Issue 27
Summer 2011
Dieter Roelstraete considers the strategy of artist Jef Geys, whose practice attempts an institutional critique from a prosaic and hyper-local perspective. Chris Sharp attempts to deduct an objectifying logic within Geys’s work, explaining his remarkable methodological integrity.
The work of New York-based duo Dexter Sinister may not immediately be considered as territorial or even spatial. However, as demonstrated by their piece A Note on the Type included in the journal, the terrain of Dexter Sinister’s work is the field of criticality and (therefore) of the printed word itself. Writer Saul Anton places their approach within a historical spectrum of criticality and progression; while Anthony Elms provides a ten-point legend towards navigating the ‘space’ between reading and writing in the artists’ work.
Francis McKee and Jean Fisher look at Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas, whose work ranges from entomological observation to social and political emancipation in coherent arcs.
Andrea Zittel’s designs for living use a specific geographical location as a testing site for her living experiments. Steve Rowell discusses the particularities of inhabiting the Southern Californian landscape, and collaborators Lisa Anne Auerbach and Robby Herbst take a road trip, mapping the vernacular architecture of playgrounds as an homage to Zittel’s models for improved—or improvised—living.
Increasingly in the context of exhibitions, publications and collections, methodologies of mapping have emerged as a means of deducting logic from a spatial or ideological terrain. Stephanie Smith’s reassessment of Suzanne Lacy’s 1995 book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art discusses an overlooked history of participatory practices, while Stéphanie Jeanjean’s piece on 1970s French feminist video collectives describes how the spatiality of information exchange became crucial in disseminating new video art. Information exchange, and the validity thereof is unpicked in a historical sense by Michèle Faguet, who considers the fate of East German Marxist-Leninist educators within Phil Collins’s video project marxism today.
Issue 27 can be purchased in bookshops across the UK, Europe and America; find a stockist near you here. For more information on Afterall or to subscribe, visit our website: www.afterall.org.
Afterall Online publishes new content exclusive to our website. Recent posts include George Clark on Cinenova, featuring eight rarely-seen clips of video and film works produced by women, Pedro de Llano’s review of Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back, curated by Georges Didi-Huberman, Andrew McGettigan’s examination of doctoral degrees within the field of art practice, and Anne Tallentire in conversation with Lisa Panting about challenges suggested, through her practice, to spatial, social and political systems.
Afterall Books‘s forthcoming title continues the Exhibition Histories series: Making Art Global (Part 1) discusses the third Havana Biennial in 1989.
In the One Work series, the latest titles are Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect by Bruce Jenkins and Jeff Wall: Picture for Women by David Campany.
Afterall journal is published by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, in editorial and research partnership with M HKA, Antwerp and UNIA arteypensamiento, Seville, and in association with the University of Chicago Press.
