To many photography critics and historians, Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958, France; 1960, U.S.) marks a watershed moment in twentieth-century photography. With money awarded to him via a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank traveled throughout the continental United States from 1955 to 1957. From the approximately 27,000 exposures he made and the thousands of contact sheets he scrutinized, Frank developed 1,000 work prints, from which he selected eighty-three final prints for the book. Peppered with grainy, blurred, and shot-from-the-hip images, The Americans would provide an “anti-aesthetic” model for photographers of the 1960s, many of whom had become impatient with the formal prescriptive and narrative codes of both the fine art and documentary photography establishments. Frank’s work signaled a decisive break from the high craft of taking and printing pictures as defined by photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and even Walker Evans, who was something of a mentor for Frank. When considering both his arduously disciplined working process and the final product, it is clear in retrospect that Frank was always a consummate professional with a masterful eye.

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In a recent interview, Omer Fast asserted that much of his interest as a video artist and filmmaker is “grounded on media: e.g., the impact television was having on the way my generation experienced reality and how we recall and retell it.”¹ He has qualified that assertion by stating elsewhere: “There is a shorthand way of reading my work as a media critique, which is pretty much a dull and dead end as far as I’m concerned.”² Between impact, experience, and critique, Fast seems to approach the media from a perspective that is clearly stated at the end of The Casting (2007), when his alter-ego (a director conducting auditions) says that he is not interested in exploring a “political angle” in the film he is making, but rather how experience turns into memory, and then becomes stories that are “mediated . . . recorded, and then broadcast.” In view of the piece, this may seem rather reductive and self-evident but its frankness anchors its purpose and asserts an authorial commitment to its goals. If the transition of live experience to reproduced memory and simulated reality is indeed a large concern for Fast, his work questions what narratives and histories these transformations produce. In our ultra-mediated world, how might the excess of reproductions affect our experiential apprehension of the world, no less our comprehension of the past? Mid-twentieth century cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin announced the eclipse of the aura-infused object to its mechanically reproduced image and theorized the attendant shifts in perception this seismic change inaugurated. Fast seems to have concerns about the same fate for experience itself, as it is replaced through multiple forms of replication, duplication, and recreation.

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The past several years have seen an extraordinary rise in civilian access to personal locational technologies—from on-board GPS-enabled communication systems in cars to the widespread use of GPS on personal mobile phones. Whether at home or while traveling, individuals have the ability to pinpoint their location with a remarkable degree of accuracy and, in conjunction with mapping software built into phones and cars, can identify not only location but determine direction. Whether on foot, in a car, 100 miles or 25 yards from a destination, one can easily follow, in nearly real time, a route suggested for optimum travel conditions.

As newly accessible technologies such as GPS, Google maps, and iPhone apps permeate everyday life, artists are using the technology and the concepts behind it to inspire their creative endeavors. These new technologies have certainly contributed to the current deluge of mapping projects and publications in artistic, theoretical, and literary realms. For example, the inclusion of GPS coordinates in artistic projects can signal an engagement with the very fundamental questions of what it means to locate oneself in the landscape, and in particular, to locate oneself with an accuracy of greater than one meter. But what do these coordinates actually tell us? Does 36°48.229’N, 118°11.620’W, or the even simpler 42°30N, mean something to us?

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Barack Obama is often compared to past national leaders: Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., to name a few. These comparisons have, for the most part, produced narratives of continuity in which Obama figures as the current leader in a legacy of social progress. However, on bumper stickers, t-shirts, posters, screensavers, Facebook icons, and other digital and physical paraphernalia, another adequation has emerged for a radically different political purpose. Since the early days of his presidential campaign to the present moment, adversaries of Obama have associated him with Osama bin Laden in efforts to cast Obama as a domestic terrorist of sorts. From verbal “slips” on newscasts to political cartoons, to YouTube videos that “transform” Obama into bin Laden, to bumper sticker campaigns exemplified in the figure above, these correlations between Obama and bin Laden illustrate more than just an internationalized form of American racism. They represent the role that politics of identity and difference play in today’s global mediascape—which is defined by decentralized forms of communication, social networks, peer-produced knowledge, and a general sense of “openness” for production, distribution, and reception.

This analysis will trace recent developments in the global mediascape as they relate to the representation of bin Laden and Obama within the new media public sphere. I will begin by focusing on the ways bin Laden was generated as a figure of digital terror in the early years of the “War on Terror,” and will primarily focus on the reception of his video messages in western media via Al Jazeera. I will then look at the use of new media in Obama’s presidential campaign that established his identity as a product of mass collaboration in the “my media” society and how this identity created the conditions for his comparison with bin Laden—often manifested in mass-produced forms of pop art, such as the bumper sticker that claims “The only difference between Obama and Osama is BS.”

