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.
By Katy Siegel
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 earlier 1991 version, staged on the street, and the artist has reenacted the performance several times since, most recently at the New Museum in New York in 2010.
By Miwako Tezuka
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 past needed to be replaced by a new impression of Japan as a peaceful nation of culture; the people were yearning for a return of their cultural life, or simply, entertainments; and, released from the straitjacket that suppressed free expression, artists quickly resumed their creative activities.
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.
By Robert Slifkin
Roland Barthes’s pithy thesis from his seminal essay “The Reality Effect” (1968) reveals what might be called the vitalist basis of modernist indeterminacy.
By Helen Molesworth and Taylor Davis
This conversation took place at the ICA Boston on April 28, 2010. Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA, asked the artist Taylor Davis to interview the then newly appointed chief curator Helen Molesworth.
Time is passing quickly; as I write this, I realize that I am more than halfway through my tenure as editor-in-chief of Art Journal.
By Rebecca Zorach
In the summer of 1968, as the Democratic National Committee prepared to roll into Chicago, the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art was entering into an unusual partnership—an “experimental friendship”—with an organization called CVL, Inc. What’s remarkable about this organization was that it was the new incarnation of a notorious street gang known as the Vice Lords.
By Sheila Pepe
By the time Rozsika Parker published Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine in 1984, the following overtly feminist “stitched” works had already been made: Faith Wilding’s Womb Room, 1972; Harmony Hammond’s Presence V, also made in 1972; Faith Ringgold’s Zora and Fish, 1975; and Judy Chicago’s monumental Dinner Party, 1979—for which she employed extremely traditional fiber and ceramic craft techniques.
In This Issue Katy Siegel, Something Totally Unpredictable, 5 Features Kerry James Marshall, Adrift, Infinity, or Oblivion, from Dailies, Inside…
By Lynn Hershman Leeson
I was a graduate student in Berkeley, California, during the tumultuous 1960s era of the Free Speech Movement. I felt an urgency to capture that moment, so, with a borrowed camera, I shot some of the people who were coming through my living room. Even though they included well-known people such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Phil Ochs, I concentrated on the stories of the yet-unknown women who were struggling to become artists.
By Katy Siegel
This is the first issue of Art Journal published in 2011, CAA’s Centennial year. We will mark the occasion throughout the year, helped by scholars and artists and a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Our website launched in February, in response to the changing nature of art writing and publishing, and to the wish to attend to time-based and new media art.
