CAA News Today

“Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South,” by Geeta Kapur, the distinguished art critic, challenges readers of Art Journal to reconsider, reclaim, and rethink the idea of the avant-garde. The text by the Delhi–based Kapur appears for the first time in the Spring 2018 issue of the journal, along with responses from the scholars Saloni Mathur and Rachel Weiss.

Also featured in the recently published issue are two projects by artists whose works provide illusions of motion. For The Virtual Immigrant, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew created a flip-motion lenticular card, inserted in each copy of the journal, which reveals two interlaced portraits of a young call center worker in India, one image in the casual Western address she wears at work, where she speaks in an acquired American accent, the other in the traditional Indian clothing she wears on more formal occasions. Matthew’s project features multiple portraits of three other call center workers; by calling a toll-free number (844-984-7882) on the back of the card, readers can hear short recordings in which the workers speak about the two cultures they inhabit in the course of their lives.

In his project Material Motion, Eric Dyer exhibits works from the last dozen years based on the zoetrope, a form of animation devised in the nineteenth century. Stills featured on the cover and interior pages of the journal show the evolution of the idea in the artist’s hands, first in spinning sculptures that reveal dozens of tiny animated details—cyclists zooming through an urban landscape; umbrellas furling, unfurling, and passing through rows of people and other umbrellas. Dyer further extended the zoetrope principle in numerous other animated pieces, including two DIY pieces that Art Journal readers can complete with a record turntable and a smartphone app.

The issue features three long-form scholarly essays: the curator Luigia Lonardelli on the unfolding of the 1973 Contemporanea, a massive multidisciplinary exhibition staged in an underground parking lot in Rome; Nika Elder on the repeated appearance of a seemingly simple shift dress in the 1980s–90s photographs of Lorna Simpson, a garment closely examined here for the first time; and Steven Jacobs on a 1960 film by Luc de Heusch in which René Magritte extended his artistic project through cinematic means, gnomically restaging some of his best-known paintings in his home.

The Reviews section opens with Joe Madura’s assessment of the exhibition and catalogue for Art, AIDS, America, with a special focus on the final iteration of the traveling show in Chicago. The section continues with reviews of Amy Bryzgel’s Performance Art in Eastern Europe (reviewed by Adair Rounthwaite), Jenni Sorkin’s Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (by Glenn Adamson), and Jane McFadden’s Walter De Maria: Meaningless Work (by Amanda Boetzkes).

CAA sends print copies of Art Journal to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members regardless of their print subscription choice.

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