CAA News

CAA recently published the Spring 2011 issue of Art Journal, which includes a Centennial essay by the noted scholar Richard Shiff and, on the front and back covers, a project by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul Sietsema.

The issue acknowledges CAA’s Centennial year with Shiff’s text, “Every Shiny Object Wants an Infant Who Will Love It,” a state-of-the-field essay on contemporary art. Beginning with the unfigured sensory experience of a Donald Judd installation in Marfa, Texas, the text examines the human impulse to organize and categorize the elements of aesthetic experience.

Paul Sietsema created two news works for the issue: Untitled Composition for the front cover and Painter’s Mussel for the back. Both are based on found photographs and slyly pun on the interplay between language and the working life of artists today.

The Spring issue also publishes an essay by Saloni Mathur that details the postcolonial context in which the American designers Charles and Ray Eames explored the traditional arts of India—and helped configure the industrial-design program of the newly emergent nation. Next, Christopher Bedford, chief curator of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, invited seven artists and curators to join him in pondering the peculiarities the art-speak word “project” (as used in the first paragraph of this news item). While some see it as a useful term, others find darker implications in its widespread use.

An essay by Karen Kurczynski called “Drawing Is the New Painting” suggests that the pressures of the contemporary marketplace can jeopardize drawing’s characteristics of expression and immediacy. In a monographic study titled “City of Degenerate Angels,” Ken D. Allan traces the art and publishing efforts of Wallace Berman in the context of the 1950s Los Angeles jazz scene in which the artist came of age. Additional audio evidence for Allan’s argument appears on the Art Journal website.

The Reviews section of the issue, edited by Howard Singerman, contains Michael Corris’s analysis of Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, and Alzo David-West’s assessment of two publications about art and visual culture in North Korea.

Art Journal has just published timely new features by two artists on its recently launched website.

Liz Magic Laser’s InterAct is an interview-performance hybrid. For Act I, the artist and her crew took part in a conversation with Christopher Y. Lew, a curator at MoMA PS1, at the East River Park Amphitheater in New York. The group then transcribed the discussion and staged it in the same outdoor space several weeks later, as Act II. Art Journal’s website features the full script along with photographs of the event and other works by Laser. This Friday and Saturday in New York (May 6–7), the Times Square Alliance is presenting Laser’s Flight (2010), a compilation of reenacted scenes on staircases from two dozen classic films, including Battleship Potemkin and American Psycho.

For his quizzically titled “X jxm vlr rpb pelria ilpb vlr,” Paul Chan discusses five conceptual maps from his 2007 project Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, staged on the post-Katrina streets of that city. The Art Journal piece coincides with the publication this week of Chan’s e-book, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide (Badlands Unlimited and Creative Time Books). The artist’s images and text open a window onto his process in creating this major work.

Image: Performers for Liz Magic Laser’s Flight in Times Square (photograph by Ka-Man Tse for the Times Square Alliance)

The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews have provided important platforms for the open discussion of scholarly, theoretical, and practical issues in the visual arts. With the Centennial year in mind, CAA hopes that you will support the three journals with a generous gift to the 2011 Publications Fund.

Published respectively since 1913 and 1929, The Art Bulletin and Art Journal have grown from their original roots in pedagogy to become authoritative voices in the history and practice of art. Even now, after ninety-eight years in publication, The Art Bulletin continues to evolve and cultivate new interest: the journal witnessed, for example, a 35 percent increase in manuscript submissions during the past year. Upcoming features include interviews with senior scholars and short-form explorations that address the motivations of art historians working today.

Art Journal recently launched a dynamic website, which not only provides free access to select articles from each print issue but also publishes exclusive web-only features. In addition to presenting time-based art online, the journal commissions artists to create special projects—such as Dailies, Kerry James Marshall’s year-long project for the magazine’s inside covers—to underscore a commitment to producing visual art as well as scholarship on it.

Founded in 1998 as one of the first born-digital art journals, caa.reviews recently reached its long-held goal of publishing over 150 reviews a year. With timely, insightful criticism on books, exhibitions, articles, conferences, and an expanding array of other works, caa.reviews also presents the titles of dissertations, both completed and in progress, from PhD students in graduate programs across the United States and Canada. The list for calendar year 2010 is forthcoming later this spring.

