ArchiveVisual Arts Articles
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Articles
Expanding the Book: An Interview with Badlands Unlimited
Latitudes
Dec 2012
Under the motto “books in an expanded field,” Badlands Unlimited aims to challenge ideas about publishing to encompass everything from art shows curated for the Kindle and iPad to experimental typography and artist e-books. In an interview with Barcelona-based Latitudes, Badlands’ Paul Chan, Ian Cheng, and Micaela Durand discuss their work “embracing every facet of a book’s social life today.”
VA
Articles
Letters to the Army of Three: Andrea Bowers on Abortion, Then and Now
Brooke Kellaway
Dec 2012
In the years before Roe v. Wade passed in 1973, a trio of activists received a flood of letters from people seeking a list of doctors who provided safe abortions. Recognizing the continuing significance of the work of Rowena Gurner, Patricia Maginnis, and Lana Phelan—dubbed the Army of Three—Andrea Bowers began an activist project of her own, carefully copying the letters by hand, word-for-word.
PA
Articles
Synaesthetic Fantasia: David Breskin and Nels Cline on DIRTY BABY
Doug Benidt & Paul Schmelzer
Nov 2012
“A synaesthetic fantasia, DIRTY BABY marries music to pictures, pictures to poems, and poems to music,” writes David Breskin of the new work he’s orchestrated that combines Ed Ruscha’s paintings, music by Wilco’s Nels Cline, and his own poems, written in the ghazal form. In an e-mail exchange, Breskin and Cline tease out the threads of this transglobal, interdisciplinary, multimedia experience.
EC
Articles
Gardening Between Hope and Doom: Fritz Haeg on Edible Estates
Paul Schmelzer
Nov 2012
Confronting a symbol of the American Dream, Fritz Haeg will visit Minnesota in May to plant a garden in an unlikely place. Situated between “simultaneous, equally valid points of doom and hope,” his Edible Estates will turn a suburban front lawn into a vegetable garden—an optimistic, if possibly “ridiculous,” act. His aim: to explore the “fantastic notion of what the city I want to live in looks like.”
VA
Articles
Cindy Sherman: Interview with a Chameleon
Kenneth Baker
Nov 2012
For years, Cindy Sherman tried to lose herself in her work, “literally and figuratively, so that I would never be recognized.” But in recent years, she tells the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker, she’s let go of that pressure to hide. “I didn’t want the challenge of constantly trying to reinvent myself or invent new characters; that shouldn’t be the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
VA
Articles
Homeland Security: Erik van Lieshout Searches for the Iraq War
Brooke Kellaway
Oct 2012
Four years after the Iraq War started, Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout and a friend set out on a mission of their own: to track down evidence of the war. In LA, New Mexico, and, ultimately, Israel, the duo trekked, videotaping their often bawdy encounters at border checkpoints and holy sites. The resulting video, Homeland Security, presents an unsettling and incisive alternate report on war.
VA
Articles
Orbital Geography: Trevor Paglen’s Cave Painting for Space
Paul Schmelzer
Sep 2012
If all goes as planned, the communications satellite EchoStar XVI will launch from Kazakhstan in October and reach a final orbit some 24,000 miles above the equator. On board will be a disk etched with 100 images from Earth, left for future civilizations to discover and decode. In a new interview, Trevor Paglen discusses these “last pictures,” which he dubs a “cave painting from the 21st century.”
VA
Articles
JoAnn Verburg on Newspapers as Portals to the Political
Paul Schmelzer
Sep 2012
JoAnn Verburg has featured newspapers in her photos since 1990, piercing idyllic scenes of her napping or lounging husband with news about poverty, war, and—in a work on view in the exhibition The Living Years—the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a new interview, Verburg discusses how she sees the newspapers as portals into the political, reminding us of the myriad realities coexisting in the world.
VA
Articles
What Can Saddam Teach Us About Democracy?
Paul Schmelzer
Sep 2012
Paul Chan is fully aware how strange it might seem to publish a book on Saddam Hussein’s 1970s speeches about democracy. But as an artist and publisher, Chan found the publication of On Democracy by Saddam Hussein “perversely pleasurable,” “profoundly confusing,” and particularly instructive on the eve of a US presidential election.