Media, the World, and Regionality
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Video art in California dealing with surveillance and Texas painters dealing with a post-paint world were thematically related topics with which the year began. The succeeding issue saw Dallas artists occupying a slippery slope between painting and photography in “A Painting of a Picture of a Photocopy.” In the same issue, “Representing Blackness” explored Kerry James Marshall’s meditations on the black aesthetic, while Michael Friedländer explored the aesthetic and social themes of Soviet and post-Soviet art. Japan’s interest in hip-hop was explored by iona rozeal brown in a studio visit, and, improbably, a new documentary analyzed by Art Papers editor Charles Reeve presented the ongoing enthusiasm for Andy Warhol in his ancestral village in Slovakia. Jerry Cullum wrote an accompanying essay on the elusive ethnic identity of the Ruthenian borderlands and Andrew Warhola/Andy Warhol himself, and expanded on this general theme in a succeeding issue in “Between Berlin and Benin: Hans Haacke and Meschac Gaba, Two Political Artists in the Age of Globalization,” a theme echoed in a different register in Dennis Raverty’s essay on Siah Armajani and in a conversation with Adrian Piper. Gender politics put in an appearance in Richard Meyer’s “After the Culture Wars: Censorship’s Many Faces,” and environmental activism in John Grande’s essay on the photographs of Edward Burtynsky.