A Word or Two on Art and Technology

By Charlotte Kent

MAY 2023 | Editor's Message

The words we bring to art intend, at best, to translate the perceptual realm into the linguistic, anchoring sensation through definition. But, as we all know, that often doesn’t occur. The well known essay, “International Art English” by Alix Rule and David Levine skewers that premise, as does Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) nearly forty years earlier, and a decade before that Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” resisted language’s simulacrum of art. So on, down the line. And yet, words also serve to support, promote, highlight, associate, and adore the art they describe.

Jordan Stein’s Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada & Other Pieces

By Maymanah Farhat

MAY 2022 | Art Books

This takes the idea of an artwork that has gone from creation, to destruction, to reanimation as the premise for a book that offers a much-needed glimpse into the ecology of the Bay Area art scene. It presents a template for how documentation and analysis can be used to honor the region’s idiosyncratic art making practices.

Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis

By Jarrod Shanahan and Abby Cunniff

SEPT 2022 | Field Notes

A crumbling strip of asphalt winds through the craggy countryside of eastern Kentucky, striated with power lines sagging in every direction. Wobbly pavement markings and errant skidmarks vanish at a hairpin bend buffered by low guard rails framing a rolling, sparsely tree-spotted expanse of hills. On one side of this road stands a roughly chiseled open coal seam, marking the remnants of a former mine. On the other, a bowed chain link fence capped in razor-wire announces the outer periphery of Otter Creek Correctional Facility. This remarkable image by photographer Jill Frank adorns the jacket of prison scholar Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis (New York: NYU Press, 2022), confronting the reader with the book’s central preoccupations.

How to Get Free of the Rectangle

By Louis Block

MAY 2022 | ArtSeen

Absent any punctuation, How to Get Free of the Rectangle reads as a directive. Decades ago, it might have been a longing question, but now painting’s rectangle has been bent, torn, re-sewn, and looped in on itself, so it might be easy to scoff at the premise and how far removed it is from the radical. But this modest survey accomplishes a small miracle: it justifies painting’s bullish intrusions into other mediums.