Issue #05
April 2009
With:
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Michael Baers, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Carol Yinghua Lu, Metahaven, Simon Sheikh, and Sean Snyder
It’s worthwhile to question the field of art from time to time, to demand to know its basic motives and intentions. Where is all this production actually heading? How do we locate the work of the work, as it were?
But finding a resolution or consolidating art’s meaning into some form of criteria is probably not the point. Perhaps it makes more sense to simply continue asking, in as many ways as possible, the question of what art should do, and how it might do it. These questions can…
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7 Essays
April 2009
For my Night School seminar that took place at the New Museum in New York in October 2008, I invited Avery Gordon and Tom Keenan to each have conversations in Whole Foods, a huge organic supermarket around the corner from the New Museum. The original plan had been to hold the entire seminar there instead of in the museum’s auditorium, but this plan failed when the supermarket refused to grant us permission. Instead, we held our conversations there and documented them using wireless…
“Identity, please!”
In Europe, the past has always been much better than the present. Those who see European identity diluted, its legacy erased—public places smattered with graffiti and covered with advertising, names forgotten, classical languages unlearned, French and German replaced by broken English—are concerned that all that was ever good about Europe may be bound to transform beyond recognition. But their lament, however justifiable, disregards the fact that the meaning of…
The essay revisited in this month’s column comes from the early 1990s, an often overlooked and misunderstood period of transition, now regarded as merely what happened after the Wall fell and before the triumphalism of Brit Art, the aestheticization of relationality, and the subsequent (re)introduction of art as lifestyle and market values. It was, however, a much more ambiguous and ambitious time, during which artists and cultural producers from around the world attempted to localize…
Good evening, I’m in charge of security for El Al, do you speak Hebrew?
In the art world, people don’t entirely know what they are talking about. They ask a lot of questions. It’s not that people don’t know what they already know, but rather that they want to know something more in order to do the next thing—and somehow get it right. That’s enough of a reminder that you might have something to say, and that at some point it might make sense. It is in fact those who ask questions who…