The Arctic Plants of New York City: An Annotated Bibliography

By James Walsh

I’ve been working since 2008 on a long, complex project centered on plants that grow in both the arctic (I always use the lowercase) and New York City, of which there are a surprising number. Along with identifying and pressing these plants, I’ve been reading eighteenth-century herbals and floras and more recent works on edible plants and botany generally, and have had a particular interest in mental travel and in writers who combine botany and literature.

Leaving Düsseldorf

By Godfre Leung

Godfre Leung reviews Sabine Breitwieser, Laura J. Hoptman, Michael Darling, and Jeffrey D. Grove, Isa Genzken: Retrospective, and the exhibition Isa Genzken: Retrospective; Kathy Halbreich, ed., Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963–2010, and the exhibition Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963–2010; and Elodie Evers, Magdalena Holzhey, and Gregor Jansen, eds., Leben mit Pop and the exhibition Leben mit Pop.

Against Infographics

By Daniel Rosenberg

When design is excellent, graphics reveal data, writes the infographics guru Edward Tufte. Good information graphics allow the reader to see relationships not apparent in data without visual form. In principle, such graphics do not impose interpretations but, by showing relationships, make interpretations possible.

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.

Oral Sadism & The Vegetarian Personality (Approximately)

By Karl Haendel

Artist Karl Haendel has been creating an archive of 35mm slides since 2000, composed of found images and photographs. The approximately 10,000 slides are organized into more than 250 categories and subcategories (from the W section: Wedding Geometry, Weapons, White House, World War I), and some of these slides become the basis for his drawings. Though this archive exists in analogue form, Haendel recognized that the popular GIF format functions in a similar manner to that of the slide projector, and thus created a digital slideshow experience of these source images for Art Journal Open. To view Oral Sadism & The Vegetarian Personality (Approximately), click on the image inside this post to launch the project.