Sarah Kanouse, Jeremy Liu, Catherine Morris, and Mimi Thi Nguyen seek 500-word responses from communities of art-making, scholarship, and exhibition practice regarding public funding for the arts in an environment of heightened scarcity and competitiveness
Scholar Suzaan Boettger traces the generative interplay between science-fiction author Brian Aldiss’s novel Earthworks and the Land art practice of Robert Smithson
Caitlin Masley-Charlet sits down with artist Elisabeth Smolarz to discuss Smolarz’s recent residencies and projects, and the importance of failure, artistic community, and cross-pollination between practitioners
Geeta Kapur puts forth a thirteen-part text, “Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South,” with critical responses by Saloni Mathur and Rachel Weiss
Zach Kaiser presents his app CitationBomb, as well as his theory and practice of scrambling and hacking the contemporary metrics of academic success. In “overflowing the commodity market for citations,” Kaiser questions the value systems we assign to knowledge production and consumption
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
Sara Reisman reflects on the ways in which artists and institutions consider (or disregard) how individuals with disabilities access their work
Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson sketch the concept of the afrotrope, a term they have developed over the past decade to describe “those recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity”
By Risham Majeed and Elizabeth Rodini
Risham Majeed and Elizabeth Rodini discuss Majeed’s exhibition Made to Move: African Nomadic Design, the museological and curatorial challenges posed by the exhibition’s material, and the possibility of a decolonized museum space
Andrew Yang shares a “transdisciplinary cluster” of works that engage the concept of the Anthropocene. When it comes to climate change, Yang asks, “Which we is responsible, or most at risk? What sorts of people, organisms, and entities does we invite or exclude?”
By A.K. Burns and Melissa Ragain
In this annotated commentary, artist A.K. Burns and art historian and critic Melissa Ragain explore the script, performances, and citations in Burn’s video installation A Smeary Spot (2015), which is the first episode in her five-part Negative Space film cycle
By Nick Herman
Art Journal Open presents Medias Res by artist Nick Herman, which features Herman’s exploration of his artworks and texts related to his interests in static, rastering, layering, and other transmission processes. These interests have led Herman to create two new works to be viewed on Art Journal Open: Comm 1 (2017), which takes the shape of a unique and experimental pop-up GIF experience, and MERROR ERROR TERRIOR (2017), a downloadable image. “Static or noise as a record of transmission becomes its own reward, reflecting its innate complexity and, in the process, some greater truth about its origin.” Herman writes, “To me, the GIF does something similar, capturing the unpredictable rhythms and constituent raster of their source”
