CAA News Today

The Fall 2011 issue of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly of modern and contemporary art, was published and mailed in late December. A benefit of CAA membership, the journal is sent to those individual members who elect to receive it and to all institutional members.

The issue opens with a state-of-the-field essay by Krista Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States.” The third of four Centennial essays commissioned with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Thompson’s study offers an extraordinary range of reference and comprehensive citations that suggest it will be highly useful to historians, students, and artists alike. The art historian Amelia Jones organized a forum for the issue, “Performance, Live or Dead,” with texts by the artists Ron Athey, Sharon Hayes, and William Pope.L, the historians Sven Lütticken and Branislav Jakovljević, and the curators Sophia Yadong Hao and Helena Reckitt. Each writer considers the phenomenon of reenactment, which has been prominent in the performance art of recent years.

The cover essay, Miwako Tezuka’s “Experimentation and Tradition: The Avant-Garde Play Pierrot Lunaire by Jikken Kōbō and Takechi Tetsuji,” examines the 1955 collaboration of vanguard visual and performing artists in Tokyo on a staging of Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire. Tezuka sees the production, little known in the West until now, as a major catalyst in the reinvigoration of new arts following destitution and stagnation in postwar Japan.

A final feature considers broadcast radio as a medium for public art. Sarah Kanouse’s “Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art” explores works by Jon Brumit, Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, and the collective LIGNA to emphasize the surprising ways in which they treat radio as a participatory, two-way medium. The Art Journal website includes audio and video documentation that complements the printed piece.

The Reviews section includes Lisa Florman’s assessment of the Guggenheim exhibition catalogue Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–36; Jaleh Mansoor on Rosalyn Deutsch’s Hiroshima after Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War; and Lara Weibgen’s analysis of Boris Groys’s History Becomes Firm: Moscow Conceptualism. Available both in print and online is Robert Slifkin’s review of two recent books and an exhibition on the artist Paul Thek.