What happens when an arts bureaucracy steps away from “data-driven” evaluation of its program? Writer Sarah Butler recounts her collaboration with visual artist Nicole Mollett on a unique commission from Arts Council England.
Author: Sarah Butler
Sky Couture: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s BROKER and the Politics of Luxury
David Markus investigates a video work set in a Trump-branded condo and analyzes superluxury living in relation to material culture, consumer desires, and the political inclinations they index.
“Come Out to Show Them”: Speech and Ambivalence in the Work of Steve Reich and Glenn Ligon
Ellen Tani explores how an incidence of police brutality in the Harlem of 1964 is deployed in artworks by musician Steve Reich and visual artist Glenn Ligon.
Traces of Traces: Image Histories in Lebanon
Anneka Lenssen reviews two recent books on photography in Lebanon.
The Future Is Present: Electronic Café and the Politics of Technological Fantasy
In the predigital era, an experiment in community-based virtual network building is launched in Los Angeles. Philip Glahn and Cary Levine uncover the activist collective Mobile Image’s project of 1984, Electronic Café.
The Challenge of a Global Modernism
Edith A. G. Wolfe on two recent studies of “discrepant modernities” in Latin America
Beyond Survival: Concluding Remarks
Sarah Kanouse brings to a close the Beyond Survival series, which probes the effects of sustained precarity, a diminished funding landscape in the arts, and institutional relations to socio-ecological urgencies.
“a salting of sorts”: Salt, Sea, and Affective Form in the Work of Deborah Jack
C. C. McKee examines the materiality and significance of salt in Deborah Jack’s art practice and poetry.
Field_Notes: Amalgams at Field_Notes
In the final entry in a series of contributions, Hannah Star Rogers gathers reflections from Alice Smits and Judith van der Elst on the 2018 convening of the Helsinki-based Bioart Society.
Questions of Identity: Photographic Series by Alicia D’Amico, 1983–86
María Laura Rosa on how Alicia D’Amico’s images of female desire reflect “dissident and destabilizing identities in the heteronormative visual imaginary.” (In English and Spanish.)
Processing and Designing Hyperacusis and Tinnitus
Artist Luca M. Damiani reflects on his creative responses to and interpretations of the hearing conditions tinnitus and hyperacusis.
Speculative Futures: Experimental Radical Projects and the Undercommons of Funding
Using Axis Lab—the Chicago-based interdisciplinary arts organization she helped found—as a case study, Patricia Nguyen explores the intricacies of funding and establishing networks of community support.