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During the 1990s, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens wrote about what they termed the “risk society,” a society in which the manufactured risks arising from a second modernity become a central concern. Characterized in part by an increasing distrust of the institutions of science, technology, and politics, as well as an inability to adequately explain or control the risks inherent to this society, Beck in particular indicated a need for the democratization of science and the agencies of risk management, a concern echoed by Bruno Latour, among others. It is this paradigm shift and corresponding concerns that underpin the recent “Dark Places” exhibit at the John Hansard Gallery.

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[“Crane Takes Flight” by Luke Strosnider ]

While some welcome rapid “modernization” within the Persian Gulf region, others are apprehensive—concerned that it will wipe away the very essence of what has made this area unique. “My Father’s House: The Architecture of Cultural Heritage” attempts to grapple with this culturally significant time within the broader Middle East, which has raised debate regarding notions of identity, tradition, and authenticity. Conservative in approach, this exhibition offers an interesting look at how architecture reflects and envelops the notion of identity within both physical and social realms. From Tim Hetherington’s images of the banal to Boushra Almutawakel’s series of home interiors entitled “Strata” (2007), this exhibition, sponsored by the British Council, features eight lens-based artists (five from the Middle East and three from the United Kingdom) who impart different approaches to understanding the complex nature of the Middle East through their interactions with the region’s architecture and the people who inhabit it.

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What might it mean for artists to claim historical modernisms as source material or as a field for research? If the conspicuous increase in such “sub-modernist” practices marks a shift in the protocols of appropriation, it also reads as an involution of modernist aesthetics and modernism’s self-reflexivity. This odd crossing suggests that the relation between artistic modernism and post-modernism––and between cultural modernity and postmodernity––is much more unstable than often thought. Such problems have regained their pertinence in light of a recent revival of modernist aesthetics. Following the 2007 “documenta,” the high-profile curators Nicolas Bourriaud, Sabine Breitwieser, and Sabine Folie have all sought to test that exhibition’s hypothesis that modernity somehow forms “our antiquity.” The simultaneity of these responses indicates something more than curatorial groupthink, prompting the question, “Why now?”

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Art from Africa has been given short shrift in the United States and Europe until recently. Despite shows at Houston Fotofest in 1998, Noorderlicht in 2000, Snap Judgments at the International Center for Photography in 2006, and major international surveys curated by Okwui Enwezor (Dokumente 11, 1998–2002) and Simon Njami (Africa Remix 2004), photography from Africa—even post-Apartheid South Africa—has been largely overlooked by the global art community. With the exception of Zwelethu Mthethwa, most South African photographers known outside of the country have been white men such as David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, William Kentridge, Guy Tillim, and American-born Roger Ballen.

In the fifteen years since South Africa has emerged from Apartheid, its rigid structures of order and classification have given way to a new and more inclusive multicultural system, which has sparked remarkable development across all aspects of artistic expression. A small but provocative show in England at the Djanogly Art Gallery at the Lakeside Arts Centre University of Nottingham-Trent, “Life Less Ordinary: Performance and Display in South African Art,” curated by Anna Douglas, brought the diversity and energy of the South African art scene to the fore.

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“Pearl of the Snowlands: Buddhist Printing at the Derge Parkhang,” featured at the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts, is the first presentation in the United States of books and prints from the Tibetan Derge Parkhang printing temple. Along with vibrant and colorful examples of Tibetan woodblock printing, extensive color photographs and ethnographic video offer viewers an unprecedented opportunity to study the historical, cultural, and religious implications of this distinctive printing method. Patrick Dowdey, curator of Wesleyan University’s Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies; Clifton Meador, artist and Director of Columbia College’s MFA program in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts; and Padma’tsho of the Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu conducted three years of field research in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in what is now western Sichuan, to prepare this exhibition.

The exhibition attests to the remarkable beauty of Derge Parkhang printing as well as its long and tumultuous history—pointing especially to times when this Parkhang’s future hung in the balance. Early struggles for leadership and the repression of Tibetan religious expression under the rule of the Chinese Communists in the 1950s left many of the Parkhang destroyed throughout Tibet. A Derge communist party official undertook an ad hoc preservation effort to catalog, store, and protect the Derge Parkhang’s woodblocks against future damage by turning it into a medical dispensary, making a later resurgence of printing possible. The Derge Parkhang reopened in the 1980s as the printing temple it is today.

