Articles - February 2016

Imagine Brown

I went to Brown in March as an “artist in residence” for Interrupt3, a three-day conference on the intersection of art and text and digital things. I was anxious when I arrived because in the days before leaving people had asked me repeatedly what I would make once I got up there. I had no idea.

As soon as I arrived in Providence, I began seeing signs with the words “Imagine Brown” everywhere. They were on lampposts and banners and posters all over Brown’s (quite white — qhite?) campus.

February 5, 2016

Blunt Objects

Alejandro Crawford

Sophia Le Fraga

Shiv Kotecha

Blunt Objects is a collaboration between Sophia Le Fraga, Shiv Kotecha, and Alejandro Crawford, produced for Divya Victor’s Jacket2 feature devoted to plural and global Conceptual writing and other cultural productions.

On Pince
Alejandro Crawford

Imagine Brown
Sophia Le Fraga

Little-Richards
Shiv Kotecha

February 5, 2016

Nice Dream?

Heriberto Yépez: Allegory and radical mimesis

Ryan Sheldon

Still from Voice Exchange Rates. Walter Benjamin notes that the image of the skull is especially fit for allegory in that it poses “not only the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual.”

“Talk-It,” the speaker-cum-software bot of Heriberto Yépez’s video-poem “Voice Exchange Rates,” describes itself as a technology “designed to help poetry return to the righteous path of the avant-garde” by automating the poetic endeavor: the program reads, translates, and composes in a variety of languages and registers in accordance with the preferences of its human user.

Heriberto Yépez, Voice Exchange Rates, 2002. Is unoriginality already the preferred condition of USAmerican experimentalism?

February 5, 2016

Critical color theory

On Angelica Dass and Divya Victor

RE Katz

A collage of photographs from Angelica Dass’s ongoing Humanæ Project appeared on the cover of the “The Trouble With Race” issue of Foreign Affairs magazine in March 2015.[1] Dass’s photographic pairing of human skin tone with swatches of PANTONE® color was selected for an issue slated to spotlight the global failure of multiculturalism.

February 5, 2016

Disaster and revival

On Cha, Goldsmith, Pendleton

Patrick F. Durgin

The first issue of 'Art in America,' which appeared in 1913, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 'Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works.'

I am going to discuss three examples of Conceptual writing. My purpose in doing so is merely to define one of a larger set of questions. Defining questions is going to be more productive than pretending to have answers. I don’t want to even seem to be making an argument about these examples; that would truly be shortchanging the artists’ efforts. The brevity of this essay requires that I forego the summation and close reading, the kind of exposition we use to support a fully fledged thesis.

February 5, 2016