Gioni is the Biennale’s youngest director in 110 years, and speculation on his plans runs rampant, although few will prognosticate publicly. Nonetheless I managed to strike up a lively conversation with Legier Biederman, a curator herself and an historian of annuals, biennials, triennials, quadrennials and art-world festivalism generally. She noted first the vogue for oversized shows that feature record numbers of artists and exhibition venues. “Just the sprawling nature of the biennial can be both a point of attraction as well as contention,” says Biederman. A participant in this maximalist trend, Gioni can be expected to put together one of the most Brobdignagian Biennales yet.

Biederman notes next that Gioni will naturally be judged against the past Biennale directors—Harald Szeeman, David Birnbaum (himself the youngest director of his time), Robert Storr, Bice Curiger, Rosa Martinez, Maria de Corral, Francesco Bonami, et al. Will he play it safe, favoring the A-list art stars to whom he now has more access than ever? Or will try to upend the hierarchy? “In many ways, that’s kind of always been an attraction in the contemporary art world, the contention between inside and outside and where that line is and when one crosses it,” says Biederman.

Or will Gioni split the difference? It’s tempting for a curator to include some, but not too many emerging artists, to rely, as Legier puts it, “on the inclusion of the standard artists, for the legitimacy. There is this kind of monstrosity on the biennial circuit as it exists today. There are the individual biennials, that are tied to the specific locations and the specific histories, that have informed the biennial, but then there is this larger global art market that defines in many ways what Caroline Jones calls ‘biennial culture’. There’s always this push and pull between these two realms, of being cutting edge but still maintaining their identities as global biennials that established what contemporary art is today.”

Even the biggest risk-takers often follow well-worn paths in Venice. Biederman does expect Gioni to be adventurous in his selection of new media, but would be surprised if he broke out of the usual geographic proportions. The last Biennale, curated by Bice Curiger in 2011, was a typically Western-centric one, with 68 out of 82 artists born in the West. The largest nationality represented was American, with 14 artists; the next largest was Italian. Biederman suspects the major biennials will continue to be slow to internationalize. “The recent inclusion of non-Western artists began not too long ago. The Venice [Biennale], being the oldest and divided by national pavilions as well as prizes, has a longer history to break, [unlike say] the Havana Biennial, which focuses strategically on ‘non-Western artists’ or artists from the Caribbean or Latin America [or] Central America,” she says. Internationalizing efforts are routinely beaten to a pulp. Witness Storr’s “African Pavilion,” or Okwui Enwezor’s “Documenta 11.” Enwezor’s show, though praised for its novel structure and diverse media, was accused of didacticism and inauthenticity (many of his non-Western artists resided in Western countries). As reported in an interview with Enwezor in Nka, it was called “cumbersome”, “humorless” and “the least arty Documenta yet.”

With Gioni, there’s even less reason than usual to expect a truly international roster. Gioni’s shows, despite their maximalism and unpredictability, typically lack major geographical diversity. His 2009 ‘Younger than Jesus’ show, for instance—which declared its intention to feature the best artists around the globe under the age of thirty-three—drew more than half its artists from the West. A third were American. Artists from Africa and South America made up 5% each. Gioni resists the idea of consciously correcting such imbalances. When The New York Times asked him how he chose artists for another show, he said, “I don’t ask to see their passports.”

My editor and I requested an interview with Gioni for this article, which I originally intended to be a more general overview of his current activities. Gioni originally assented (through a representative). However, when he stipulated he must be allowed to “review the transcript and make necessary edits prior to posting,” and we declined to agree, our emails stopped being returned. Refusing subjects a sneak-peek is standard journalistic practice. But you can’t blame a Venice Biennale director for not playing by the rules, now can you?

Justine Price, associate professor of art history at Canisius College, died unexpectedly of natural causes on October 24, 2011 in Buffalo, New York. She recently had been tenured and named director of the college’s art history program. Price’s knowledge and love of art were limitless, and her professional accomplishments extended beyond academia to the worlds of publishing and museums.

