Awards
2011 Art Journal Award
Kirsten Swenson, Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott, “Land Use in Contemporary Art” (Winter 2010)
The series of articles, entitled “Land Use in Contemporary Art” and published in the Winter 2010 issue of Art Journal, approaches its urgent topic from a variety of perspectives, clarifying the historiography of sustainability and, through a number of compelling authorial voices—Kirsten Swenson, Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott—revealing many of its aspects. Collectives and artist groups, activist geographers, ironic investments in failure, community rejections of “participatory” art, and the dynamics of art-world reception through various media are all scrutinized, to the benefit of artists, art historians, and public discourse.
The jury found each of the articles interesting and socially, economically, and conceptually significant but was especially impressed by the range of their differences, particularly in the authors’ descriptions of the collaborators’ approaches and the values those people support. Not all the work discussed is overtly political, yet all relates to the social configurations around specific geographic sites and the unusual and performative approaches used to make the concerns of these environments visible. The issues are so complex and broad that it takes a cluster of articles to even begin to elaborate them. This made the series, good as each article was, even more impressive, useful, and theoretically significant, since together they constitute an exemplary forum on the live issues in the new genre of Land Use, both inside and outside what is thought of as “art.” Presented complete with relevant introductions and histories of the issues at hand, the articles combined were even more compelling and informative than any one of them alone.
Jury: Ann Gibson, University of Delaware, chair; Carol Becker, Columbia University; and Caroline A. Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
