7 Visual Culture

Abstract

This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2017. It is divided into three sections: 1. Surrealist Women; 2. The Aesthetics of Place; 3. Art and Art Writing in Russia and the USSR. The books under review cover a broad range of subjects within their specialities, but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section explores how women, often overlooked in histories of Surrealism, have come to the fore in recent studies (Alyce Mahon and Susanna Greeves's Dreamers Awake and Jennifer L. Shaw's Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun). The second section deals with a popular topic of the past few years, the theme of place-in particular, how artists and designers relate to place and integrate this into their practice (Rachel Adams's Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys, 1967-2017 and Daniel Daou and Pablo Pérez-Ramos's New Geographies, 8: Island). The third and final section looks at how art critics and artists continue to try to understand their place within contemporary Russia, and their past in the USSR (Elena Zaytseva and Alex Anikina's Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing, Margarita Tupitsyn's Moscow Vanguard Art 1922-1992, and Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, and David Morris's Anti-Shows, volume 8: APTART 1982-84).