Beginning her art history studies at Bryn Mawr College (B.A.’92), Price earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Her dissertation, supervised by Richard Shiff, was titled, “Abstraction, Expression, Kitsch: American Painting in a Critical Context, 1936-1951.” Her work on American artists was published in edited volumes and catalogues. New scholarly directions focused on contemporary Polish photography, including recent collaborations with the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a 2009 exhibition of Polish contemporary photography at Canisius College.

Before joining the faculty at Canisius College in 2005, Price had been engaged in curatorial and publishing pursuits. From 2001 to 2008, Price was a tireless researcher for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in New York, contributing to the catalogue raisonné under the direction of Jack Cowart, director of the Foundation. She also contributed to an exhibition on Roy Lichtenstein’s American Indian Paintings, and worked as an editor and director of photography for Bill Smith Studio in New York.

Price’s death at such an early stage in her career is an incalculable loss. A much beloved teacher at Canisius College, Price supervised dozens of undergraduate theses and internships. Students flocked to her classes and her reputation as a teacher led many on the college’s ice hockey team, the Golden Griffins, to enroll in her courses. She, in turn, found time to attend their games as one of their most devoted fans. At her memorial service at Canisius College, one of the team’s members remarked that since Price had not known much about hockey and the hockey team had not known much about art, “it proved to be a good relationship.” In the summer of 2011, Price led a group of Canisius students on a service mission to an orphanage in Zmiaca, Poland, where she made many new friends among the children.

Price leaves behind her mother, father, stepmother and younger sister as well as friends around the world who were nourished by her vitality, humor, and warmth. She also leaves a legacy and a challenge: a life well lived, in service to the things and people we love.

Art and “The War on Terror”: Ten Years On
August Jordan Davis, Winchester School of Art, A.J.Davis@soton.ac.uk
March 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (collectively identified by the Bush administration’s rubric of “the war on terror”) featured in myriad ways (both explicitly and tacitly) within contemporary art production, exhibitions, and criticism of the 2000s. This session offers a forum for a timely review of this decade of art and war (and their interpenetration). The session consists of a roundtable of artists, art historians, and critics, including Martha Rosler, Jonathan Har- ris, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, followed by papers. Papers might address the art and activism of Artists Against the War; pertinent curato- rial projects of this period (e.g., the Whitney Biennial of 2006: Day for Night); the work of “embedded” artists; popular culture’s role in shaping narratives of the wars (e.g., films including World Trade Center, Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss); or consider what the legacy of this recent past might mean for art today.

The “New Connoisseurship”: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators
Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Perry Chapman, University of Delaware
A conversation on the past, present, and future of the “new connoisseurship” brings together leading figures from the academy, mu- seum, and laboratory to consider what matters about the material objects we study. The aim is to go beyond stocktaking to recuperating and repositioning the material object as subject for art-historical research. What lessons can we learn from the ever “new” and serially “scientific” connoisseurship, from Morelli’s forensics to Berenson’s reliance on photographic evidence, to today’s “technical art history”? Given the fate of the Rembrandt Research Project, as well as what scholarship has revealed about artistic practice in the workshop, can or should we aspire to establish a corpus of “authentic” or “autograph” works, or is this a chimera, the wrong question to ask? At this moment can we look squarely and constructively at connoisseurship, a word that has come to be spoken with disdain by so many schol- ars, redolent of an outmoded practice? “Close looking,” so fetishized and admired and freighted a concept, neither accounts for what is below the visible surface, nor recognizes the interventions and transformations of appearance of that surface resulting from the vicissi- tudes of time and restoration. What can be gained from research and rethinking the historical record as it becomes increasingly available in conservation archives? How can we ask better questions and benefit from our varied categories of knowledge going forward? What can or should art historians do to take advantage of—and to train a generation of “new connoisseurs” conversant in—new developments in conservation and technical studies?

The Changing Complexion of Theory
Ian Verstegen, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, ianverstegen@yahoo.com
This panel is devoted to registering the fundamentally chang- ing nature of contemporary theory. For many years, theory was influenced by post-structuralism, and the theories of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault were largely language-based and devoted to forms of nominalism. More recently, with the sociological determinist approach of Pierre Bourdieu, the materialism of Slavoj Zizek, the realism of Jacques Deleuze (at least as imputed by Manuel de Landa), and Alain Badiou has disrupted this status quo. Today, we are more likely to take for granted the relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. This panel not only seeks to trace the influence of such newer ideas but also raise the very question of theory in the humanities. Papers are sought that go beyond the exegesis of
recent theorists and discuss the relation of theory and the func- tion of relativism and objectivism in the academy.

