Archive

Not Folking Around: Towards a Political-Aesthetic Economy of Folk Art

By Henry Adam Svec

Erin Morton, For Folk’s Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. 405 pp.

Aislie Walsh’s recent biopic Maudie (2017) charts the rough life of Maud Lewis, the self-taught artist whose idyllic, brightly coloured paintings of daily existence in rural Nova Scotia garnered both national and international acclaim, which has only grown since her death in 1970.
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What is Forensic Aesthetics?

By Tim Kaposy

Eyal Weizman. Forensic Architecture: Notes From Fields and Forums. Hatje Cantz. 2012. 44 pp.

Eyal Weizman. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso. 2012. 336 pp.

Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics.  Sternberg Press. 2012. 88 pp.

In the fall of 1996, mere months after the optimism from the Oslo Accords had distilled across the Palestinian population, Eyal Weizman began “a year in the field” in Tel Aviv studying urban planning.
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A Latent History of Everything: Hillel Schwartz’s “Reverb: Notes”

By John Melillo

Hillel Schwartz. “Reverb: Notes,” the endnotes to Making Noise: From the Big Bang to Babel and Beyond. Zone Books, 2011. 349 pp.

Hillel Schwartz’s 2011 history of noise, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, offers—through more than 900 pages of sonorous, often punning prose—nothing less than what the titles of its three main “rounds” suggest: a history of sound “everywhere,” “everywhen/everyone” and “everyhow.” In this review, however, I will examine the book’s 349 pages of endnotes, entitled “Reverb: Notes,” that, because of printing costs, could not be included with the published text.
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Trauma and the Limits of Counter-Memory

By Kelli Moore

Dora Apel. War Culture and the Contest of Images. Rutgers University Press, 2012. 273 pp.

War Culture and the Contest of Images comes in the wake of the Bush administration’s corporatized media production, chiefly represented by Colin Powell’s testimony before the U.N. Security Council on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the current extension of policies and practices of the Obama administration that continue to drive underground public knowledge and debate about secret detention camps.
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Under the Hood of Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology

By Liam Young

Wolfgang Ernst. Digital Memory and the Archive. Jussi Parikka, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 265 pp.

The allure of the archive as a concept, space, form, and metaphor has proven irresistible for continentally inflected media and cultural studies over the last two decades. The “archive fever” diagnosed by Derrida in 1995 has only become more acute as the ever-accelerating digitization of culture, memory, and history has fundamentally reconfigured archives, both real and imaginary.
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