Art History

Sa’dia Rehman’s Lotah Stories was an art installation that was exhibited in the bathrooms of Queens Museum of Art in New York during the 2005 Fatal Love show, the first exhibition on South Asian American art in a major venue. Given its unusual placement outside the white cube, one’s encounter with Lotah Stories is jarring. Moreover, Rehman’s crass subject matter incites carnivalesque laughter. This article argues that Rehman’s aesthetics give form to the dissent of play; by situating Rehman within the age of identity art and the emergence of South Asian diasporic art from the 1990s onwards, I maintain that attention to play as a political aesthetic can reshape the way we see difference.

This article provides a theoretical framing for Zanele Muholi's visual activism in South Africa. Despite colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideologies that have imaged her community of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people as invisible citizens of a larger society and hypervisible deviant outsiders of that same collective, Muholi's photographs attempt to shift the conventions of the gaze. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's photography theory and Jill Bennett's affect theory for art, I argue that Muholi's photographs bring forth an affective appeal to act. Azoulay's notions of "citizenship" and the "civil contract of photography" call on photography's responsibility to act on behalf of those depicted in images of atrocities. Bennett's "empathic vision" describes a relational perception of art, where one is affectively struck by the visual imagery. Reading Azoulay's political, ethical vision and Bennett's embodied methodology for visual culture together, I suggest that Muholi's practice moves her audience to see differently-where seeing the photographed in and of itself becomes an act of political restoration.

This chapter compares two exhibitions that engage permanent collections, Eyes of Time (Brooklyn Museum of Art) and The Scorpion Gesture, at the Rubin Museum. I argue that Chitra Ganesh's contemporary art comprise of ephemeral interventions within permanent displays and these aesthetic interactions have to the capacity to shift the colonial notion of time anchoring art display. Ganesh accomplishes this in particular through a science fictional aesthetic that she superimposes onto museum objects mired in mythology.

Sa'dia Rehman's Lotah Stories was an art installation that was exhibited in the bathrooms of Queens Museum of Art in New York during the 2005 Fatal Love show, the first exhibition on South Asian American art in a major venue. Given its unusual placement outside the white cube, one's encounter with Lotah Stories is jarring. Moreover, Rehman's crass subject matter incites carnivalesque laughter. This article argues that Rehman's aesthetics give form to the dissent of play; by situating Rehman within the age of identity art and the emergence of South Asian diasporic art from the 1990s onwards, I maintain that attention to play as a political aesthetic can reshape the way we see difference.

This article provides a theoretical framing for Zanele Muholi's visual activism in South Africa. Despite colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideologies that have imaged her community of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people as invisible citizens of a larger society and hypervisible deviant outsiders of that same collective, Muholi's photographs attempt to shift the conventions of the gaze. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's photography theory and Jill Bennett's affect theory for art, I argue that Muholi's photographs bring forth an affective appeal to act. Azoulay's notions of "citizenship" and the "civil contract of photography" call on photography's responsibility to act on behalf of those depicted in images of atrocities. Bennett's "empathic vision" describes a relational perception of art, where one is affectively struck by the visual imagery. Reading Azoulay's political, ethical vision and Bennett's embodied methodology for visual culture together, I suggest that Muholi's practice moves her audience to see differently-where seeing the photographed in and of itself becomes an act of political restoration.

Can the Western Museum Consume Asian Art? Zhu Qi questions transnational understandings of artworks that are displayed outside their local context through the title: "Do Westerners Really Understand Chinese Avant-Garde Art?" Guided by the overarching query into the depth of Western understanding of Chinese avant-garde artworks, Qi specifically addresses Western visiting curators that "discover" 1 artists in Asian countries, inviting them to exhibit their work in the US. In addition to Qi's description of a Western election of specific Asian artists to "somehow represent [their nationality]" 2 so that they can be commercialized within the Western market, Qi states that these artworks are evaluated within binary terms, dignified as either: "art that is like Western art, or art that is not like Western art." 3 Yet, according to Qi, many Asian artists are aware of the conditions of their invitation to exhibit in the West, and "have learned to manipulate this situation" 4 to their benefit. Huang Yong Ping's Indigestible Object was originally displayed in 1992 at an exhibition entitled Small Medium Large Life Size in Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, at the Centro per l'arte. 5 After consulting the I Ching, Ping displayed four hundred kilograms of rice that was cooked to varying degrees. Spread alongside the stretch of a museum hallway, "the fresh part [of the rice] was still steaming, while other parts started rotting and stinking." 6 Lee Bul's Hwaum: Majestic Splendor similarly plays with the notion of decay. Hwaum: Majestic Splendor has been displayed in two distinct iterations. The first exhibition of Bul's Hwaum: Majestic Splendor was displayed in 1991, and featured garishly decorated rotting fish, arranged akin to a display at a Seoul fish market. 7 After

How does the Cultural Industry use Diet to Control Us? We Are What We Eat At the turn of the nineteenth century, the private matter of eating became public discussion through the growing publication and distribution of recipe books (Novero 4). Though