The National Gallery, London, 9 November 2011 – 5 February 2012

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

Tate Modern, London, 6 October 2011 – 8 January 2012

Two great exhibitions currently taking place in London, Leonardo Da Vinci: Court Painter at Milan at The National Gallery (until 5 February 2012) and Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern (until 8 January 2012), offer a telescopic opportunity to consider how artistic concerns in Western culture have (and have not) shifted in the last half millennium. Though the artists are from entirely different eras, these exhibitions share at least two common themes: the primacy of the artistic process, and the exploration of artistic illusions. Where Leonardo’s process is explored through careful presentation of his drawings alongside his paintings, Richter’s process is made explicit in the wall texts that accompany the exhibition. Some of Leonardo’s greatest innovations were his careful studies of nature and the lifelike illusionism of his paintings. Richter’s work on the other hand points to the false nature of illusions, and questions the authority of representation.

The Leonardo exhibition is small and very rich. Each room is dedicated to one or two Leonardo paintings alongside related drawings and works by his followers.  The first room focuses on Leonardo’ Portrait of a Young Man (The Musician) of 1486-7, and frames Leonardo’s innovations in easy-to-grasp terms: he was one of the first artists to break out of the standard profile portrait formula dominant in 15^th century portraiture. The Musician has the quality of a film still, as if frozen in some very subtle motion. The nearby Portrait of a Young Man from 1490-1 by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio sets up the theme of using Leonardo’s followers’ works as foils to the master, and that strategy works best here. This comparison heavily favors Leonardo, as his portrait has a sense of liveliness absent in Boltraffio’s picture. However, in some works which appear later in the exhibition, particularly some of the drawings in the room dedicated to the Virgin(s) of the Rocks, Boltraffio’s work is at times quite masterful.

Some of the most celebrated portraits by Leonardo come in the next room, where the Portrait of a Woman (The Belle Ferrioniere), c. 1494, and the Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), c. 1490, are arranged to vie for the viewers’ attention. That the cult of feminine beauty is still so dominant in contemporary culture surely helps these two pictures resonate with viewers. The crowds of visitors gathered in front of these women were practically impassible. In this case, one’s patience is indeed rewarded, as both of these pictures are exquisitely beautiful, with enough mystery to hold one’s attention for long periods. Despite the explanations offered for the awkwardly tense ermine held by Cecilia Gallerani, it just looks unsettling, particularly juxtaposed with the sitter’s delicate expression. The Belle Ferrioniere, however, unnerves you with her eyes. Certainly she is posed, and seems aware of the fact that she is being observed. Yet some clever, defining action appears to be taking form in her head, and we are left to imagine what it might be.

Focusing on Leonardo’s interest in the human anatomy, his unfinished Saint Jerome from c. 1490 is the centerpiece of the following room, with a dozen or so drawings that demonstrate Leonardo’s explorations of the human body. The Saint Jerome is a pleasant surprise simply because of how easy it is to see in this exhibition. At the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Saint Jerome typically hangs in small alcove which is dimly and unevenly lit. It is refreshing to see the work so beautifully displayed in The National Gallery, a rare presentation indeed, given how infrequently Leonardo’s work are lent out.

