Holland Cotter, an art critic at The New York Times, recently wrote an article called “The Boom is Over. Long Live Art!” I read the article with interest and several of us on the activist art education listserv exchanged reactions. I felt a little silly coming to Cotter’s defense because he hardly needs my defense […]
The Hole
A couple of friends, Damian Duffy and John Jennings, just published a new book, The Hole. Straight from the website of Front 40 Press: “The Hole: Consumer Culture is a science fiction horror story about the buying and selling of race in America, the simultaneous worship and degradation of African Americans in popular culture, and […]
NYC scenes, 2008
On a brick wall by the New Museum on the Bowery. It says “Bring Me Back,” in case you can’t read it. The Silence=Death Project was able to display their activist graphics in the window of the (old) New Museum courtesy of curator Bill Olander. Associated with ACT Up, the graphic has appeared on T-shirts, […]
Martin Puryear at MOMA
In mid-January, we made it to New York City just in time to see the Martin Puryear retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The curators really used the new museum spaces well I thought, with this ladder for Booker T. practically disappearing up into the atrium. Then one could look down on it and […]
From Site to Vision
Not too long ago the women who have been working long and hard on a history of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building put it on the Web. What a gift to all of us to have this e-book! Lucy Lippard wrote the Foreward, Terry Wolverton, one of the editors, wrote the Introduction. Then there are […]
The Inspired Disturbance of All Status Quos
One issue that came up several times during the Political Equator 2 tour was the tiresome question, “Why is this art?” I think Roberta Smith nailed a definition of art in her November 16, 2007, review of Lawrence Weiner ‘s show at the Whitney (“The Well-Shaped Phrase as Art,” New York Times , p. B33): […]
Publico transitorio
The website for the eight-day moving public event between Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana–Political Equator 2— is now online. It looks terrific and represents, in a phenomenal way, the collaborative possibilities of artists, scholars, and designers coming together around issues of common concern.
Chicago. Fig.
Chicago. Fig. These are titles of two books by the photographic team of Adam Bloomberg and Oliver Chanarin. “Chicago” is the name of a cardboard and junk city in the Negev used to train Israeli and US soldiers in milieus that simulate Gaza or a refugee camp. “Fig” includes images of pine forests that have […]
Laurie Long
I just heard that Laurie Long died quite suddenly of heart failure, during treatment for lung cancer, on Thursday, September 13. Laurie is in black in the photo with (L to R) M. Simon Levin, Piotr Adamczyk, and Kevin Hamilton. I remember when Laurie came to my cabin during one of her trips to Champaign-Urbana […]
Slipstreaming
Ryan Griffis recently sent around a link to an article on ctheory. Browsing the links there, I came across this 2005 interview with Christina McPhee. I like her use of “slipstreaming.” Christina McPhee: Thinking about the poetics implied by “between your body and ‘the machine’”: — one wonders if ‘machines’ could be imagined as distributive […]
