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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“What to do with all the stuff?” This is one of many questions posed—and provisionally answered—in the most recent issue of Art Journal, in an extensive multiauthor forum that delves into the complex matter of artists’ estates. “The Politics of Legacy,” guest-edited for the journal by Rachel Middleman and Anne Monahan, comprises contributions by no fewer than twenty-one artists and scholars. The texts include interviews (with, for example, Flavin and Rainer Judd, Mira Friedlaender, and Jane Kallir of Grandma Moses Properties, Inc.) and position papers (by Caroline A. Jones, Michael Corris, and Nancy J. Troy, among others). Central to the forum are three commissioned artists’ projects by Danh Vo (on the estate of Martin Wong), Mimi Gross (the estate of her father Chaim Gross, as well as her own legacy as an artist), and Jill Magid (the contested estate of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán).

Elsewhere in the issue, editor-in-chief Rebecca Brown has selected three essays that deal with upheaval. Nazar Kozak details the interventions by Ukrainian artists during the 2013–14 uprising in Kyiv that brought down the nation’s government—artworks that at times literally became part of the armed barricade in the city’s central square. Sherry Buckberrough conjures the early twentieth-century context in which the Robert Delaunay created singular works with themes of androgyny, gender, and political violence. Sophie Landres explores sexual, corporeal, and musical interventions of the groundbreaking performances of Charlotte Moorman in late-1960s, as the new ideas of feminism reached the larger culture.

The issue marks the debut of reviews editor Kirsten Swenson, whose commissions explore books on Carolee Schneemann, on art in postwar South America, and on the trajectory of the choreographer Simone Forti. “The Prehistory of Exhibition History,” a critical bibliography by grupa o.k. (Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska), completes the section.

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.