One little remarked upon advantage of this exhibition is the opportunity to see many of the Leonardo’s drawings from the British Royal Collection in the context of the artist’s practice. In this the case, the curatorial implication is that studies such as those hanging in these room are part of the process of developing paintings, like the one Saint Jerome was en route to becoming. Indeed, virtually all of the drawings by Leonardo in the exhibition are arranged to a provide a sense of the artist’s process, regardless of how tenuous the connection may be between the actual paintings and drawings exhibited in any given room.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the opportunity to view together for the first time both versions of the Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, dating from c.1485 and c. 1508. The earlier Louvre version is presented first, and its dark, mysterious presence is reinforced by the brightness and bolder coloring of the later National Gallery version. Many viewers prefer the Louvre version. It was painted first, and is generally accepted as more purely representative of Leonardo’s concetto. No doubt the sense of mystery that surrounds the Louvre picture is one source of its greater appeal. While it is of course a remarkable painting, I have to take the perhaps unpopular position the National Gallery version provides a better viewing experience in the context of this exhibition. The recent cleaning and restoration of this painting undoubtedly means that in its present state, it creates a viewing experience closer to the artist’s original intent than that of the Louvre version. Yes, the Louvre painting has had a life of its own beyond the grasp of Leonardo, and this history is presumably what the Louvre wants to preserve by leaving the picture in its present state. Yet next to (or across from) the Louvre painting, the National Gallery picture is gloriously crisp, exquisitely detailed, intensely colorful, and radiantly present. The Louvre picture is equally luscious, but heavily yellowed and desaturated. In fact, the stunning success of the National Gallery’s refurbishment hints at the possibilities that lie beneath the grimy surface of the Louvre painting.

The curatorial hand is perhaps at its strongest in the following room, where the painting known as the Virgin and Child (The Madonna Litta) c. 1495, is the focus. To its left hangs a beautiful Leonardo drawing of a woman’s head in practically, though not precisely, the same pose as the Madonna Litta.  The drawing has the effect of making the Madonna of the painting look rather stiff and tired. To the right of the painting, a drawing by Bolraffio of the Christ Child greedily suckling his mother’s breast looks exactly like the version of the child in the painting. There is no conclusion from the way the visual evidence is presented other than the suggestion that the Madonna Litta is in fact not by Leonardo.

The theme of attribution follows the viewer into the next room, where the recently authenticated Christ as Salvator Mundi, c.1499,  hangs, along with several drawings, the Virgin and Child (The Madonna of the Yarnwinder), c.1499, and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (The Burlington House Cartoon), c.1500. In these last two rooms, the question of attribution, which in the case of the Salvator Mundi has been discussed widely in the media, has the potential to distract from pictures themselves. While the top portion of the Salvator Mundi seems remote and distracted, particularly the face of Christ (for which explanations have been offered), the bottom half is exquisite. Christ’s hands are the stars of this picture, both the elegantly shaded right hand in the act of blessing, and the left hand partially obscured by the deservedly much-discussed crystal orb.

Turning to the right, viewers find themselves faced with the large drawing known as The Burlington House Cartoon. Another one of Leonardo’s unfinished works, this one has the distinction of having been exhibited to large, adoring crowds during the artist’s lifetime. It is this aspect of the historical Leonardo that seems to unite his contemporaries with a twenty-first century audience. As the Salvator Mundi attests, Leonardo isn’t done yet. His oeuvre is a work in progress. Hence there is the pervasive sense that despite what we know about this great artist, there are things beyond our grasp which may or may or be made clear in the future.

One gets the sense from the timing and length of the Leonardo exhibition, the ticket price, and the lack of any special accommodation for the massive crowds, that The National Gallery did not foresee the frenetic popularity surrounding the exhibition. The exhibition is overcrowded, making it difficult to actually view the works on display while one is pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with other viewers. Given the institution’s dedication to public service and education, it would not be out of the question to expect some kind of special accommodation for the enormous number of people who otherwise would not get to see the show. I feel very lucky to have been able to see this exhibition, and I hope that The National Gallery could find a way to share this extremely rare opportunity with a wider audience. Of course any show of this nature is going to be crowded, but this one seemed to set a new standard.

While Leonardo Da Vinci: Court Painter at Milan focuses on a small portion of the artist’s career, Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern follows the stages of the artist’s career (thus far) chronologically. Whereas Leonardo is presented and understood as remarkably innovative, indeed practically without precedent, Richter looks to have spent much of his career absorbing the influences of, and reacting to, earlier artists and styles.

The topics around which the fourteen rooms are arranged vary from Richter’s rejection of Abstract Expressionism (though the specific term is avoided), to his interest in the constructed nature of landscape, to his attempts to address the intersections of political and personal history. Over one hundred works are presented in the well-lit, evenly spaced galleries, creating a refreshingly comfortable viewing experience.

