ART PAPERS 39.02 - Mar/Apr 2015

This March/April issue of ART PAPERS celebrates and interrogates island living. It looks across the Gulf of Mexico and over Florida to our neighbors in the Caribbean, where waves made by mass processional city traditions such as Carnival crash upon the region’s ostensible northernmost city--New Orleans--and create a cultural resonance so strong that it connects the American South to a global one. This issue’s contributors consider the physical migration of bodies through geopolitical space (those of the displaced, of the diaspora, and those of separatists), and the digital migration of artifacts through cyberspace, where piracy thrives, at times for the cultural good. Permeating a number of these features is a tension between escapism and a longing for connectivity--one evident, perhaps, in the nomadicism that seems to inhere to art world production and participation today.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

The Plastic Gyre
Pam Longobardi
What is the material marker of the Anthropocene? Artists, scientists, and activists respond; QR codes elaborate.

Interview: The Political Aesthetics of Carnival
Eric Bookhardt
Curator Claire Tancons talks with D. Eric Bookhardt in New Orleans, the "northernmost city of the Caribbean."
The New World, Application for Turtle Island
Josef Strau
An illustrated, narrative petition for immigrant status replaces formal paperwork in a commission adapted from a solo exhibition at Chicago's Renaissance Society, the artist's first at a US museum.

On Informality and Nomadism
Timothy P.A. Cooper
Torrent sites and pirated media form the black market archives preserving visual culture in postcolonial Pakistan.
Desire is Irrelevant, or Is It?
Omar Kholeif
From its curator, a reflexive overture to the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Life Altars
Iyawó (Kristin Naca)
Ekphrastic poetry emerges from a journey via Latino art to Cuba, where the author is initiated into the religion Santería.

Hayley Silverman's SOUP: A Play in Two Acts
Pablo Larios
Songs excerpted from Aimé Césaire's A Tempest accompany a poetic essay accompanying recent works exhibited in artist Hayley Silverman's Unmanned Lander.

No Fair Is an Island
Bade Stageberg Cox
Studies and schematics from the architecture firm behind the Armory Show's evolving occupation of Piers 92 and 94 in Manhattan.

New Spaces of Queer Separatism
Risa Puleo
Radical communities update—and revindicate—off-the-grid feminist movements of the 1970s.

Escape from Berlin
Caia Hagel
New travel magazines suggest that print is the muse-medium for the post-digital flaneur.

Glossary: #TMAI
Shumon Basar
Sometimes futurist discourse is just #TMI.

Reviews

Days of Endless Time
Washington, DC
Erin C. Devine

Creating Matter: The Prints of Mildred Thompson
at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Atlanta
Dan Weiskopf

Greer Lankton: LOVE ME
at Participant, Inc., New York
Emily Colucci

Shahzia Sikander: Parallax
at Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio, TX
Rachel Adams

Not Ready to Make Nice:
The Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond
at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA
Lilly Lampe

Forecast
at Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Richmond, VA
Dinah Ryan

Taipei Biennial 2014: The Great Acceleration
at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Marcus Civin

Repurposing the Wunderkammer
at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL
Galen Olmsted

Satin Island + Empire's Crossroads
Book Review
Jerry Cullum