From the Editor

Abstract

Welcome to the final edition of Afterimage for 2021 (Volume 48, no. 4).In this issue’s peer-reviewed section are examinations of two very different projects connected by their attention to space(s) and the position of the human body within it. First, Curt Lund looks at the work of twentieth-century photographer Alexey Brodovitch, who was best known for his decades-long tenure as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Lund’s re-reading of Brodovitch’s 1945 photobook Ballet newly ties Brodovitch’s own artmaking to his “unorthodox” teaching philosophies and “groundbreaking” classroom practices. Through archival resources, the nature of Brodovitch’s experimental, even revolutionary teaching is brought to light. In our second article, Alena Kavka explores the displacement of Anthropocentrism in the unconventional architectural arrangements of Gregor Schneider’s Haus u r. Schneider’s ongoing domestic installation space in which he deconstructs and reconstructs the interiors of his family home in Germany, “defies easy categorization as an artwork.” Kavka argues that the project “offers an alternative to spatial anthropocentrism through the production of ‘antihuman’ rooms, which ultimately confer agency onto the space itself, forming a kind of body in which the viewer is made into the object of its senses” with Schneider moving “between these nodal sites as a kind of mediator.”In our reviews section we have a diverse selection of project, exhibition, and book coverage. To begin, Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann dig deep into the myriad layers of SwampScapes, a multi-platformed cocreation by Elizabeth Miller, Kim Grinfeder, and Juan Carlos Zaldivar. Covering a “mosaic of multiple issues, politics, and environments in South Florida,” SwampScapes, as Hudson and Zimmermann write, uses “technological interfaces to reconnect people to the swamp environment and to environmental epistemologies [as] an act of restoration, moving away from drainage and development into embodied and immersive engagements with natural environments that continue to exist in proximity to human-built environments.” Alisia Grace Chase explores the late Niki de Saint Phalle’s recent exhibition Structures for Life at MoMA PS1, finding the display confining for the size and scope of the works, noting that the artist’s “oeuvre is predicated on its scale and overall relation to site.” Regardless of some curatorial decisions, Chase concludes, “Saint Phalle’s life and this show prove…she was definitely capable of transforming it into art.”Alexander L. Fattal provides rich context for Verde, photojournalist Federico Rios Escobar’s book of photographs of the insurgents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In this collection, published by Raya Editorial, an independent publisher of artisanal photobooks based in Manizales, Colombia, Rios Escobar, Fattal writes, shows his “expert eye,” “evinces a strong social concern,” and “transmits a sociological sensibility.” In her review of the abundantly illustrated A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, Jocelyn Jurich shares how author Marko Ilić reveals “the ways in which the New Art Practice emerged from and critically responded to the period when Yugoslavia became increasingly enmeshed in Western capitalism and how the economic inequalities among the republics…affected artists and artistic practices.”* * *Along with scholarly submissions intended for peer review, we welcome reports on events and happenings (taking place both in person and online); essays; photo essays; interviews with artists, curators, writers, and theorists; and exhibition, book, film, video, and project reviews. We also encourage proposals of dossiers and guest-edited issues.As we head into a second pandemic winter, we at Afterimage wish you and yours a safe and healthy season. We will see you again in 2022.