In This Issue Rebecca M. Brown 5 to come Features Rozita Sharafjahan, Anahita Ghabaian, Maryam Majd, Masoumeh Mozaffari, Table of Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam, and Keivan Moussavi-Aghdam 6 Inside Tehran: A Conversation with Iranian Gallerists Contents Kay Wells 00 Laboring Under Globalization: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists Forum Nora A. Taylor and Karin Zitzewitz 00 History as a Figure of Thought in Contemporary Art in South and Southeast Asia Koh Nguang How 00 Artist’s Project: Early Performance Works by Tang Da Wu in Singapore Kevin Chua 00 Archive as Figure in Singapore Contemporary Art Nora A. Taylor 00 The Document as Event: Vietnamese Artists’ Engagements with History Pamela N. Corey 00 Siting the Artist’s Voice Karin Zitzewitz 00 The Archive in Real Time: Gossip and Speculation in the World of South Asian Art Hammad Nasar and Karin Zitzewitz 00 Art Histories of Excess: Hammad Nasar in Conversation with Karin Zitzewitz Shilpa Gupta 00 Artist’s Project: That Photo We Never Got Reviews 00 Lindsay Nixon on Jessica L. Horton, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation; Sophia Powers on India/Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art, exhibition and accompanying book; Sarah Montross on Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin, and Suzanne Hudson, Agnes Martin: Night Sea; and Ace Lehner on Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories Hudson begins the second chapter by canvas—in Jungian terms, as a way to push Ace Lehner noting that 1963, the year Martin painted past one’s ego, the aggressive square, while Night Sea, was also crucial in the broader also submitting to its perfection. Cruising for reception of her work. Prior to this time, These two books offer compelling Antiessentialist Methods: critics were more dismissive of her work approaches to Martin’s painting with a A Queer Reworking of Art and often connected her painting to themes sophisticated integration of her biography. History of domesticity, decoration, or craft. Around Along with the recent publications by Nancy 1963, however, assessments of her work Princenthal and by Frances Morris and Alpesh Kantilal Patel. Productive start to shift; as Donald Judd wrote, “These Tiffany Bell, these books sensitively address Failure: Writing Queer Transnational paintings are much better than last year’s.” Martin’s sexuality and her personal and cre- South Asian Art Histories. Manchester, The rest of the second chapter is largely con- ative relationships, particularly with women, UK: Manchester University Press, Rethinking cerned with the effects of Martin’s “structure that impacted her career and art making. For Art’s Histories series, 2017. 272 pages, 31 of disavowal”: how she denied connection example, Rosenberger recalls how Taos and color ills., 39 b/w. $110, $29.95 paper, $14.75 to movements such as Minimalism or the Santa Fe were fertile spaces for gay, lesbian, ebook stimulus from other Coenties Slip artists and bisexual men and women, and that whom she saw daily and with whom she was their “position away from . patriarchal Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s Productive Failure: Writing romantically linked, such as Chyrssa. Martin’s institutions may have allowed Martin more QueerTtransnational South Asian Art Histories is more refutations extended to other readings of freedom” (Rosenberger, 51). While Martin than an art historical intervention intended her works as well, particularly their associa- remained notoriously private throughout to correct the field’s neglect of South Asian tion with nature or landscape. Late in her life her life, these new books shift interpretation art and artists. It may be true, as the author Martin stated that any connection to nature away from Martin as an isolated desert mys- suggests (7), that apart from Women, the Arts in her work was “really a response to beauty” tic. These recent monographic and biographic and Globalization: Eccentric Experience, the multiau- (Hudson, 43). Calling attention to diverse studies provide revisions and excavations of thor volume edited by Marsha Meskimmon interpretations of Martin’s paintings including Martin’s life and art that were perhaps only and Dorothy Rowe for the same series of the artist’s own, Hudson concludes that the possible in the years since the artist’s death books, Western art history has primarily artist’s highly refined abstract compositions in 2004. Through these expanded outlooks, ignored South Asian visual culture, par- heighten subjective responses within each Martin’s life and paintings persist as rich and ticularly work engaging queer and feminist viewer. While Martin’s opinions of her own changeable subjects of study. ideas.1 The chief aims of Patel’s book, how- work were very particular, the lucid precision ever, are to prompt art historians to consider of her canvases was the reason that viewers Sarah Montross earned a PhD from the Institute how these exclusions were made to begin of Fine Arts, New York University. As the Mellon have their own private and specific responses. Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin with, and to attend to the ways in which art Hudson’s third and final chapter returns College Museum of Art, she organized exhibitions histories are “always a product of the people us to a tighter focus on Night Sea, its material- including Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, who write them”(4). That is to say, art histo- ity and associations with water, flow, and and Post-War Art of the Americas. At deCordova rians not only bring certain objects and prac- Sculpture Park and Museum she curates exhibi- tices into view, but also frame the discourse struggle. For Hudson, control and loss hold tions and outdoor commissions including Platform in a counterbalance within this painting. The 19: Letha Wilson and Screens: Virtual Material. Her around them. Patel’s project delves into the two primary material elements—gold leaf forthcoming exhibition Visionary New England nuances of the methodological shortcomings and blue paint—evoke intangible flux and (Spring 2020) explores spiritual, mystical, and of canonical art history and works to dis- celestial, infinite depths. Gold leaf is an earthly utopian practices since the 1840s and their impact mantle the exclusionary practices that have on contemporary art. ore that can reflect and refract light, making resulted in the marginalization of various evident the passage of time. Hudson similarly 1. These include Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: constituencies. He argues it is imperative for explores the possibilities of the ultramarine Her Life and Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, scholars to reflect on our methods, invest- blue of the painting, drawing connections to 2015), as well as a major retrospective of her ments, and blind spots. Engaging situated work organized by the Tate Modern that traveled viewing and critical self-reflection, Patel’s its symbolism in Renaissance painting, but to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and also establishing a connection of the color Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; text models an interdisciplinary praxis that blue with Leonore Tawney, with whom Martin see Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany challenges the limiting and often problem- was intimate at this time. In her final pas- Bell, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2015). atic practices entrenched in traditional ways sages on Night Sea, Hudson brings attention to Bell also edited the first volume of Martin’s digital of writing art history. catalogue raisonné for Artifex Press, released in the painting’s title, drawing out associations 2017; see https://artifexpress.com/catalogues/ Patel’s book builds on a lineage of art to archetypal night sea journeys, from Hades agnes-martin/description, as of November 9, historical and visual studies interventions to Moby Dick. Hudson reminds us that Martin 2018. These examinations of Martin’s work coin- made by scholars committed to rethinking was part of the postwar generation of Abstract cided with broader reappraisals of mid-century art history. His insights are refreshing and abstraction and the contributions of women necessary, and engage a growing schol- Expressionists that favored models of the col- artists, such as the 2016 exhibitions Women of lective unconscious. In specific, Hudson aligns Abstract Expressionism, organized by the Denver arly movement invested in identity-based Martin’s modernist composition of Night Art Museum, and Revolution in the Making: concerns, without falling into outmoded, Sea—the softly repeating elongated rectangles Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016, organized essentialist ideas about identity and canon in contrast to the equilibrium of the square by Hauser and Wirth Gallery, Los Angeles. 122 winter 2018 formation. Rejecting methods that claim conservative notions of disciplinary appro- Orientalist overtones” (27). For example, objectivity in service of veiling authors’ priateness. In contrast, the author proposes he cites Martin Kunz’s introductory essay vested interests in maintaining exclusions a progressive countermethodology that is to the 1982 exhibition catalogue for British and inequities, Patel’s project models an antihierarchical and interdisciplinary at its Sculpture Now at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, alternative praxis of art history vigilantly core. Simultaneously, Patel’s methodology Switzerland, wherein Kunz framed Kapoor’s attending to the legacy of colonial expansion, builds on the work of Mieke Bal,

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