Oscillating between the extremes of painterly photo-realism and pure abstraction, Richter’s oeuvre is united by themes of representation and history, or art history. One aspect of Richter’s delicately painterly images drawn from photographs is to question photography’s claim to any sort of truth. They often succeed in stealing back the authority of representation from photography itself. The wall texts emphasize the artist’s process, describing his motivations and techniques in any given phase of his career. In Richter’s case, the wall labels function as the drawings did for Leonardo, creating an overall sense of what the artist was trying to achieve and helping viewers identify with him.

Some of the most simply beautiful paintings by Richter are his large seascapes, such as Seascape (Cloudy) from 1969. One is confronted not only with an elegantly modeled surface, but also with the sense of viewing something much bigger than oneself. The deliberate painterliness of the otherwise precise pictures builds enough visual tension to open the picture to concerns outside of the raw beauty of nature and the viewer’s place in the vast openness. Here, wall texts explain Richter’s large seascapes as his attempt to deal with Romanticism, something about which the artist has serious critiques, but nonetheless can’t seem to write off.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example of Richter’s practice of incorporating elements drawn from other artists into his works is his 1973 repainting of Titian’s Annunciation of 1535, housed at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. The re-presentation is largely faithful, save for the textured softness which for many has become Richter’s trademark. Up close, Richter’s Annunciation looks almost abstract, as pools of color spill into one another. From across the room the picture glows, taking on a cinematic quality and suggesting the sort of mysterious spirituality one imagines that Titian sought to evoke in his own viewers.

On the next wall in the same room hang three large paintings of clouds dating from 1970. Each is colorful, delicate, and comfortable in its status as a painting. At this point in the show the viewer is tempted is to find comparative examples from the history of art in order to explain the cloud paintings. Wall texts help direct viewers toward Dutch landscape painting, but given Richter’s interest in photography I couldn’t help but think of Edward Steichen’s Equivalents series, an early twentieth century attempt to make photographs which would perceived as Art.

Richter’s purely abstract paintings (such as Abstract Painting, 1977) stand out in his oeuvre for his acidic use of color, which at times is quite jarring. These are certainly the loudest of Richter’s works, and they underlie his career-long interest in the tension between abstraction and representation. One curatorial curiosity of this exhibition was the placement of one or two small pictures of flowers (for example, Flowers, 1977) in rooms filled with large abstract paintings. Rather than provide a meaningful counterpoint, they serve to confuse the viewer’s understanding of the curatorial presentation, and no explanation is offered.

Both the Richter show and the Leonardo show continue with additional displays after they appear to have ended. In the case of The National Gallery, Leonardo’s fresco of The Last Supper from the convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, c.1478, is the subject of the additional room (which one finds on the first floor of the main building, entirely separated from the rest of the exhibition). Several drawings from Her Majesty The Queen’s collection set up the viewer for Giampietrino’s contemporary full-scale copy of the work from 1520, on loan from The Royal Academy of Art, London. The awkwardness of the placement of this final room is quickly forgotten, given the power of the works on display. In the case of the Richter exhibition, a final exhibition room appears after exiting through the café and gift shop, and it indeed seems like an afterthought.

Richter has been so successful at absorbing and re-presenting so many different styles that most viewers will find something intriguing on offer at the Tate Modern. Furthermore, viewers should find it easy to step into the artist’s shoes and re-imagine his process. That is, of course, a central source of fascination with Leonardo’s drawings: the opportunity to try and see his mind at work. His finished paintings, of which there are precious few, display his mastery of unsettling illusions, the kinds of illusions that Richter would deliberately deconstruct by painting in a way that is simultaneously photorealistic and painterly. The Richter exhibition is an utterly pleasant experience, with a well-paced presentation and none of the madness surrounding the National Gallery exhibition. The Leonardo show is somewhat of an exercise in patience. Yet the works on display are so rarely viewed in this sort of context, and so fundamentally worth viewing, that one’s patience is indeed greatly rewarded.

