February 2, 2012. How do we measure the intrinsic worth of objects? How do we stack up material value against the agency and power an object purportedly holds? In our conversation with Steven Leiber, whose loss we are only beginning to feel, he notes the genesis of his collection of artist ephemera as “just twenty-one boxes of crap.” That frank assessment echoes across Matthew Rana’s essay, in which—citing Baudrillard—he offers that objects “demonstrate their autonomy irrationally, through ambivalence and seduction.” We’ve all felt the irrational seduction of objects, even in an era, as Julia Glosemeyer notes, that’s “infatuated with the concept of immateriality.” In a week where we’ve received news of the deaths of three significant figures in the art world—Leiber, Mike Kelley, and Dorothea Tanning—the idea that there is a universe populated exclusively of objects, one that does not privilege our relationship to them but their relationships to each other, has a sense of permanence that might explain our ambivalence and our attraction. We are not immortal, but aspire to find what is. –PM.

January 19, 2012. Serial publications have the power to link what’s in print with what’s happening now, reflecting the impermanence and transience not only of the medium, but also of the ideas catalogued therein. As an online venue, Art Practical strives to create such a connective dialogue that brings today’s art to life, but it also aims to historicize the interactions between artwork and viewer, writer and reader. “Printed Matter” is concerned with Art Practical’s indebtedness to print culture; we ponder the extent to which Art Practical can serve as an archive while constantly evolving alongside its own conversations as part of an ever-shifting digital frontier. There’s a tension between the ephemerality of being in the present and the staying power of a constructed archive. Our fiftieth issue, “Printed Matter” is a self-reflexive pause within this space. Enjoy. CM

December 22, 2011. As we round the corner on another year, it is nice to have the moment to pause and look back. Art Practical has experienced significant growth in 2011, and through the expansion of our travels, public programs, and content, we've amplified our core mission to generate dialogue. That dialogue has often proved to be most thought provoking and lively at its most intimate scale: the back and forth between two individuals. The interviews with artists, curators, and writers we've published, especially those in conjunction with our partner Bad at Sports, and by feature contributor Bruno Fazzolari, manage to capture the energy, curiosity, perplexity, self-depreciation, and even doubt that accompanies any creative process. But what is most evident in all of the conversations is the remarkable opportunity to hear about work we admire in the voices of those who produce it. In this issue, a selection of some of the outstanding interviews from 2011. Enjoy! - PM

December 8, 2011. On first glance, the alien-propagating slackers that are the subject of Mindglow bear little resemblance to the wealthy Venetian patrons depicted in the paintings of Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power, and the aesthetics governing each are far removed from Anna Halprin’s 1970 Blank Placard Dance. But as Carol Anne McChrystal, Larissa Archer, and Christina Linden respectively illuminate, self-representation, portraiture, and participation negotiate similar terrain. Absorbing the contemporaneous means and methods of representation can simultaneously foment broader recognition and exercise the desire for “palpable change.” Forms of power and forms for dissent collide and co-opt each other; those we adopt to identify ourselves also reveal the forces and ideologies with which we align and those we oppose. Enjoy–PM.

November 17, 2011. In this issue, we are pleased to present Shotgun Reviews by the six finalists for the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium (ACAC) Writing Fellowship. Michele Carlson, Liz Glass, Joshua Kim, Charlotte Miller, Jeffrey Songco, and Ellen Tani were selected by jurors Britta Erickson, Glen Helfand, Hou Hanru, Santhi Kavuri‐Bauer and myself based on their insights into contemporary Asian art practices and discourses. While providing a platform for emerging writers, the ACAC Writing Fellowship aims to promote and encourage such discourse, particularly around events and exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area. This fellowship will invite the recipient to examine where the intersections lie between artists of Asian descent living and working in the Bay Area, those living and working internationally, and artists of non-Asian descent living in Asia. We look forward to announcing the recipient in the coming days and to welcoming a new contributor to Art Practical. - PM

November 3, 2011. Last night, the cranes at the Port of Oakland, which protestors had shut down as part of the general strike, weren’t illuminated. Their darkness made stark silhouettes of the stacked shipping containers, which stood out as deep, black rectangles. The containers first appeared so flat that I imagined the protestors racing through the Port to scramble onto ships and hang banners that could be visible from the highway. But then image and comprehension merged, and the aesthetics of protest gave way to that of capitalism momentarily dormant. I thought of Lea Feinstein describing Richard Serra’s drawings as preserving the energy of the actions that created them, even in their blackness. And Bean Gilsdorf unpacking the allegory Serra puts forth in his video: in the creative process, potency comes not from freedom, but in the repeated exertion against confinement. The daily gatherings and hand gestures of the general assemblies that Elyse Mallouk describes in her feature take on new resonance juxtaposed against these readings; the accumulation and repetition of actions, not their resolution into form, is what matters. - PM