At the threshold of its next century of activity, CAA remains committed to the superb quality and ongoing development of these highly regarded journals, which are enjoyed by thousands of readers annually and which remain essential resources for students, educators, and practitioners in all areas of the visual arts. Your contribution not only helps to maintain an invaluable platform for the presentation of new research and interpretation, but it also supports the groundbreaking work of emerging and future scholars.

Contributors of $250 and higher are prominently acknowledged in four issues of the printed publication that they support, or on the donor page of caa.reviews; they are also recognized in the Acknowledgments and through CAA News. CAA hopes that you will take your place on any or all of these growing lists of esteemed donors.

Art Journal is pleased to present “David Wojnarowicz: Against His Vanishing” on its new website. In the previously unpublished interview, conducted by Steven Dubin on New Year’s Day in 1990, the late artist speaks presciently and passionately to the ambivalent relationship of art institutions to free speech.

In December 2010, Wojnarowicz’s work reemerged as a focus of international attention when the Smithsonian Institution, reacting to pressure from conservative groups such as the Catholic League, removed his video A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery. Stills from the censored video and related works accompany the interview.

“David Wojnarowicz: Against His Vanishing” appears on the new website of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly publication of modern and contemporary art. The site features both free selections from the print journal and content created for the web. In coming months, the site will feature time-based art discussed in articles, online artists’ projects, and more conversational modes of scholarship and discourse.

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for service on the editorial boards for its three scholarly journals—The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews—for four-year terms.

Art Bulletin Editorial Board

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for two individuals to serve on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for a four-year term: July 1, 2011–June 30, 2015. The ideal candidate has published substantially in the field and may be an academic, museum-based, or independent scholar; institutional affiliation is not required.

The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin and assists him or her to seek authors, articles, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; performs peer review and recommends peer reviewers; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.

The Art Bulletin Editorial Board meets three times a year: twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay their own expenses for the conference.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: Chair, Art Bulletin Editorial Board, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or email the documents to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: April 15, 2011.

Art Journal Editorial Board

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for two individuals to serve on the Art Journal Editorial Board for a four-year term: July 1, 2011–June 30, 2015. Candidates are individuals with a broad knowledge of modern and contemporary art; institutional affiliation is not required.

The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief of Art Journal and assists him or her to seek authors, articles, artist’s projects, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; performs peer review and recommends peer reviewers; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.

The Art Journal Editorial Board meets three times a year: twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay their own expenses for the conference.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: Chair, Art Journal Editorial Board, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or email the documents to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: April 15, 2011.

caa.reviews Editorial Board

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for one individual to serve on the caa.reviews Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2011–June 30, 2015. Candidates may be artists, art historians, art critics, art educators, curators, or other art professionals with stature in the field and experience in writing or editing book and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required. The journal also seeks candidates with a strong record of scholarship and at least one published book or the equivalent who is committed to the imaginative development of caa.reviews.

The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief of and the field editors for caa.reviews and helps them to identify books and exhibitions for review and to solicit reviewers, articles, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.

The caa.reviews Editorial Board meets three times a year: twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: Chair, caa.reviews Editorial Board, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or email the documents to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: April 15, 2011.

The deadline for CAA members to apply for two important positions in the publications program—reviews editor of The Art Bulletin and editor-in-chief of Art Journal—is Friday, March 25, 2011.

Art Bulletin Reviews Editor

The Art Bulletin Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the position of reviews editor for a three-year term: July 1, 2012–June 30, 2015, with service as incoming reviews editor–designate in 2011–12. Candidates should be art scholars with stature in the field and experience in editing book and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required. They should also be published authors of at least one book.

The reviews editor is responsible for commissioning all book and exhibition reviews in The Art Bulletin. He or she selects books and exhibitions for review, commissions reviewers, and determines the appropriate length and character of reviews. The reviews editor also works with authors and CAA’s codirectors of publications in the development and preparation of review manuscripts for publication. He or she is expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and recent exhibitions in art history, criticism, theory, visual studies, and museum publishing. This three-year term includes membership on the journal’s editorial board.

