We are pleased to announce that react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture is now accepting submissions for spotlight works, feature articles, and book or exhibition reviews that respond to the theme “The Spirit in the Shadow,” to be published in its second volume in January 2022. We seek submissions related but not limited to the spiritual, monstrous, cosmological, or otherworldly with in or as forms of political action or resistance in the fields of art history, architectural history, and visual culture across all historical periods and media.
The broad field of the political is often analyzed in terms of strategy, ideology, and its concrete historical and material circumstances and trajectories. Within the field of art and architectural history, discourse on the political may focus on the aesthetics and materiality of the visual forms accompanying or embodying it, ranging from the style and form of state-sponsored architecture and its role in ideological dissemination to the symbolic material culture of protest movements which mobilize against dominant political structures. Examples include the Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars, which celebrates the resistance of Prussian soldiers and citizens against the French; the patriotic implications of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in its relation to U.S. national buildings; paintings or posters by Palestinian artists like Ismail Shammout which lament and interrogate the conditions of Palestinian exile; or the headscarves worn and photographs carried by the Madres of the disappeared in Argentina and beyond.
Such examples of visual and material culture also commonly include less tangible dimensions, including themes of the spiritual, otherworldly, monstrous, or hauntings. For example, Schinkel’s original proposal for the Prussian monument was a neo-Gothic church, a proposal surviving only in the monument’s central spire; the omission of overt symbolism from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial lends it a shrine- like quality; Shammout’s work registers the haunting nature of dispossession and exile while advocating for global solidarity with the Palestinian crisis; and, as Diana Taylor writes, mothers protesting disappearances in Mexico drew on Catholic tradition to present the photographs of their children as relics in elaborate handmade frames. Whether part of the generative principle of a work’s production, the effect of a set of aesthetic practices, or the unconscious impact of an artist’s ideology on their work, visual and material culture may be marked by spiritual themes “in the shadow” of the political. Such themes are significant in that they may not always be accounted for under a traditional rubric of art historical concerns, or may be treated in isolation without reference to the political dimensions with which they are linked. We seek to rectify this omission by reconsidering the ways in which the political is imbricated with the affective, the generative, and the ethereal, temporal dimensions of the spirit.
We welcome all submissions, but will prioritize those by graduate students from any discipline at any stage of their MA or Ph.D. program, as well as postdoctoral fellows, and early career contingent scholars.