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Art, History, and Criticism
It can seem as if recent changes in how we learn do little more than facilitate a quantitative randomness. But the centrality of the Internet to intellectual work has made visible one under-recognized and revolutionary truth: the collective nature of … READ MORE
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City after Fifty Years’ Living: L.A.’s Differences in Relation
It’s not about the piece but about how the pieces fit together. It’s about taking something that already exists, and making something special. —Ice Cube A marketing triumph, Pacific Standard Time has been responsible for a series of promotional videos, … READ MORE
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City of Angles
Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, eds. West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 448 pp., 92 color ills. $120, $39.95 paper Chris Kraus. Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the … READ MORE
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In Print
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, … READ MORE
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The Binder and the Server
Lackeys Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve. —Gilles Deleuze At first a convenience, then quickly a conundrum: Of course we … READ MORE
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Fête in Venice
Hiroko Ikegami. The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 288 pp., 87 color ills. $29.95 Hiroko Ikegami’s The Great Migrator, which toward the end quotes Homi Bhabha on the subjects … READ MORE
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Reconstruction
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 … READ MORE
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Experimentation and Tradition: The Avant-Garde Play Pierrot Lunaire by Jikken Kōbō and Takechi Tetsuji
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 … READ MORE
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Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art
First staged in the main railroad station in Hamburg in 2002, the Leipzig version of Radio Ballet was performed the following year. Subtitled “Übung in nichtbestimmungsgemäßem Verweilen,” or “Exercise in Lingering Not According to the Rules,” the piece gathered people in the Leipzig station for a group radio listening experience. Using handheld radios, people listened to LIGNA’s critique of the normative ordering of public space … READ MORE
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Thek’s “As If”
“What is alive cannot signify—and vice versa.”[1. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 146.] Roland Barthes’s pithy thesis from his seminal essay “The Reality Effect” (1968) reveals what might be called the vitalist basis of modernist indeterminacy. Countless artists in the 1960s … READ MORE
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