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.
Category: Texts + Documents
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.
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.
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.
The Cost of Precarity: Contingent Academic Labor in the Gig Economy
Kristen Galvin and Christina M. Spiker discuss the adjunctification of the academy and what has been sacrificed by this new paradigm of the gig economy.
Take This Hammer (After Leadbelly): Extended Version
Margo Handwerker and Richard Saxton of the collective M12 Studio offer observations and critiques of the process of applying for and reporting on grants in the United States.
Beyond Survival in Art and Art History: Fifteen Futures Already Alive
Amy K. Hamlin offers fifteen propositions for “thinking otherwise”—a text that serves as a kind of imaginary syllabus asking what the future of art history might look like.
The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda
In a new essay, Winston Kyan considers the extensive body of work of artist Zhang Huan within the histories of Chinese Buddhism, the American art market, durational performance work, and “existence as suffering.”
In the Free Field: Doug Wheeler’s PSAD Synthetic Desert III and Anechoic Histories
Walker Downey explores sound—and the various societal, artistic, and militaristic attempts to eliminate it—through the work of Doug Wheeler, in particular his 2017 exhibition PSAD Synthetic Desert III at the Guggenheim Museum.
Digging into Aldiss’s Earthworks and Smithson’s “Earthworks”
Scholar Suzaan Boettger traces the generative interplay between science-fiction author Brian Aldiss’s novel Earthworks and the Land art practice of Robert Smithson.
To Listen
By Anna Craycroft
In “To Listen,” artist Anna Craycroft considers the role of the voice of the artist and reflects on her process of creating her exhibition Tuning the Room (Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, January 28–April 16, 2017) in relationship to her research into the archives of photographer Berenice Abbott for Craycroft’s exhibition The Earth Is a Magnet (Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, November 16, 2016–March 26, 2017). This is the second installment of Craycroft’s two-part series for Art Journal Open.
Building a Table
By Ryan Kuo
In “Building a Table,” artist and writer Ryan Kuo discusses his use of HTML to construct the data tables in his artist’s project, Tables of Content, and the profound implications that seemingly benign systems of ordering have on society. With an introduction by Art Journal Open’s former web editor, Gloria Sutton.