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The Third International Center for Photography (ICP) Triennial is a survey exhibition that attempts to redefine how the idea of fashion is interpreted. Entitled “Dress Codes,” the exhibition is a culmination of a year of fashion-related shows at ICP that included such historical and contemporary exhibitions as “Avedon Fashion 1944–2000,” “Edward Steichen: In High Fashion,” “The Condé Nast Years 1923–1937,” and “Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now.” “Dress Codes” is also ICP’s third triennial exhibition—their way of bringing together a diverse group of international artists under one specific theme. Unlike other venues that try to include multiple mediums in biennials (e.g., the Whitney or Venice), ICP limits the type of work shown to photography and video. That definition must now include the catch-all “multi-media/new-media” terminology and in “Dress Codes” new media is represented through a project by Cao Fei that takes place in Second Life. It is evident that there are historical precedents for all the artists chosen, making it necessary to identify a common trajectory through time in order to make connections between old and new. While the critique of an exhibition is not necessarily about tracing influence, no one works in a vacuum. The political nature of much of the work is one of the most daring and striking aspects of the exhibition. To favor content over aesthetics is rare, and the curators of this exhibition were adamant that much work speak to the political and social issues of nations while perhaps using the guise of “fashion” to do so. The range of work is as expansive as the uses of the mediums. One challenge with a large group exhibition is how to allot space and how to justify the discrepancy of the number of works shown by each artist. Some artists are given whole rooms or walls, while others are represented by a single work. How is it possible to evaluate a single piece by an artist like Barbara Kruger or Stan Douglas when it is seen in relation to a suite of works by artists including Valérie Belin, Olga Chernysheva, or Miyako Ishiuchi? Nonetheless, the organizers of the exhibition should be commended for the diversity of their choices. Citing statistics does not change the quality of the work on view; however, it is important to note that there are more women than men among the thirty-four artists, and eighteen countries are represented.

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It is a pivotal point in Iran’s political and cultural history. As Hamid Dabashi puts it in a recent Al Ahram article, “What is happening in Iran is a ‘revolution,’ though not in a mundane politics of despair but in form, in language, in style, in decorum, in demeanour, in visual and performative sublimity.”¹ Judging from the show of green in support of the Iranian people at the Venice Film Festival—where Hana Makhmalbaf’s Green Days, which documents the 2009 elections, was added to the program at the last minute—Iranian filmmakers will play an important role in the future of cinema. Three recent books address questions of politics and film in Iran, and each provides a useful angle of analysis, though Negar Mottahedeh’s Displaced Allegories puts forth a more careful deployment of film theory and more illuminating readings than the sweeping overviews in Hamid Reza Sadr’s Iranian Cinema and Hamid Dabashi’s Masters and Masterpieces.

Dabashi’s Masters and Masterpieces seems to promise auteur criticism, but is more deeply guided by Dabashi’s project of historicizing Iran’s encounter with colonial European modernity. Like his previous work, Iran: A People Interrupted (2007), Masters and Masterpieces provides a rich account of Iranian literary and intellectual history. Dabashi covers twelve directors, beginning with the poet Forough Farrokhzad and concluding with Jafar Panahi. Each of these chapters places a key film in its literary and political context, often pairing filmmakers with their literary collaborators—Dariush Mehrjui with psychiatrist and author Gholam Hosayn Sa’edi, Bahman Farmanara with surrealist writer Houshang Golshiri, and Ebrahim Golestan, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Bahram Beyza’i’s film careers within their own literary work.

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Over the past twenty years, several significant books have been published that discuss Asian American media arts. Moving The Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts (1991, edited by Russell Leong) offered a broad overview of Asian American filmmaking, with articles by historians, critics, and filmmakers. Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism (2000, by Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu) provided a critical and analytical context for the field. Peter X. Feng’s various books, including Identities In Motion: Asian American Film and Video (2002), have further explicated important issues in Asian American media.

It’s noteworthy, however, that three books have been released in the past few years that deal with Asian American media arts production, with each book taking a very different approach to discussing Asian American media. These recent publications make important contributions to the scholarship in the growing field of Asian American media arts.

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Every time a critic reviews two books simultaneously, it’s a love triangle—or maybe I’ve just been watching too much film noir. In the case of two recent books from the agreeably noir-happy editors at Rutgers University Press, readers finds themselves torn between a sweet, normative, brunette historical survey (Wheeler Winston Dixon’s Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia [2009])—and an obsessive, pathological, crazy redhead of an argument (Vincent Brook’s Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir [2009]). Brook is the better writer, and Driven to Darkness the better book but, as in film noir—all those doom-laden, black-and-white-but-mostly-black crime stories that suddenly appeared on American screens in the 1940s—even a relatively mousy second lead like Dixon can sometimes exhibit a self-destructive scarlet streak.

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