Visualities

Alix Beeston

Contributors

Woman with a Movie Camera: Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)

Elizabeth Alsop

As I watched Marie Menken’s short film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)—screened as part of an exhibit at the Noguchi Museum earlier this year—I found myself thinking about Gertrude Stein. Specifically, I recalled the letter Stein...

Judging by its Cover, Part 2

Alix Beeston, Pardis Dabashi, Daniel Morgan, Rochelle Rives, Kartik Nair, Jed Esty, Natalia Cecire, Rebecca Colesworthy

The first section of “Judging by its Cover” consists of pieces that are interested in the cover as a form of compensation, a covering over, as a piece of gorgeous textile can mask or stand in for what one doesn’t want to confront, or what can’t...

Judging by its Cover, Part 1

Alix Beeston, Pardis Dabashi, Anne Anlin Cheng, Katherine Groo, Anneka Lenssen, Miriam Thaggert

On October 26, 1936, T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to American writer and host of an influential Parisian literary salon, Natalie Barney. In it he admitted with discernible embarrassment that his most recent author at Faber & Faber, Djuna Barnes...

Monet’s Cataracts, Re-examined

Robert Volpicelli

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Claude Monet’s world began to go dark. The impressionist painter had experienced problems with his eyesight before: as early as 1867, a young Monet found that his penchant for painting outdoors, in...

Looking With Images: Chinese Diasporic Worldmaking Beyond the Frame

Nadine Attewell

For someone who thinks a lot about photography, I have decidedly mixed feelings about being seen. In Canada, where I grew up and once again live, the state’s term for non-Indigenous racialized people like me is “visible minority.” The...

“Improbable Life”: Bain, the Baroness, and Public Photography

Noa Saunders

I first encountered Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) at a conference on modernism and comedy. While her performance style is not exactly comical, the Baroness is most notable for her eccentric writing and elaborate costumes,...

Material Matters: Dressmaking and Exhibition-making for “Poets in Vogue”

Sophie Oliver, Sarah Parker

“Poets in Vogue” is an interdisciplinary exhibition held at the National Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, London, from 17 February to 10 September 2023. Sophie Oliver (University of Liverpool) and Sarah Parker (Loughborough University)...

Leonor Fini’s Surrealist Object and Other Marvelous Precipitates of Desire

Alex Zivkovic

"Objet trouvé par Leonor Fini. Couverture d ’ un livre ayant séjourné dans la mer.” Like all object labels, this label tells a story. The first sentence is true. The second, a seductive fiction.

The artist Leonor...

Finding Africa in Benaras: Postcolonial Citation in Jai Baba Felunath (1979)

Oishani Sengupta

This summer, as I was wrapping up my dissertation and packing my boxes in upstate New York, I started watching Satyajit Ray’s Jai Baba Felunath ( The Elephant God , 1979) after what felt like a lifetime. The film is based on a...

So, What Does a Feminist Look Like?

Georgia Monaghan

There’s a recent feminist slogan that, no matter how staunch my feminist allegiance, always troubles me. You’ve no doubt seen it in one form or another: the ubiquitous “This is what a feminist looks like” emblazoned on posters, memes, and fashion...

Blur

Alix Beeston

A creature luminous and vexed, the firefly flits in melancholic briefness, brilliant yet burning out, its light’s little lifespan mocked by the starry fixtures of the sky. The firefly’s illumination is a chemical process, like the flash of a...

Stare, Flaunt: Seeing Trans Femininity in Literary Modernism

Emma Heaney

In a scene midway through Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, the little tomboy Bechdel sits with her father in a small-town Pennsylvania luncheonette when, together, they look (or rather he swivels to glower and she stares...

Inspiration, Memory, and Migration from My Ántonia to Minari

Heidi Kim, Rachel Warner

Sometime last year, I came across an article in which the director Lee Isaac Chung described the formative influence of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia on his 2020 film Minari . I knew then that I needed to find the right person—or...

Shelter in Two Acts

Mena Mitrano

The minuteness of her body and the expansiveness of her thought struck some as an odd contrast. In this still, her body crowded by the desk lamp, the large microphone, and the curtains that seem to drift toward her on the window’s breeze, they...

Passing into Film: Rebecca Hall’s Adaptation of Nella Larsen

Rafael Walker

Director Rebecca Hall’s recent adaptation of Nella Larsen’s exquisite second novel, Passing (1929), is visually stunning. I had the pleasure of seeing the film on the big screen, during its limited theatrical run and before its Netflix...

Before and After Hormones: Youth and the Eugenic Imagination

Mia Florin-Sefton

In Germany in 1923 everyone was talking about their hormones. This was, in large part, thanks to the popular release of a medical education film called Der Steinach-Film . Der Steinach-Film was sponsored by the Universum Film-...