The reviews editor attends the three annual meetings of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board—held twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Publications Committee. CAA reimburses the reviews editor for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but he or she pays these expenses to attend the conference.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and at least one letter of recommendation to: Art Bulletin Reviews Editor Search, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or email the documents to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: March 25, 2011; finalists will be interviewed on Friday, April 29, 2011, in New York.

Art Journal Editor-in-Chief

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for the next editor-in-chief of Art Journal, to serve a three-year term: July 1, 2012–June 30, 2015, with service on the Art Journal Editorial Board in 2011–12 as editor designate and in 2015–16 as past editor. A candidate may be an artist, art historian, art critic, art educator, curator, or other art professional; institutional affiliation is not required.

Working with the editorial board, the editor-in-chief is responsible for the content and character of the journal. He or she solicits content, reads all submitted manuscripts, sends submissions to peer reviewers, and provides guidance to authors concerning the form and content of submissions. The editor-in-chief also develops projects, makes final decisions regarding content, and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. He or she works closely with CAA’s staff in New York.

The editor-in-chief attends the three annual meetings of the Art Journal Editorial Board—held twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the Annual Conference in February—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Publications Committee. CAA reimburses the editor for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but the editor pays his or her own expenses for the Annual Conference.

The position usually requires one-half of a person’s working time. CAA provides financial compensation for course release, usually to an editor’s employer.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and at least one letter of recommendation to: Art Journal Editor-in-Chief Search, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or email the documents to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: March 25, 2011; finalists will be interviewed on Thursday, April 28, 2011, in New York.

Membership fees cover less than half of CAA’s operating costs; thus voluntary contributions from members significantly help to make possible the wide range of programs and services that the organization offers. In a new website section called Acknowledgments, CAA recognizes the distinguished contributors for each of the following:

• The Centennial Campaign celebrates CAA’s one hundredth anniversary, a celebratory landmark for any organization but particularly so given the organization’s dynamic influence in shaping the study and practice of the visual arts
• The Annual Campaign helps CAA maintain affordable membership dues and Annual Conference fees, implement its myriad programs and publications, and serve the international community of professionals in the visual arts
• The Donors Circle of Patron, Sponsoring, and Sustaining Members includes individuals who contribute to CAA above and beyond their regular dues
• Life Members are individuals who make one-time payments of $5,000 and remain active CAA members for life
• The Art Bulletin Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s preeminent scholarly journal covering all areas and periods of art history
• The Art Journal Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s cutting-edge quarterly of contemporary art and ideas
• The caa.reviews Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s online journal devoted to critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies
• The Annual Conference Travel Grants help cover expenses for graduate students in art history and studio art, and for international artists and scholars, who attend the CAA Annual Conference

CAA offers additional ways to contribute to the organization. Through Planned Giving, you can include CAA in your will. You can also purchase Benefit Prints by the artists Willie Cole and Buzz Spector or a collection of Art Journal Artists’ Projects by Barbara Bloom, Clifton Meador, Mary Lum, and William Pope.L. For general inquiries on CAA’s campaigns and funds, please contact Sara Hines, CAA development and marketing manager, at 212-691-1051, ext. 216.

 

The Winter 2010 issue of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly of modern and contemporary art, has just been published. A benefit of CAA membership, the publication is mailed to those individual members who elect to receive it and to all institutional members.

Included is a collection of essays, called “Land Use in Contemporary Art,” that investigates a new genre of aesthetic practices that redefine and expand on earthworks. Organized by Kirsten Swenson and with texts by Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott, “Land Use” won the 2011 Art Journal Award. In her editor’s introduction, Katy Siegel writes that the above contributors: “eschew the extremely long view taken by Land artists in the 1960s and 1970s…. The more recent generation considered here focuses on a shorter-term history, directly or obliquely addressing modern life’s interaction with nature: airports and the evacuation of rural America, economic injustice in communities along the highway, global tourism and utopia in rural Thailand.”

The Winter 2010 issue also features Kelly Baum’s short essay on Santiago Sierra that includes photographs of the artist’s project, Submission (formerly Word of Fire) from 2006–7, and Jordan Troeller’s exploration of Zoe Leonard’s photographic series, called Analogue. In addition, Chika Okeke-Agulu writes about Who Knows Tomorrow, an exhibition of projects by five African artists, sponsored by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, that were shown in museums across the city. Okeke-Agulu also interviews Zarina Bhimji, a participating artist whose Waiting (2007) appeared in the Hamburger Banhof. Finally, Michel Oren writes about the activities of the USCO Group, a multimedia art collective from the 1960s.

