By Carla Acevedo-Yates
Can art instigate social change? What can previous attempts to produce activist art teach us? It is a difficult task to assess the social and political impact of activist art. But perhaps the questions that arise with the proliferation of these practices are more important than any answers we can find.
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Susan Silton’s art sneaks up on you where you least expect it, often in public, on power boxes, billboards and fumigation tents, in postcards and posters, in whistling crowds and on Facebook. Silton’s work is all about communication (and lack thereof) and power (and lack thereof). Silton has cultivated a thriving practice with her [...]
By Michele Robecchi
When the eminent professor Arnold Bode initiated Documenta in 1955, his primary goal was to show the ‘Entartete Kunst’ (degenerated art) erstwhile banned from his country by giving movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and fundamentally anything remotely abstract the first opportunity to be viewed in post-war Germany. It was clearly [...]
By Paco Barragán
Biennials have become very popular. They are like ready-mades, and like ready-mades, carry contradictory connotations. By “popular,” I mean a kind of artistic platform or product that is globally ubiquitous. Through this article I will introduce a critical perspective to the biennial phenomenon based on two paradigms: the economic and conceptual [...]
Xaviera Simmons creates photographs, installations and multimedia works that use landscape as a base on which to layer complicated characters and open-ended, non-linear narratives. Using an amalgamation of histories and memories as communicated over time through text and images, Simmons creates new characters that depart from and engage with the histories locked within [...]
For two decades, artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila (b.1959) has been a central figure in the vanguard movement of putting a new face on film installation art. Chrissie Iles, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, identifies the phenomenon as bringing the “black box of cinema into the white box of [...]
By F. Javier Panera
At a time when technology is starting to blur copyright boundaries, more and more voices are indicating that the contemporary artist has become a mere manager of information, destined in some cases to imitate himself and in others to “reprogram existing works,“ in a strategy similar to that of a [...]
By Max Ryynänen
If you read a pile of old art journals you cannot but notice that art talk has changed a lot during the last two decades. Institutional matters have taken over. Not long ago, it was commonplace to debate only artists and their work. Now even mainstream art magazines publish critical notes [...]
By Marco Antonini
The questions of what art is and what it means to make art have been adapted to diverse social, political and cultural contexts throughout history. Forms of art are not physical phenomena or chemical processes, as they rarely adapt to scientific methods and can hardly be studied in quantitative terms. Philosophical, [...]
