CAA News Today

The Winter 2010 issue of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly of modern and contemporary art, has just been published. A benefit of CAA membership, the publication is mailed to those individual members who elect to receive it and to all institutional members.

Included is a collection of essays, called “Land Use in Contemporary Art,” that investigates a new genre of aesthetic practices that redefine and expand on earthworks. Organized by Kirsten Swenson and with texts by Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott, “Land Use” won the 2011 Art Journal Award. In her editor’s introduction, Katy Siegel writes that the above contributors: “eschew the extremely long view taken by Land artists in the 1960s and 1970s…. The more recent generation considered here focuses on a shorter-term history, directly or obliquely addressing modern life’s interaction with nature: airports and the evacuation of rural America, economic injustice in communities along the highway, global tourism and utopia in rural Thailand.”

The Winter 2010 issue also features Kelly Baum’s short essay on Santiago Sierra that includes photographs of the artist’s project, Submission (formerly Word of Fire) from 2006–7, and Jordan Troeller’s exploration of Zoe Leonard’s photographic series, called Analogue. In addition, Chika Okeke-Agulu writes about Who Knows Tomorrow, an exhibition of projects by five African artists, sponsored by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, that were shown in museums across the city. Okeke-Agulu also interviews Zarina Bhimji, a participating artist whose Waiting (2007) appeared in the Hamburger Banhof. Finally, Michel Oren writes about the activities of the USCO Group, a multimedia art collective from the 1960s.

The Winter 2010 issue publishes two artist’s projects: a centerfold by Fabian Marcaccio titled Black Hole $ Paintant and the final installment of Dailies, Kerry James Marshall’s comic for the inside front and back covers. Among the book reviews are Rachel Haidu’s assessment of Christine Mehring’s recent book on Blinky Palermo and Monica McTighe’s analysis of Kate Mondloch’s Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art.

Art Journal offers a pair of texts from the print publication—David Reed’s “Soul-Beating,” on his relationship to Philip Guston, and Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s review of Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967–70—on its new website. In celebration of CAA’s Centennial year, the website also highlights Howard Singerman’s “Art Journal at Fifty,” an essay exploring the history of the publication, and “A Baker’s Dozen from the Archives,” thirteen selections from Art Journal and its predecessors, which you can download as PDFs and read.

The Fall 2010 Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly of cutting-edge art and ideas, has just been published. The issue explores the broad theme of “war and other disasters” in six essays, three artists’ projects, and an interview.

Katy Siegel, Art Journal’s editor-in-chief, observes that the contributors “point to ways in which we are still living in a postwar world, working through the rubble of the atomic bomb and under the shadow of its future use.” David McCarthy writes on David Smith’s Spectres sculptures from the mid-1940s, and a pen-and-ink sketch by Smith graces the issue’s cover. Cécile Whiting’s essay explores early-1960s works by Californian artists who were intrigued by World War II, and Jung-Ah Woo frames On Kawara’s Date Paintings as manifestations of tragedy, violence, and death. Through the lenses of politics, reenactment, and memory, Claire Gilman looks at drawings by Andrea Bowers, Sam Durant, and other contemporary artists.

Two artists’ projects join P-Van, the second comic from Kerry James Marshall’s Dailies series to appear on the inside covers of Art Journal. Walid Raad’s Appendix XVIII: Plates 88–107 obliquely captures three decades of war in Lebanon in letters, script, numerals, indices, and more, set against colored backgrounds. Yun-Fei Ji’s Three Gorges Dam Migration is presented along with photographs and an interview that document the making of the monumental scroll. In an accompanying essay, Jonathan Spence discusses elements of Chinese history, culture, and politics in the scroll. Elsewhere in the issue, Joan Kee theorizes the aesthetic approaches of East Asian artists in “The Curious Case of Contemporary Ink Painting.”

In the Reviews section, Margaret Iversen assesses Douglas Eklund’s catalogue for his exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, and William McManus examines three recent books on the dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer.

A benefit of CAA membership, Art Journal is mailed to those individual members who elect to receive it and to all institutional members.

The Spring–Summer 2010 issue of Art Journal marks the first issue produced by the art historian and critic Katy Siegel, who began work as editor-in-chief in July 2009. Special artists’ projects by Sharon Lockhart and Kerry James Marshall are highlights of this issue, and the magazine also features never-before-published photographs of a project by the cult artist Jack Smith and his collaborator, the renowned avant-garde actress Kate Manheim. Completing the mix are feature essays by Hannah Higgins, Cary Levine, and Martin Patrick, and an interview with the London-based artist Goshka Macuga by Achim Borchardt-Hume.

Katy Siegel, a professor of art history at Hunter College in New York, a contributing editor to Artforum, and author of the forthcoming “Since ’45”: America and the Making of Contemporary Art (Reaktion, 2010), will serve as editor-in-chief of Art Journal for three years. She says of this first issue, “While preserving its integrity as an academic journal, I want to make sure that every issue of Art Journal also represents the vitality and vicissitudes of the real life of art and artists.”

Readers immediately encounter four pages of Kerry James Marshall’s comic Dailies: On the Stroll, placed in the inside front and back covers. Marshall’s bold black-and-white graphics weave together racial politics in the larger society with those of the art world in the first episode of a frankly polemical serial.

Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break Times previews a publication the artist will launch later this year. Working with blue-collar workers throughout the state of Maine, Lockhart conveys the visual aspects of the industrial workplace by means of intriguing objects she has found there: antique postcards and photos, a coffee-cart sign emblazoned on a state map, a labor activist’s painting hanging in the union hall, and more.

Kate Manheim is best known for several decades of performances as the lead actor in Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Jack Smith (1932–1989) blazed through the underground art and film scenes in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, creating films and performances with his coterie of Flaming Creatures. Smith and Manheim collaborated on a project exploring marriage, melodrama, and the Hollywood star Maria Montez. A selection of their atmospheric and amusing photographs is published for the first time ever in the pages of Art Journal, introduced by a beautiful personal essay by the film historian P. Adams Sitney.

The art historian Hannah Higgins has contributed a clear-eyed and moving account of the intertwined careers of her parents, the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, and her relationship to them as both daughter and historian. Martin Patrick considers the present-day implications of the work of another important Fluxus artist, Robert Filliou. Cary Levine reflects on a somewhat sinister body of work by the West Coast artist Mike Kelley, which draws on the themes and techniques of do-it-yourself crafts. And the curator of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Achim Borchardt-Hume, interviews Goshka Macuga about her yearlong installation at Whitechapel that was based on Picasso’s tapestry version of Guernica, presented here with documentation of the artist’s project. This is the first installation of a new feature, “Before and After,” which will expand Art Journal’s engagement with the making of art as well as its social afterlife.

The quarterly Art Journal, published since 1929, is available by subscription to CAA members. Single copies may be purchased by calling 212-691-1051, ext. 204, or by writing to nyoffice@collegeart.org. Art Journal is made possible by a generous grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, CAA membership support, and contributions from individuals and institutions. To make a contribution, please contact Sara Hines at 212-691-1051, ext. 216; or visit www.collegeart.org/support.