Since the early 1990s, the term "global art" has gone hand in hand with an expansion of the canon, while not always reflecting the plurality of art worlds. This volume interrogates the relationship between the increasing globalization of artistic discourse and the situatedness of its practices. Focusing on multiple recent practices of art, curating, historiography, and criticism, the contributions ask how contemporary forms of critique not only take into account new hegemonies and exclusions but also address transcultural entanglements in the arts. Thus, they challenge universalizing...

How to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to pinpoint the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwarzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of media analysis, as well as sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The topics range from a new reading of Thomas Struths street photographs to CERN photos with their charged rhetoric, from the assault of photographic close-ups to speculations on an anonymous slide collection featuring a woman with an ever-present white handbag. The book is...

How is photography connected to global practices? This is a first edited collection to trace the relationship between history, photography and memory in a global perspective on three interrelated levels: firstly, in the artistic and cultural production of pictures, secondly, in the decoding of colonial and contemporary photography, and thirdly, in collecting photographs in picture archives dealing with colonial and anthropological photography. The contributions sketch the contested field of (post-)colonial photography and trace the manifold intertwinements between historical and contemporary...

Well before today's debates on global warming and climate change, photographic images have played an important role in educating the general public about the wonders of nature and the destruction of the global environment. Most now-iconic images have historical precursors. Gisela Parak illuminates how the interrelationship of photography and science gave rise to a genre of photographs of environmental phenomena. She emphasizes the power of these images to support and instruct the scientific pursuit of knowledge, as well as their potency as a means of persuading and shaping public opinion.

The ancient stories of Pero, who breastfed her father, and of the unnamed Roman daughter who breastfed her mother, were of tremendous interest to artists and their audiences from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. The Roman Charity investigates the iconography of the breastfeeding daughter from the perspective of queer sexuality and erotic maternity. The book explores the popularity of a topic that renders modern viewers uneasy, but appealed to early modern observers for its eroticizing shock value, its ironic take on the venerable concept of charity, and its implied critique of...

Michael Lent asks what role art has in colonization and subsequent dissolution. He proposes a practice informed by the fatal strategies and "raw" phenomenology of Jean Baudrillard as a challenge to a system of disappearance. Focusing on the otherness of space to prevent its ultimate dissolution, Lent promotes a spatial practice of radical alterity. Examining ideas of disappearance put forth by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, he utilizes art as a means for investigating loss of potentiality and experience through the representation of space, shifting their ideas - originally ascribed to objects...

Image Theory After Representation.