Afterall issue 30 out now
Featuring:
Jimmie Durham
Yael Bartana
Eduardo Molinari
ruangrupa
Theaster Gates
Artistic Labour and the New Economy
Afterall is pleased to present issue 30, Summer 2012, which looks at the relationship between institutions and the local.
During the 1990s, the discourse around New Institutionalism called for a more direct relationship between institutions and their different constituencies, as well as more enhanced models of participation. In this issue, we examine what the concrete effects of such rhetoric have been two decades later, both on art and curating. The case studies addressed range from organisations such as the collective ruangrupa in Indonesia, Grizedale Arts in the north of England, and The Artist’s Institute in New York, to art practices that navigate the intersection between place, people, and community, such as those of Jimmie Durham, Yael Bartana, and Theaster Gates.
Jimmie Durham has for many years contested how traditional readings of a place are constructed, showing the bias and contingency in history and geography. In his text, Anders Kreuger discusses Durham’s decades-long practice, while Anthony Huberman reflects on Durham’s show at The Artist’s Institute and the responses it engendered.
In her work, Yael Bartana radically questions the connection between people and place that has been at the heart of Israeli identity. Volker Pantenburg examines her practice, following its move from documentary to her founding of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, and the ramifications of the latter. Teresa Riccardi and Nuria Enguita Mayo look at the practice of Eduardo Molinari, who makes work and political actions under the umbrella of Archivo Caminante, a ‘walking archive’ that exists in a liminal state between bona fide historical archive and fictional artistic project.
Other artists forge a relationship to their communities that is closer to that of the institution. Hesse McGraw, for example, examines Theaster Gates‘s urban regeneration programmes in under-developed Chicago neighbourhoods, assessing how Gates uses the value of his artworks on the market as funding for these projects. The collective ruangrupa both organise exhibitions of their work and put together festivals and a series of networks for self-organised spaces across Indonesia; Nuraini Juliastuti talks to ruangrupa’s director, Ade Darmawan, while David Teh discusses their practice in the context of the Southeast Asian art scene.
Turning to institutions, John Byrne assesses the work of Grizedale Arts, a residency space and commissioning agency that is seeking to reinvigorate John Ruskin’s legacy of politics in aesthetics, while Mari Paz Balibrea looks at the project On Capital and Territory, which used Henri Lefebvre’s writings on social space to examine the impact of the housing bust in southern Spain. Finally, Alberto López Cuenca returns to the history of artistic labour to discuss how we might understand artistic productivity within the New Economy.
Afterall Books is proud to present the third book in the Exhibition Histories series: From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–75. Afterall Books is also very happy to announce that this book is published in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, their new research partner for the Exhibition Histories series, which joins the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Van Abbemuseum.
Kodwo Eshun’s Dan Graham: Rock My Religion and Steve Edwards’s Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems also appear this spring.
Afterall journal is published by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, in editorial and research partnership with M HKA, Antwerp; UNIA arteypensamiento, Seville; and the journal’s new partner the Smart Museum of Art and Open Practice Committee, University of Chicago; and in association with the University of Chicago Press.
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