The Winter 2010 issue publishes two artist’s projects: a centerfold by Fabian Marcaccio titled Black Hole $ Paintant and the final installment of Dailies, Kerry James Marshall’s comic for the inside front and back covers. Among the book reviews are Rachel Haidu’s assessment of Christine Mehring’s recent book on Blinky Palermo and Monica McTighe’s analysis of Kate Mondloch’s Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art.

Art Journal offers a pair of texts from the print publication—David Reed’s “Soul-Beating,” on his relationship to Philip Guston, and Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s review of Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967–70—on its new website. In celebration of CAA’s Centennial year, the website also highlights Howard Singerman’s “Art Journal at Fifty,” an essay exploring the history of the publication, and “A Baker’s Dozen from the Archives,” thirteen selections from Art Journal and its predecessors, which you can download as PDFs and read.

CAA has introduced a new website for Art Journal, its quarterly publication of modern and contemporary art. The launch coincides with the start of CAA’s Centennial year.

Katy Siegel, editor-in-chief of Art Journal, writes that the website “both acknowledges current material conditions of art and publishing, and honors the journal’s unique nature…. Rather than attempting to be another rapidly changing aggregator of information, the site will make visible and maintain the dense artistic and scholarly content of Art Journal in print, hopefully serving a need in the international arts community.”

The debut site features free selections from the print journal as well as content created specifically for the site. An essay by the painter David Reed, “Soul-Beating,” relates his first encounters with his mentor and friend Philip Guston and explores their shared fascination with the work of Piero della Francesca. Also from the print edition, a review by the writer and critic Lauren O’Neill-Butler examines the recently published notebooks of the artist Lee Lozano.

The initial web-only offerings are an essay by Howard Singerman, the journal’s reviews editor, on the history and shifting identity of Art Journal, and selected features from its extensive archive, each with a short introduction by a member of the journal’s editorial board. In coming months, the Art Journal site will grow to include time-based art discussed in articles, online artists’ projects, and more conversational modes of scholarship and discourse.

The Art Journal site was generously funded by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Katherine Behar, an artist and assistant professor of new media at Baruch College, will oversee the site. Lauren Cornell of Rhizome advised the organizers, and Brendan Dugan of Supervision Art Service designed the site.

The CAA three journals have launched special projects to coincide with the yearlong celebration of CAA’s Centennial. Each publication—The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews—has created an online anthology of articles from its back archive. The editorial boards of the journals determined the shape, structure, and content of the anthologies, and the three projects are fascinating in their distinct approaches. All are available to the wider web-browsing public.

The Art Bulletin

The Art Bulletin Editorial Board chose to feature thirty-eight essays and reviews from the journal, which has been in print since 1913, for its Centennial anthology. As Natalie Kampen notes in her introduction to the project, the articles are “the ones that made a difference to us as art historians and as people.” The articles are listed chronologically, with author, title, and a link to a PDF of the full text. Among the authors are Meyer Schapiro, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Linda Nochlin, James S. Ackerman, and Griselda Pollock.

Art Journal

Art Journal’s project is in two parts. The first is an extended essay by Howard Singerman that traces the history and shifting identities of the journal and its predecessor titles, Parnassus and College Art Journal. The author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Singerman is current reviews editor of Art Journal. To complement the essay, members of the editorial board selected texts and artists’ projects from past issues and wrote brief introductory texts to them. As editor-in-chief Katy Siegel writes, “Some feature familiar names attached to much-cited touchstones, while others, we hope, will come as a surprise.” Both projects can be seen at the journal’s new website.

caa.reviews

The editorial board of caa.reviews took a different tack, one that reflects the journal’s born-digital nature. Current and past editors of the journal penned texts to introduce statistically relevant reviews. For each of the dozen years of publication, the Centennial anthology includes the one review that was read the most over a three-year period. Though statistics were not available for the journal’s infancy, some early reviews had the largest overall readership. The topics of the reviews in the anthology vary from installation art to Islamic architecture and reflect the diverse range of expertise of the journal’s numerous commissioning editors.