Books by Janine Mileaf
Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris
by Leah Dickerman, Dorothea Dietrich, Brigid Doherty, Sabine Kriebel, Janine Mileaf, Michael Taylor, Matthew Witkovsky, Earl Powell
Along with Russian Constructivism and Surrealism, Dada stands as one of the three most significant movements of the historical avant garde. Born in the heart of Europe in the midst of World War I, Dada displayed a raucous skepticism about accepted values. Its embrace of new materials, of collage and assemblage techniques, of the designation of manufactured objects as art objects as well as its interest in performance, sound poetry and manifestos fundamentally shaped the terms of modern art practice and created an abiding legacy for postwar art. Yet, while the word Dada has common currency, few know much about Dada art itself. In contrast to other key avant-garde movements, there has never been a major American exhibition that explores Dada specifically in broad view. Dada--the catalogue to the exhibition on view in 2006 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and The Museum of Modern Art in New York presents the hybrid forms of Dada art through an examination of city centers where Dada emerged: Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York and Paris. Covered here are works by some 40 artists made in the period from circa 1916, when the Cabaret Voltaire was founded in Zurich, to 1926, by which time most of the Dada groups had dispersed or significantly transformed. The city sections bring together painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work.
Relying on dynamic design and vivid documentary images, Dada takes us through these six cities via topical essays and extensive plate sections; an illustrated chronology of the movement; witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of each artist--accompanied by Dada-era photographs.
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Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris
by Leah Dickerman, Dorothea Dietrich, Brigid Doherty, Sabine Kriebel, Janine Mileaf, Michael Taylor, Matthew Witkovsky, Earl Powell
The authoritative volume on the Dada movement, from Berlin to New York Now available in paperback, this lavishly illustrated and astonishingly comprehensive volume stands as the definitive study of the influential but deliberately elusive international Dada movement of the early twentieth century. Organized according to the primary city centers where this shifting, quintessentially avant garde movement emerged, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris features the work of 40 key artists, both infamous and lesser-known, including Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, André Breton, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, to name just a few, in media spanning painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work. Dynamically designed with an uncommon intelligence suited to the complexity of the movement itself, it contains hundreds of reproductions of works which, until the major traveling exhibition of 2005 and 2006 for which this book was originally produced, had for the most part never been seen in one place together. Documentary images, topical essays and an invaluable illustrated chronology of the movement make this volume uniquely essential, along with witty chronicles of events in each city center, a selected bibliography and biographies of each artist, accompanied by Dada-era photographs.
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A Home for Surrealism
Chicago has for decades years been one of the most prominent cities where European surrealism is avidly collected and displayed. However, there has yet to be a scholarly exhibition and catalogue that addresses the local manifestations of this international mode of art. A Home for Surrealism focuses on a select group of painters whose work in the 1940s and ’50s both transformed the domestic and domesticated the surrealist, particularly in Chicago. Working independently, but within a chain of social and artistic relationships, this group explored the interior as a site of projected imagination and fantasy, and the self as the generator of such altered perception. Including contributions by Robert Cozzolino, Adam Jolles, and Joanna Pawlik, the book provides a richly illustrated account of an international movement’s unlikely—but somehow ever so fitting—home in America.
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The Arts Club of Chicago at 100: Art and Culture, 1916-2016
by Janine Mileaf, Susan F. Rossen
Founded in 1916 in the wake of the scandalous Armory Show, the Arts Club of Chicago aimed to present the city with new images, sounds, and ideas. Conceived as an exhibition and social space that would cultivate sophisticated conversations around a range of media, the Arts Club has maintained its core interest in presenting culture “in the making.” Today, it continues to serve as a key venue in Chicago for the presentation of work by the national and international avant-garde, including such artistic luminaries as Sharon Lockhart, Josiah McElheny, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and many more.
This volume addresses the visual art, music, theater, dance, architecture, and literature presented by the Club over its one-hundred-year history with new scholarship by leading writers in each field. Janine Mileaf and Susan F. Rossen offer an in-depth look at the tastemakers of modernism in the city, from Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein to local cultural player Rue Winterbotham Carpenter. In addition, each copy of the book also includes an original artist’s project by Walid Raad. A dynamic exploration of the intertwined histories of the Arts Club and Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago at 100 celebrates both an institution and a city that have remained innovative and forward-thinking throughout the decades.
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Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture)
Product Description
Touch suggests a broad range of physical, intellectual, and emotional connections that serve to undermine the dominance of vision in histories of modernism. By exploding notions of the very nature of art, the artists considered in this beautifully illustrated monograph introduced fundamentally new conceptions of subjectivity and engagement for the modernist era. While offering an entertaining and engaging history of dada and surrealism, Please Touch presents a persuasive argument highlighting the role of “tactility,” which it defines as a decentralized, fragmented, and intimate form of knowing. In this compelling volume, Janine Mileaf offers the first full-length consideration of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and their profound legacy in the transatlantic context of dada and surrealism. This book embraces a broad range of art objects: consumer items such as the urinal and bottlerack that Duchamp “sneaked” into art exhibits; flea-market assemblages fabricated by his interwar avant-garde successors Man Ray, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim, and others; and the bricolage boxes of American surrealist Joseph Cornell. Please Touch is an intriguing exploration of some of the twentieth century’s most important art and artists that will appeal to a broad range of art historians and interdisciplinary scholars.
Review
"Mileaf gives accounts of the varieties of tactility in its art-historical and philosophical variations, and her thoughtfully contextualised and imaginative analyses of the objects are an important contribution to current thinking about them, inflecting the familiar with the unfamiliar."-- "Oxford Art Journal"
Review
“Explicitly looking through a lens inflected by the recent interest in synaesthetic and haptic approaches to visuality, Janine Mileaf’s Please Touch delineates a new history of Dada and Surrealism by focusing on a relation of touch (literal or imagined) evoked by the groups’ found and constructed objects. Among other things, this novel strategy provides a compelling way of rethinking the transition between Dada (with its humorous or aggressive approach to artmaking) and Surrealism (with its turn to the erotic), and between the European arms of these movements and the US-based versions. Mileaf’s book is both lucid and compelling; moving beyond models of art that restrict interpretation to the visual regime by calling upon the sensual effects of the works themselves, Please Touch shifts the framework through which histories of modern art will be told.” (Amelia Jones, Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University)
“In Please Touch, Janine Mileaf directs our focus to the tactile as the necessary sense through which Dada and surrealist artists experienced the object. Even more, she takes tactility as a critical lens through which to re-evaluate long accepted understandings of Surrealism’s ‘bad boys’ (Duchamp, Dalí, Breton, and Cornell) and in turn also opens her analysis to its ‘leading ladies’ (Mary Reynolds, Suzanne Duchamp, Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, and Jaqueline Lamba). In Mileaf’s account, objects became the motor through which ideas about modernity, beauty, the self and other, were constantly being re-imagined in the context of the every day life pressures of history and politics. Her detective work and the new conceptual frames that she creates for Surrealism are lasting contributions—outside of the individual chapters, and her extensive comparative analysis of the artwork, both of which are admirable, it is her time in the archive and her ability to distil from that experience the larger, field-changing questions related to Surrealism and the object that will make this book a lasting contribution.” (Jordana Mendelson, New York University)
About the Author
JANINE MILEAF is an associate professor of art history at Swarthmore College.
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