Susan Rosenfield writes:

dele jegede, alongside [Sylvia] Forni, and Rachel Nelson provided their panels with optimistic insight regarding progressive alternatives for contemporary African art. Both presenters still warned of this imminent threat of globalization on the African art market, observing that Western aesthetic values cause contemporary art to migrate in a way that jegede described as “eerily reminiscent” of colonialist-era movement. Nonetheless, jegede explored the burgeoning revaluation of the local, arguing that African auction houses and collectors encourage the marketing of indigenous tastes.

Samuel M. Anderson writes:

Several conference sessions were constructed around revisiting broader theoretical concepts of visual culture through African lenses. One such panel looked at Tonye Erekosima and Joanne Eicher’s “cultural authentication” model through a wide variety of visual arts practices … [Another] engaged Bruno Latour’s “iconoclash.” Like cultural authentication, iconoclash attempts to describe the transference of imagery between cultures, but iconoclash is much less systematic, depicting a state of uncertain contradictions rather than a process of incorporation. The panel was divided between two perspectives emphasizing either closure or potential …

This edition of the Triennial was notable for the attendance of many more African scholars than in previous years [whose] presentations demonstrated that approaches to art history education within Africa are as diverse as the continent itself.

There are, of course, the more obvious inclusions: Banksy drew the most attention on my last visit. Dozens of camera phones were capturing his installation, including a wry, gilt-framed sign declaring “this is not a photo op” (Photos here). Space Invader’s contribution maintained his street persona – rather than a dedicated area, “invasions” popped up throughout the show. Outside the museum, there are rumors that a recently arrested vandal is in fact Space Invader, in town for the exhibition. It’s not only Space Invader, however, who is making his mark on the city. The LATimes reports an increase in tagging in the Little Tokyo area, prompting police concern and increased security near MOCA. These inside-outside questions are at the core of any show that attempts to institutionalize the deliberately unruly practice of street art, but one hopes the discussion generated can begin to carve out some possibilities and direction for future study of the genre.

Overall, the show treads a nice balance between new commissions, recreations, and historical documentation. A visual timeline gives a limited, bare-bones sketch of the history of street art, but it does provide some useful archival documents, including the “black books” of taggers that were crucial to fostering nascent graffiti culture and cans of early spray paint, whose development in the 1960′s effectively gave birth to the practice. While coverage of the phenomenon began in the 1970s, with attention from art critics, sociologists, even novelists, street art still sits uncomfortably within art history. A few options for further reading:

Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art Edited by Patrick Nguyen and Stuart Mackenzie, the volume includes interviews with key figures.

Trespass. A History of Uncomissioned Urban Art Curated by the founders of Wooster Collective, a crucial blog in the international dissemination of street art.

The Faith of Graffiti and The Birth of Graffiti Jon Naar first published his photojournalistic documentation of early graffiti in 1974 with The Faith of Graffiti. The book, which includes an essay by Norman Mailer, has been referred to as “the bible of graffiti.” His 2007 Birth of Graffiti looks back at forgotten images from that same period.

Graffiti Kings Based on artist and historian Jack Stewart’s doctoral thesis (in art at NYU), he gives a firsthand account of the movement.

Siegel is particularly interested in American art’s peculiar obsession with endings:

Mark Bradford’s 2008 project for the Carnegie International spelled the words “HELP US” on the museum’s roof, recalling the citizens of New Orleans … “I have always liked potentiality better than actuality. We all wait for the storm.” The storm that Bradford seeks seems to be on its way. Not only, literally, in extreme climate change, but also, finally, maybe really, in the end of America that so many see prefigured in the current economic and political situation. The short American century, which began with the economic ascension of the country in the 1920s, reached its highpoint with the end of World War II; at the same time, many claimed that moment of domination was also the end of America as historically constituted, as it marked the full entanglement of the nation in global affairs. One end after another has followed: recessions, military defeats in Vietnam and the Middle East, the attack on American ground of September 11, 2001, the economic crash of 2008. From even the slight distance of a few years, they seem of a piece, part of the same end, as well as a ritualistic repetition of America’s historical pattern of crisis, always already a ruin. Is this latest crisis just a repetition, or part of a long good-bye?

