The Year of the Guest Editors
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Niels Van Tomme’s issue “On Temporality” led off the year with topics ranging from Christian Marclay’s 24-hour The Clock to notions of time in Gambia, with stops along the way in São Paulo, Paris, New Delhi, and sites in Thailand, Croatia, and Lebanon, alongside artist-run spaces adrift in historicity in New Orleans. Susan Morgan devoted the next issue to design and the built environment, with John Latham’s temporally inflected “Flat Time House” providing a link to the preceding topic. The issue began with a reconsideration of the 1939 Telesis group in California, continued through Swedish designer Greta Magnusson Grossman’s 40-year career, and concluded, chronologically, with transformational proposals for the Sugar Hill Arts District in Detroit and the East River Blueway in Manhattan. Erin Dziedzic’s subsequent issue explored “identity, location, exile, [and] the fleeting nature of space and time” from Mike Kelley’s mobile homestead to the shifting meanings of “regionalism,” the complex geographies of Shirin Neshat, and the “fairennial” model as art fairs grow in importance and proliferating global biennials become ever more problematic. The next issue, edited by the MALONE design and art collaborative of Alex P. White and Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, featured a hiply ironic coded cover by North Georgia artist Jody Fausett and essays dealing with painting in the information age, art after social media, delinquent bodies, and sisters Amy and Wendy Yao “skyping with coffee and cats.” After this, September/October’s “The Theatrical Turn?” with editors William Corwin and Alex Ross might have seemed almost old-school in its attention to real bodies and live performance, except that “Body Sketches for a Universal Stage” and “Demonstrative Urgency of Performance in the State of Resistance” made it clear that theater, public performance, and video mesh in ways that address our most immediate social issues, even as Sarah Lucas and Gelitin demonstrated in conversation that “No One Is Less Dead Than Franz” [West] and the aftermath of Viennese Actionism. Dushko Petrovich delved even deeper into traditional media with an end-of-year issue devoted to the topic of art magazines of all sorts.