The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin by Matthew Biro

University of Minnesota Press

In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I.

Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.”

"Matthew Biro’s spirited account of the cyborg in the Berlin Dada movement reveals how artists imagined new forms of hybrid identity and challenged contemporaries to reflect on their own technologically-mediated lives. Engaging with politics, perception, embodiment, and the urban experience to define what it means to be human, Dada artists developed constellations of questions that remain central to artistic practices today. Brushing history against the grain, as Benjamin urged us to do, Matthew Biro combines formal analysis with critical theory to understand Weimar Germany’s profound cultural legacy." —Maria Tatar, Harvard University

"Impressively well-researched, The Dada Cyborg provides a series of insightful readings of various montage works and activities in order to reconstruct the Dada movement as one with which we—as citizens of a cyborgian age—should be deeply familiar." —Lutz Koepnick, author of Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture

More information + the table of contents:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/biro_dada.html

Ingres: Painting Reimagined by Susan Siegfried

Yale University Press

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) produced a body of work that strongly appealed to his contemporaries while disconcerting them. Even today, the odd qualities of his work continue to fascinate scholars, critics, and artists.

In this handsomely illustrated and elegantly written book, Susan L. Siegfried argues that the strangeness associated with Ingres’s paintings needs to be located in the complex and richly invested nature of the work itself, as well as in the artist’s very powerful—if often perverse—sense of artistic project. She shows that his major re-thinking of pictorial narrative – in his classical literary, historical, and religious subjects – was as central to his achievement as his distinctive rendering of the female figure in classical nudes and portraits. He was engaged in a complex process of giving visual form to narrative, which he did in new and unusual ways that involved him in a close reading of the texts on which he drew, including authors such as Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Dante, as well as religious narratives and stories about medieval and early modern French history.

For more information:
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300148831