Review

Wor(l)ds: An Eclipse

Reading “Art and its Worlds” sent Michal B. Ron on a journey in time and space between anarchist art collectives, various languages, multidirectional cartographies, and strategies of creating publics for art.

Local Photography

Why wasn't the work of local photographers being taught at Bezalel Academy's photography department, in its various iterations over the years? Did local photography, dealing with the connection between people and place, exist? Hagai Ulrich examines the history of local photography following the publication of Noa Sadka's book, Photographic Truth is a Natural Truth – a Chronicle of a Photography Department.

Available in Audio

The Art of Art Writing

“What it Means to Write About Art features conversations with writers who average three decades of experience turning phrases that go to press with a bold, uninhibited passion for art.” Matt Hanson reviews Jarrett Earnest’s recent book, a collection of interviews with prominent art writers such as Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, and Yve Alain Bois.

 

 

Resurrection After All: Russian Cosmism as an Intellectual History Project

Russian Cosmism is the subject of the widely-exhibited film trilogy by Anton Vidokle, which traces, or better, resurrects the presence of Cosmist ideas in post-Soviet art, engineering, and architecture. Alma Mikulinsky reviews the films' installment in an artist-run space in Toronto, as well as the theoretical corpus that has been developed around the subject in the last four years.

Home Goods

A carpet made of concrete, a ripped duvet, and toy soldiers scattered across a single bed. East of Elsewhere's “While You Were Sleeping” housed a collection of domestic furnishings distorted and deconstructed to reflect the consequences of conflict seeping into everyday life.

 

Returning to Accra: Between Nina Simone, Ama Ata Aidoo, Fassbinder, and the Cockettes

Moving across New York and San Francisco, Paris and Munich, Accra and Lagos, artist and scholar Malik Gaines’s Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible offers a lively and affirmative account of stage, dress, film and television, and music performance. Saadi Nikro reviews Gaines’s recently published book, discussing its many intersections of race, theatricality, subjectivity, and sexuality.

 

Obvious Artifice

"Pre-Israeli Orientalism: A Photographic Portrait", written by Dor Guez, focuses on a photographic genre from the early decades of the twentieth century as a local, unique, and complex case of visual Orientalism. Hagai Ulrich reviews the book and suggests broadening the conversation through the values and characteristics of performance art.

In Search of Critical Curating

In light of the recent criticism of documenta 14 and the Venice Biennial, Noah Simblist returns to the book/magazine issue “Curating Critique,” to comment on whether and where curating and criticality might meet today.

Mobilizing Stills

 “The work of the photojournalists’ collective Activestills does not settle for reflecting the grim reality by providing representations of it, but offers a more active mode of photography that joins the protests of the struggling communities being photographed.” Nadeem Karkabi reviews the recently published book that covers a decade of Activestills’ collective photo-activism.

An Expert Testimony

In Eyal Weizman’s new book, the reader joins the author as he hovers over contested territories in the Middle East, follows him as he traces the histories, ideologies, slippery borders, technologies, and narratives involved in the State-inflicted marginalization and displacement of the Bedouin inhabitants of the Negev desert, in Southern Israel. Rotem Rozental reviews “The Conflict Shoreline,” as well as Weizman’s methodology of forensic visual culture research.

Capitalist Realism: Then and Now?

In the current post-Occupy disillusionment, where the art world is dominated by commercial interests, could the term “Capitalist Realism” offer new strategy for change? Alma Mikulinsky reviews ARTMargins’s special issue on Capitalist Realism.

The Land of Widows

Doris Salcedo addresses the collective trauma related to totalitarian regime in Colombia. Gabriela Vainsencher writes about the artist’s first American retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City