Adverse Possessions: Legal Representation and the Settler-Colonial Image

Jack Quirk

What do images have to do with the law? A lot, as it turns out. To make sense of an image requires the viewer to imagine a form of life. To imagine a form of life is to imagine a form of law. So law owes its existence to images; they clothe its...

Feminist Catastrophe Against Disaster Patriarchy: Curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women

Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi

How many feminist scholars and archivists does it take to screw in a lightbulb ? There is no punch line to this set-up. Instead, we have spent the past two years curating a four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set on “ Cinema’s First Nasty Women ,” a...

Claude Cahun’s Pronouns

Juno Richards

From the start, I wanted Claude Cahun to be like me, or I saw myself in them, and used the pronoun that would make this misrecognition seem the most true. It would be possible to write a different sort of essay than the one I’m writing now,...

The Intelligent Hand: Ana Hatherly |/ Asemic Writing |/ Visualizing the Creative Act |/

Natalie Ferris

Rain in Lisbon often made me think of notation, of glyphs and dashes inscribing a page |/. I know this sounds too romantic, too neat, particularly for a rain that would often fall in unruly sheets, dislodging cobbles, stripping trees, and running...

Remembering to Forget the Kodak

Kevin Riordan

In 1888, the George Eastman Company put the first film-roll camera on the market. The new “Kodak” put photographic practice into the hands of many amateurs and hobbyists for the first time. This camera had immediate cultural effect, shaping how...

On Seeing Ghosts

Lorraine Sim

When I first saw this image on the National Gallery of Australia’s website, I wasn’t quite sure who, or what, I was seeing (fig. 1). What is the shadowy form lurking in the bottom-left-hand-corner of the image? Is it a person emerging out of the...

Restaging Little Theater Online

Grace Brockington

This article is the final installment of a special series on the Visualities blog exploring digital archives connected to modernism’s visual cultures. Contributors to the series introduce and model the uses of online resources spanning art,...

New Hands on Old Papers: Modernist Publishing and the Archival Gaze

Alice Staveley, Claire Battershill, Helen Southworth, Matthew Hannah, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Nicola Wilson

Virginia Woolf records in her diary, September 22, 1925, clarion testimony to the transformational power of the Hogarth Press on her writing life. The avowed feminism of that final sentence has the force of proleptic aphorism; one woman’s victory...

Handiwork: Mina Loy, Collage, and the En Dehors Garde

Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, Susan Rosenbaum

Although Mina Loy consorted with nearly every historical avant-garde movement, she was contained by none and is rarely mentioned in their histories. She’s not alone in this regard. Canonical histories and theories of the avant-garde typically...

Digital (Re)Visions: May Watkis and the Women Film Pioneers Project

Kate Saccone

This article is part of a special series on the Visualities blog exploring digital archives connected to modernism’s visual cultures. Over the next few months, contributors to the forum will introduce and model the uses of online resources...

Ways of Seeing Art in a Pandemic

Brandon Truett

For their final writing assignment in a course on contemporary art, my students were required to analyze a single artwork from the last sixty or so years. The point was to encourage them to apply the theories of visuality that we’d studied...

Typestruck: On Women and Writing Machines

Amy E. Elkins, Glenn Adamson

The crown jewel in the 1937 Hollywood musical Ready, Willing, & Able is an elaborate song-and-dance number called “Too Marvelous for Words.” A lovestruck male theater producer, attempting to write a love letter by dictation, is...

On the Verge of Tears

Louise Hornby

Glass tears do not leave a trace. In Man Ray’s photograph, Les Larmes de Verre (Glass Tears) (1932), they rest on the model’s cheekbones—hard, cold drops, threatening to fall (fig. 1). The tears are too smooth, too round, too still. If...

This Chaotic Earth: On Clarence Larkin’s Charts

Phillip Maciak

The apocalypse stressed me out. This is an obviously true, maybe irresponsibly glib statement in material terms—the sixth extinction, global pandemic, nuclear annihilation, space rocks, methane farts, these all terrify me daily in ways that I...

Dear Nella: What Did You See?

Pardis Dabashi

Dear Nella,

I was terribly disappointed that you didn’t get here last week. And I was furious with myself for mentioning the damned wedding to you because it turned out that I didn’t go. People kept coming in and then deciding not to go...

Looking like a Modernist

Alix Beeston

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, or so the story goes. For Snow White’s stepmother, the evil Queen, the terrible magic of the mirror is its unimpeachable veracity, its devotion to the truth. The mirror doesn’t lie about what it knows; and what the...

Visualities

Aug 5, 2019 By: Alix Beeston and Pardis Dabashi

Volume 4, Cycle 2

Tags:

visual culture

visuality

Critical and creative engagements with modernism's cultures, objects, and problems of sight.