When is ‘contemporary? The arrival of a new editor always invokes a consideration of a magazine’s history and its accomplishments, and a necessary process of re-visioning. In C’s more than 25-year history–which now includes six editors–there are a number of consistent trends. These include: coverage of Canadian and international work that often falls outside the purvey of more traditionally oriented…
Category: Contemporary
Art pedagogy
Nineteen eighty-four, the year this magazine was founded, marked the end of an era. In February of that year Pierre Trudeau announced his retirement; subsequently, Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives were elected in a landslide. We all know what happened next. The election of the Mulroney government ushered in an era of wildly unfettered capitalism, which may now be…
No typical donor
This year, the Power Ball, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s biggest annual fundraising event and one described by society pages and fashion media as the “official launch of the summer social season,” added an Artist Ambassadors ticket package to its sponsorship options. A response to arguments that few artists can afford to attend the event at $160 general admission…
The National Campaign
Including work by Center for Tactical Magic, Luca Frei, Pia Lindman, Carlos Motta, Duke Riley, Chris Sollars, Allison Smith, Mark Tribe, United Victorian Workers Union, Organized by Creative Time; curated by Nato Thompson, Park Avenue Armory, New York Creative Time’s June–September project Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008) ended in a ‘convergence’ of over 40 artists presenting artworks, performances,…
It’s Time, Man. It Feels Imminent
From May to October of this year, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London undertook an extended 60th anniversary program. Nought to Sixty operated under a straightforward premise: the institution presented 60 projects in six months from artists and art centres based in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The backbone of the program rested on two solo exhibitions that…
The art system
While browsing Brooklyn‘s art blog recently, I noticed that there were numerous articles on offer about the mechanisms of our impending doom–environmental and American–none of which I particularly wanted to read. The cultural pessimism of the moment was hard to ignore. In the art world, too, there is a sense of foreboding. The often used metaphor of an art world…
Modern and Post Modern
A simplified understanding posits any art with grand reformist and universalist or novelty pretensions as modernist, and art offering itself as a re-signification of and intervention into the preceding (whether trends or canons) as postmodernist. Foster shows that both what is described as ‘modern’ and what is described as ‘postmodern’ can contain avant-gardist tendencies, but neither will necessarily have this…
Critics analyze art
If Joan Copjec analyzes in the work of women visual artists the formations and failures of the closure of the notion of woman (or to put it in Lacanian vulgate, that complexity of existing women undermines the Woman and therefore whatever its patriarchal oppressive aspects as well), Hal Foster focuses on the working of masculinity in the early and late…
Boom in the art market
The last ten years have witnessed an extraordinary boom in the art market. An emphasis on money or spectacle overshadows all other types of conversations about the value of contemporary art. For those in search of a different approach, Hal Foster has always been a voice to heed. In his articles in the Big Art Ideas, Artforum and The Nation,…
Mike Nelson A Psychic Vacuum
Once I’d poked my head into the filthy walk-in freezer, carefully pulled the latch handle and stepped inside–far enough to be in but not so far that the door could close–I felt my heart rate rise and my skin tingle. I recognized this feeling. I had experienced it before, crawling under chain-link fences into abandoned lots or wandering the floors…