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 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.

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.