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.
Category: Texts + Documents
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.
Decentering Land Art from the Borderlands: A Review of Through the Repellent Fence
The 2017 film Through the Repellent Fence looks at Postcommodity’s practice and its relation to and divergences from Land art traditions. Emily Eliza Scott explores the film and the role of art along the US-Mexico border.
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.
In Submission
By Ryan Kuo
“As platforms from Submittable to Snapchat streamline personal publishing into drag-and-drop gestures,” writes Ryan Kuo, “the work being submitted becomes not the work, but a signpost redirecting us to a semblance of the work, subject to Terms and Conditions.” “In Submission” is the first of a three-part series by writer and artist Ryan Kuo for Art Journal Open.
Communing with Dore Ashton
By Michael Corris
A tribute to Dore Ashton, “one of the most energetic, widely published, and politicized American writers on art, and one of the chief proponents of the artists of the New York School (she decried the label Abstract Expressionism).” Michael Corris shares his remembrances of Dore Ashton as well as the audio and transcribed text from their 2011 conversation about Ashton’s experiences with the New York art world in the 19650s and 1960s. Alfredo Jaar’s film, Dore Ashton, you know (2015), and photographs by Madeline Djerejian and Polly Bradford-Corris are also presented here.
To Record, to Interpret, to Comment
By Anna Craycroft
In “To Record, to Interpret, to Comment,” Brookyn–based artist Anna Craycroft asks readers to reconsider how we come to know what we think we know about the history of modernist photography and the photographer Berenice Abbott, which draws from Craycroft’s extensive research into Abbott’s writings, photographs, letters, inventions, and other archival materials.
Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Three, 2013
By Natilee Harren
In “Episode Three, 2013,” Natilee Harren looks at artist Karl Haendel’s practice of appropriation within the context of today’s image culture. This is the third and final part of her essay, “Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation.”
Response to Natilee Harren’s “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Three, 2013”
By Nate Harrison
Nate Harrison responds to “Episode Three, 2013,” the third and final part of Natilee Harren’s essay, “Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation.”
Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Two, 2012
By Natilee Harren
In “Episode Two” of her three-part essay, “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation,” Natilee Harren explores appropriation, artistic heritage, and medieval suits of armor through the context of an encounter between Karl Haendel and an artist of an earlier generation, Robert Longo.
Response to Natilee Harren’s “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Two, 2012”
By Nate Harrison
Nate Harrison responds to “Episode Two, 2012,” the second part of Natilee Harren’s essay, “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation.”
Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode One, 2000
By Natilee Harren
In Natilee Harren’s three-part essay series on issues of appropriation and artistic heritage, she examines episodes in the work of the Los Angeles–based artist Karl Haendel. In “Episode One,” Harren looks closely at Haendel’s Knight’s Heritage, 1963 (2001), which he made as a graduate student, and how it relates to the career and work of the sculptor Anne Truitt (1921–2004). Haendel made his work, a reconstruction of a 1963 work by Truitt, based on photographs, without ever having seen the Truitt sculpture itself.
Response to Natilee Harren’s “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode One, 2000”
By Nate Harrison
Nate Harrison responds to “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode One” by Natilee Harren.
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?
The New Geography: Earth Music and Land Art, Version 2.0; Comparison #2
By Mike Maizels
Mike Maizels examines Shawn Brixey’s Epicycle (2000) and Robert Smithson’s Pointless Vanishing Point (1967) in the second installment of The New Geography: Earth Music and Land Art, Version 2.0.
The New Geography: Earth Music and Land Art, Version 2.0
By Mike Maizels
The apologists for “Big Data” seem to be everywhere these days. In forums ranging from TED talks to marketing campaigns, we are now being bombarded by the just-on-the-horizon possibilities of Total Information. It is no surprise that a particular articulation of these ideas has also surfaced in the world of contemporary art practice.
Administered Occupation: Art and Politics at the 7th Berlin Biennale
By Olga Kopenkina
In one of his best-known videos, the artist Artur Zmijewski is seen trying to persuade a former Nazi concentration camp prisoner to “renew” the number tattooed on the man’s forearm. In another film, Berek, naked adults play a game of tag in the gas chamber. But it is not the controversy about Zmijewski’s works that prompted his appointment as curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale, which took place at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Kunst Werke) and various locations in Berlin April 27–July 1, 2012.
OCCUPOLOGY, SWARMOLOGY, WHATEVEROLOGY: the city of (dis)order versus the people’s archive
By Gregory Sholette
The archive, with its icy temperature and motionless repose, may seem like an unlikely place to begin thinking about Occupy Wall Street (OWS), a dynamic and still-unfolding phenomenon whose precise nature appears impossible to determine, let alone file away like a stack of dog-eared documents.
Art Journal at Fifty
This is the second essay the College Art Association has published entitled “Art Journal at Fifty.” The first, by CAA … More
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.