Author: AJ Open

The New Geography: Earth Music and Land Art, Version 2.0; Comparison #3

by Mike Maizels

As the first pair of artists in this series examined the semantics of local places, and the second explored the possibility of picturing the world in totality, both artists in the final pairing investigate the question of geographic epistemology—how do the materials facts of the external world become the objects of systematic human understanding?

New Realisms in the 1960s

By Jaimey Hamilton

The term nouveau réalisme, or new realism, has long been tied to the specific claims made by the critic Pierre Restany about the Paris-based art group he promoted. Restany convinced Arman, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, Martial Raysse, Jacques de la Villeglé, Raymond Hains, and François Dufrêne to sign on initially, and then added César, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Gérard Deschamps, Mimmo Rotella, and Christo.

City after Fifty Years’ Living: L.A.’s Differences in Relation

By Malik Gaines

A marketing triumph, Pacific Standard Time has been responsible for a series of promotional videos, slickly produced, that pair an honored artist with a Southern California celebrity. The shining success among these original works is the pairing of the late design team Ray and Charles Eames with the rapper and actor Ice Cube.

The Hour Blew

By Amy Granat

The digital form still feels new to me, and slightly intangible when I use it. Nevertheless, I use it constantly—though its workings remain unclear. That confusion can be liberating. It creates layers and dimensions I don’t understand and cannot visualize. If I try, I see free-floating motion with no hard edges.

In Print

By Katy Siegel

At my first meeting as editor-in-chief, the Art Journal Editorial Board learned that due to fallout from the financial crisis of 2008–9, CAA could not afford to publish the journal as a quarterly—there would only be three issues in 2010, with reduced color and page count. It turns out that printing a magazine is, as these things go, a luxury.

The Binder and the Server

By Triple Canopy

At first a convenience, then quickly a conundrum: Of course we would publish on the internet. We came of age with the medium, it was our generation’s default. Plus, financially speaking, it remained—and remains, for now—a wheat-paste endeavor: nine dollars a month to hold down a domain name.

Fête in Venice

By Seth McCormick

Hiroko Ikegami’s The Great Migrator, which toward the end quotes Homi Bhabha on the subjects of postcolonial mimicry and hybridization, is itself something of a hybrid: part traditional monograph, part Foucauldian genealogy of contemporary art in the age of globalization.

Mining the Postwar Japanese Vanguard: Miwako Tezuka Speaks with Doryun Chong

By Miwako Tezuka and Doryun Chong

I specialize in contemporary Japanese art, which basically means post-1945. While doing some ground research, I realized that in the history of post-1945 Japanese art, most research was done on Gutai in the 1950s in the Kansai area, the western region of Japan, and I noticed this gap on the activities in Tokyo.

Reconstruction

By Katy Siegel

For several days in 2000, William Pope.L sat enthroned on a towering toilet, contemplating and quite literally consuming The Wall Street Journal, dusted with white powder and surrounded by the great American fluids—milk and ketchup. This performance grew from an earlier 1991 version, staged on the street, and the artist has reenacted the performance several times since, most recently at the New Museum in New York in 2010.

Experimentation and Tradition: The Avant-Garde Play Pierrot Lunaire by Jikken Kōbō and Takechi Tetsuji

By Miwako Tezuka

During the 1950s, after the devastating defeat in World War II, Japan exerted itself to regain political and economic confidence. Arts and culture played a key role in the country’s recovery: the image of a belligerent nation in the recent past needed to be replaced by a new impression of Japan as a peaceful nation of culture; the people were yearning for a return of their cultural life, or simply, entertainments; and, released from the straitjacket that suppressed free expression, artists quickly resumed their creative activities.

Making Time

Time is passing quickly; as I write this, I realize that I am more than halfway through my tenure as editor-in-chief of Art Journal.

Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum

By Rebecca Zorach

In the summer of 1968, as the Democratic National Committee prepared to roll into Chicago, the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art was entering into an unusual partnership—an “experimental friendship”—with an organization called CVL, Inc. What’s remarkable about this organization was that it was the new incarnation of a notorious street gang known as the Vice Lords.

Craft Class

By Sheila Pepe

By the time Rozsika Parker published Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine in 1984, the following overtly feminist “stitched” works had already been made: Faith Wilding’s Womb Room, 1972; Harmony Hammond’s Presence V, also made in 1972; Faith Ringgold’s Zora and Fish, 1975; and Judy Chicago’s monumental Dinner Party, 1979—for which she employed extremely traditional fiber and ceramic craft techniques.

Excerpts from the Graphic Novel !Women Art Revolution—A Secret History

By Lynn Hershman Leeson

I was a graduate student in Berkeley, California, during the tumultuous 1960s era of the Free Speech Movement. I felt an urgency to capture that moment, so, with a borrowed camera, I shot some of the people who were coming through my living room. Even though they included well-known people such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Phil Ochs, I concentrated on the stories of the yet-unknown women who were struggling to become artists.

Race to the Finish

By Katy Siegel

This is the first issue of Art Journal published in 2011, CAA’s Centennial year. We will mark the occasion throughout the year, helped by scholars and artists and a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Our website launched in February, in response to the changing nature of art writing and publishing, and to the wish to attend to time-based and new media art.

Charles and Ray Eames in India

By Saloni Mathur

A photograph of the living room of the Eames house in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles has proven rather puzzling to historians of design. It depicts the famous Case Study House as full of exotic collectibles. Hopi kachina dolls, seashells, craft objects, silk textiles from Nepal and Thailand, and elaborately patterned rugs from Mexico and India all crowd and assault their modernist frame.

InterAct: a reenacted interview

If the world’s a stage, then Liz Magic Laser becomes its director and all passersby are forced to perform. In 2009 Laser staged chase; the following year she produced Flight: in both works, action was registered on video and video begat action. To produce Interact, this project for Art Journal, Laser and her cast met at the East River Park Amphitheatre on two mornings last autumn: the first time to talk in the bleachers and the second time to relive the first conversation on stage.

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By Paul Chan

On the occasion of the upcoming release of the multimedia e-book version of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A field Guide (co-published by Badlands Unlimited and Creative Time Books), Paul Chan writes about some of the secrets hidden in plain sight within the maps and notes that make up the documentation of this multi-faceted work.

David Wojnarowicz: Against His Vanishing

By Steven Dubin

David Wojnarowicz was thrust into the national spotlight in 1989 when the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded its financial support for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, curated by Nan Goldin for Artists Space.

Soul-Beating

By David Reed

I was a student at the New York Studio School during the fall of 1966 and spring of 1967. The school was then located in a loft building on the northeast corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street. Draft deferments during the Vietnam War were not granted to students attending an art school, especially an unaccredited one like the Studio School.

Lee Lozano, Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967–70

By Lauren O’Neill-Butler

“HISTORY DRAGS.” Of the many shrewd observations and witticisms that Lee Lozano (1930–1999) recorded in her notebooks, this one strikes deepest when considering the revival of interest in her work. Of course, we’ll never know her opinion on the widespread, international attention that has been lavished on her art and life over the last decade.

A Baker’s Dozen from the Archives

To complement Howard Singerman’s comprehensive and insightful overview of Art Journal’s rather eccentric history, we’ve asked the editorial board and a few friends to pick their favorite articles, essays, reviews, and artists’ projects from issues past. Some feature familiar names attached to much-cited touchstones, while others, we hope, will come as a surprise.