is looking into ways to prolong the impact. “How do you extend the impact of a single event?” Koebner asks. He is helping to create resources for the audience –– for instance, curated playlists attendees can download, and short recording snippets of the concert that he sends out for several weeks afterward to prolong the impact.
At the end of the concert, Charles and Cherner invite the audience to sing along and lead the room in lyrics that could hardly be more fitting: “Be here and now, living life out loud.”
The post A Carnegie Hall Concert Series Designed for Mental Health appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
The Terra Lectures in American Art: Part 1: Performing Innocence: Belated
Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the first in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?
Performing Innocence: Belated
Abstract:
Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts’ emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts.
Biographies:
Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life (editor and contributor, Routledge 1997) and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge UP 2001; awarded the Best Book Prize in 2001-02 by NEASA, the New England branch of the American Studies Association) as well as essays on Whitman, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Dr. Holmes, Justice Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Washington Irving, G. W. Cable, Edward Everett Hale, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of flânerie in 19th-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one exploring the influence of two competing speech models—oratory and conversation—on Whitman’s writing and his notions of public life; the other tracing the emergence of a “cosmopolitan tradition” in American culture over the course of the long nineteenth century.
The Terra Lectures in American Art: Part 3; Performing Innocence: Primitive / Incipient
Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the third in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Performing Innocence: Primitive / Incipient
The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914
Moderator: James Smalls, Professor and Chair of Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?
Abstract:
Projections of different ideas of innocence became entangled in the representation of Black US character in fin-de-siècle Paris. By pairing new research on blackface minstrelsy and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner in the American Art Association of Paris with the displays of Blackness curated by Black intellectuals in the “Exhibit of American Negroes” in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, Professor Burns argues that American minstrelsy in Paris built a racialized “primitive” identity that caricatured Black men as effeminate and emasculated, while the latter exhibit constructed innocence grounded in claims of youth, newness, and incipient culture. While the curators staunchly and effectively rejected narratives of primitivism, these tropes of the new simultaneously paralleled and reinforced performances of cultural innocence in the largely white US community in Paris.
Biographies:
Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Dr. James Smalls is an art historian, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in the art and visual culture of the nineteenth century, as well as the art and visual culture of the black diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (Parkstone Press, 2003) and The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (2006). He has published essays in a number of book anthologies and prominent journals, including American Art, French Historical Studies, Third Text, Art Journal, and Art Criticism. His book chapters and articles include: Menace at the Portal: Masculine Desire and the Homoerotics of Orientalism (2016), The Soft Glow of Brutality (2015), A Teacher Uses Star Trek for Difficult Conversations on Race and Gender (2015), Racial Antics in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture (2014), Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of Richmond Barthé (2013), and Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn (2013). Smalls is currently completing a book entitled Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism.
In 2006, Smalls curated a two-part exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art on the art, career, and international influence of the African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner. In 2009-2010, he served as the Consulting Editor for the five-volume set of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. In 2015 he was appointed to the Advisory Board for The Archives of American Art Journal.
Dr. Smalls holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in Ethnic Arts (B. A.), and Art History (M. A., and Ph.D.). He has taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and at the University of Paris.
The Terra Lectures in American Art: Part 2 Performing Innocence: Puritan
Professor c, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the second lecture in the The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914 series. Moderator: Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University
Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?
Performing Innocence: Puritan
Abstract:
Visual culture representing Americans in Paris often polarized stereotypes of French and US identities, framing French bohemia as distinct from steadfast US work ethic. This lecture analyzes how Americans and US institutions in Paris adopted the ideal of the Puritan as a symbol of their sustained connection with the United States and a protective armor from becoming absorbed into Parisian decadence. US churches in Paris—all Protestant—participated in this construction alongside offering critiques of Catholicism in the context of debates about laicization in France. Professor Burns analyzes paintings, sculpture, and illustrations by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Cecilia Beaux, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Jean André Castaigne, and studies St. Luke’s Chapel, which was built for the US students in Paris, to argue that this discourse inflected US artists’ representations of their studio spaces; the rhetoric of US artists’ clubs in Paris; and limited professional possibilities for US women artists.
Biographies:
Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University
Having earned a BA (l963), MA (l965) and Ph.D. (l974) from New York University, Professor Wanda Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in 1980. At Stanford she held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From l992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center.
A scholar of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and photography, Professor Corn has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Smithsonian Regents, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and the Clark Institute of Art. In 2003 she was the Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College and in 2006-07, the Samuel H. Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. In 2012, she was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship to support her pioneering research on Georgia O’Keeffe’s clothes. She has won numerous teaching awards: in 2007 The Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association; in 2002 the Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Teaching Award; and in 1974 the Graves Award for outstanding teaching in the humanities. In 2006, the Archives of American Art awarded her The Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History and in 2007 she received the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. In 2014, the College Art Association dedicated a Distinguished Scholar Session to her work. She has served two terms on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association and two on the Commission for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She served on the Advisory Board of the Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné and two terms on the Board of the Terra Foundation in American Art. Today she is a trustee of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art; and a board member of the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa. Since 2000, she has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios (HAHS) that is an affiliate of the National Trust.
Active as a guest curator, she had produced various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1990-1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (l973); Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983); Seeing Gertrude Stein, Five Stories (2011-12); and in 2017-19, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern. Her O’Keeffe study, published by Prestel Press, won Honorable Mention for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award and was awarded the 1918 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. Her historiographic article for Art Bulletin, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art" (June l988), became a significant point of reference in the field as has her work on cultural nationalism in early American modernism. Her study of avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915-35, was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. In 2011, UC Press published Professor Corn’s Women Building History about Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of murals and sculptures for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. She continues to research, write, and lecture on high, middle, and low culture interpretations of Grant Wood’s American Gothic.
The Terra Lectures in American Art: Part 4; Performing Innocence: Baby Nation
Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the fourth in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Content Warning: This talk will include references to historic racist language and imagery. Viewer discretion is advised.
Performing Innocence: Baby Nation
Moderator: Professor Alastair Wright, Associate Professor in the History of Art, St John's College
Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?
Abstract:
French artists often referred to US artists and art as their offspring. In the context of French declining birthrates, cultural fecundity absorbed the anxieties about a decline of French culture in the name of superiority. The final lecture analyzes how US artists in Paris took up the child as a motif and mantra that reinforced or rejected the narrative of French artistic parentage. While Edwin Blashfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both artists invested in the French academy system, framed dutiful tutelage, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and Ellen Emmet Rand instead probed burgeoning ideas in psychology about the child to frame independent and precocious children. These modern children modeled artistic independence echoed in these painters’ aesthetic experimentation, mirroring the conceit framed by Henry James’s depiction of his child character in What Maisie Knew as “flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.” Cartoons related to the War of 1898 suggest the fungible nature of this position; while playing youthful in the context of Europe, Americans adopted the aged Uncle Sam in rendering their colonized subjects as the children as they moved to outgrow their longstanding dependence on Parisian art practice.
Biographies:
Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge).
During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Alastair Wright teaches modern art and visual culture for both the first year course (Prelims) and courses taken in subsequent years. At graduate level, his teaching focuses on French modernism and the interaction between art and mass culture. In all his teaching he encourages students to engage as closely as possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to collections in Oxford and beyond.
Alastair Wrights's research focuses primarily on European modernisms. His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and more recently he curated an exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The accompanying catalogue, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin’s understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. He has published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Artforum International, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in various edited volumes.