21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual

Wie kann ,queere Moderne‘ erzählt werden?

Jo Ziebritzki — 2025-12-16

Brigitte Buettner and William J. Diebold (eds.), Medieval Art, Modern Politics, and Philippe Cordez (ed.), Art médiéval et médiévalisme

Annamaria Ducci — 2025-12-16

Gregory C. Bryda, The Trees of the Cross. Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany

Britta Dümpelmann — 2025-12-16

Janet Catherine Berlo, Not Native American Art. Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions

Felipe Rojas — 2025-12-16

Émilie Oléron Evans, L’histoire de l’art engagée. Linda Nochlin

Hannah Goetze — 2025-12-16

Rural Temporalities

Julia Secklehner — 2025-12-16

The rural has long functioned as antithesis to the urban as the location of modernity. One of the defining elements of this dichotomy is the different temporalities they relate to, which mark the urban as fast-paced and technologically driven, while the rural appears slow, even “timeless”. In 1930s Czechoslovakia, however, an array of different realisms, defined by their value as a social record, was inscribed in the countryside through photography and film. Exploring the tensions arising in this space in the work of Irena Blühová and Karol Plicka, this essay argues that the fusing of urban and rural temporalities played a defining role in constructions of competing rural realisms. It takes the rural/urban dichotomy as a point of departure to show that its intrinsic, competing constellations forged new rural realisms at the intersection of modernist form, ethnography, and reportage.

Photographic Realism in Nigeria

Perrin M. Lathrop — 2025-12-16

After Independence in 1960, postcolonial modernists in Nigeria like Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko began to produce art that merged learned indigenous and global visual traditions into new visual languages for the postcolonial era. Skeptical of the so-called “abstraction” that pervaded the work of this younger generation of artists, first generation modern Nigerian artist Akinọla Laṣekan, self-trained as a painter, illustrator and political cartoonist, continued to insist upon realism as the formal language that would secure an African Renaissance. This essay traces the origins of Laṣekan’s commitment to realism to the earlier writing and practice of pioneer Nigerian colonial modernist Aina Onabolu. It examines the claims that an African Renaissance would be articulated in a visual language that privileged the clarity of form and message – the legibility – offered by realism. The disjunctures of realism, between the future once dreamt of and the realities of history, are played out in this essay’s analysis of relations between painting and photography, and between imagination and naturalism.

Slow Spectacle

Daniel Spaulding — 2025-12-16

Sayre Gomez’s photorealistic works reflect explicitly on the gentrification of historically low-income, non-white areas of Los Angeles, manifesting a pervasive aspect of spectacle, namely, its production of the city as a collection of images that in the last instance resolve to ciphers of property relations. Building on Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, this essay explores Gomez’s characteristic device, the use of literal or implied scrims to produce layers of spatiality distinguished by their degree of focus. My argument is that the enframement of the city in Gomez’s paintings concretizes Debord’s critique of capitalist spatiality by returning it to the built environment, while also reflecting on the entanglement of spectacle with racial capitalism (unlike most Debordian discourse). Gomez’s highly stylized painterly realism hence does not articulate spectacle as an undifferentiated miasma but rather as the minutely differentiated medium of racial and class distinction.