Another recently published book, Robert Genter’s “Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America,” which has a narrower time-frame (the 1950s, mostly) and a broader subject (writers and artists), is particularly interested in American society’s “fear over the threat of totalitarianism,” its attempts to resist that threat with a fierce brand of individualism, and American artists’ participation in — or resistance to — that project. In a long chapter on Jasper Johns, Genter writes:

Johns had little respect for the overtly masculine displays of his fellow artists who believed that the potency of their brushwork, either dripped, splashed or poured across the canvas, testified in some way to their heroic natures … Johns refused to believe in simplistic notions of autonomy … Johns offered an image of the human subject as inescapably embodied … [subject to] social and psychic pressures … Johns deflated the excesses of romantic modernism, not merely through ironic detachment as many have claimed, but through an intense reconsideration of the expressive act itself … Johns turned American modernism away from its metaphysical themes and back to the real cultural debris littering the American landscape … [Johns argued that the Abstract Expressionists] in their compulsive quest to reclaim their own masculinities, had forsaken any contact with their own culture, trying to remain aloof from a world on the brink of catastrophe.

Ai was arrested in Beijing on April 3, an event his studio assistants recorded on Twitter (translation here).  Evan Osnos reported on the day’s events in a New Yorker dispatch.  Police claim that Ai is being investigated for “economic crimes.”

Artists and arts professionals around the world are circulating a petition for his release.

Read more about Ai Weiwei’s work in Evan Osnos’s excellent New Yorker profile.  And watch a short documentary about Ai that Frontline/World aired on PBS.

“The Turner Prize, awarded annually to a British artist 50 or younger, tends to be won by someone who pushes the definition of “art” in novel and provocative (or derivative and irritating, take your pick) ways.”

I wonder how much this function of pushing the definition of art has become the sole function of art. Though it may sound mundane to some, I believe it would be fascinating to have a CAA panel (or the like) with a variety of scholars discussing this topic. I also wonder if a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, or John Cage, would qualify for the Turner Prize (if they were British and under 50).

In her contribution to the debate, Elizabeth Harney questions

Whether a “field” of contemporary African art history exists. What, indeed, is the rush to name this field? Above and beyond the professional questions of who we build our careers … [there’s] wariness about closing down the capacious and extremely diverse set of conversations … [That said] canonization is inevitable [and] perhaps it has already come to pass.

Okwui Enwezor hints at an intriguing development to come:

[W]hat I believe in passionately, as far as contemporary African art goes, is institution and capacity building … Without these the field will not grow. Stay tuned for the launch of a new institute dedicated to this very idea … [C]oming from Nigeria, I will not subscribe willy-nilly to messy, chaotic, unruly, and other qualifiers as attractive ways to theorize this difficult problem. We have seen what all of those qualifiers connote when applied to Africa.

And then later elaborates:

[A]t the invitation of a foundation here in the United States we are developing a model of a mobile summer art academy, in collaboration with African institutions … We are working on a five-year pilot program and have designated five African countries among which the project will rotate. Concurrently, we are developing an online academy … Our attention is to bridge the gap, not to create false dichotomies of “African-based” curators … and non-African-based scholars … In our project, we see knowledge transfer as part of a new politics of countering NGOism, as a specific critique of the development models that have deracinated institutional capacities and created a culture of dependency and sympathy in Africa. But this venture in itself is not a solution, only a strategy to create a robust global African public sphere of knowledge production.

Sidney Kasfir chimes in near the end of the exchange:

Initial impression: what a lot of verbiage! Quite a few of us in the roundtable seem to equate intellectual integrity with using as many words as possible … [My PhD advisor] advised me to avoid too much clarity and conciseness … I’d also like to say a bit about the terminologies that we use to talk about African art. I steer clear of the traditional-contemporary frmework because it creates a nice distinction that does not exist in reality. The older genres, like masquerades, continue to thrive and are in a real sense also contemporary … The last of these conceptual frameworks is postcoloniality, which for me is steadily losing its explanatory power. Whether construed as “after” or “against” the colonial … [the concept] began to flatten out in the 1990s and now is simply taken as an all-purpose descriptor … [T]he keywords are uncertainty, ambivalence, and contingency [but] they are very, very capacious and could also be used to describe the experience of being a colonized subject … [T]he postcolonial has pretty much been edged out by globalism-related discourse on diaspora and migration.