October 20, 2011. In her conversation with Constance Lewallen, recounted in the curator’s catalogue essay for the exhibition, State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, and excerpted in this issue, the artist Martha Rosler described her time as a student at the University of California, San Diego. “We might as well make big demands; why not do what we wanted. Either the market or the institutions were going to change or we would ignore them and make new ones.” It is interesting to consider this statement in comparison to Matt Stromberg’s review of We Bought the Seagram Building, in which he notes that the artist Lucas Soi “reflects his disillusionment with the dreams of modernism and globalization, making transparent the often-hidden history of finance underlying culture.” If institutions define and reify while art resists and confounds, what role does art play in this moment of occupation that refuses sound bites while demanding recognition, each person according to its own? - PM

October 6, 2011. The direct and barbed questions that Guillermo Gómez-Peña raises and the answers that Pablo Helguera inadvertently provides in their respective features let no one off the hook. Anyone who claims some relationship to what we collectively call the art world is complicit in how it functions, whether artist, curator, viewer, reader, or even museum guard. But if individually one's agency is hard to locate—as Christine Hill notes in the interview with Helguera, "no one wants an MFA in Futility"—there are multiple reminders in this issue that art's ability to displace its audience is sometimes catalyst enough. Whether it is Allen Ruppersberg's acts of narrative reclamation, Kurt Schwitters' destroyed but still evocative Merzbau, or intervening amongst the dead in Ever After, art puts one in a strange place that can be hard to return from. Enjoy—PM.

September 22, 2011. It's the start of our third issue year and we're getting underway with both barrels blazing. (C'mon, you have to let me exploit the metaphor.) In this issue, our regular contributors offer quick, thoughtful impressions of the new season of exhibitions, as well as of events that occurred since our most recent issue in mid-August. The thirty-two shotguns included here are only a first hint of the enthusiasm with which our writers will seek to foster critical dialogue this year. And as we delve into the season, you'll see that dialogue take on new forms, as we introduce a series, the Visiting Artist Profiles, and a writing fellowship dedicated to exploring Asian contemporary art practices and discourses. Lots to come—enjoy! - PM

August 18, 2011. We've reached the end of our second year of issue production, and in honor of the occasion, have asked some of our writers to reflect on the events of the past twelve months. Art Practical’s mission is to create a historical record of contemporary artistic practices and to foster artistic production through critical writing and public programming. We participate in a continuous spectrum of activity, conversation, and critique as part of the everyday lives of artists, curators, viewers, and readers. But we are also the recorders of that activity, thus giving conversation a form; thoughts and gestures become tangible as reviews, interviews, and features. The undifferentiated events of the everyday become tagged, categorized, contextualized—they are written. As Catherine McChrystal notes in this issue’s “Best Of Year Two: Editors Choice,” Art Practical functions within a continual process by which we convert experience to form and reinsert it back into experience as dialogue while also appropriating it as history. Enjoy—PM

August 4, 2011. We are in the midst of what, during my East Coast childhood, would be the long pause of summer. The heat rose off of every surface and from every body, so much so that moving was something one did reluctantly, and only after much consideration. These are perhaps conducive conditions for looking at art, at least in the way Mark Van Proyen advocates for in his review: “the only way to come to terms with this…is to silently sit there and let them slowly form themselves into consciousness.” Sally Elesby describes the same process slightly differently; for her, “the painting itself expands to contain viewers in the act of viewing.” Words don’t get to share in the luxury of slow absorption; they require immediate and unconscious register of their meaning. But assembled together well, they open up space around an object, and suddenly it is there. Enjoy - PM

July 14, 2011. In the current issue, Shannon Jackson quotes Tenderloin Economic Development Project director Elvin Padilla expressing her desired goal that individual artists “invite someone else along.” Jackson uses that phrase to evaluate the social dynamics underlying aesthetic decisions in storefront art, but it could also be understood as a litmus test that other writers apply in assessing the push and pull of the mostly digitally produced work reviewed here. For example, Brady Welch notes that the Whitney’s exhibition of Cory Arcangel’s software-hacked work can make for “an oddly emotionless interaction,” and similarly, the overall effect of David Claerbout’s video installations is one of alienation. In contrast, Genevieve Quick notes that Desirée Holman’s Heterotopias grants access to the private fantasy lives of individuals through their costume-wearing avatars. And Elyse Mallouk illuminates how Brindalyn Webster brings viewers literally into the belly of a whale as a place from which to speak. As Mallouk and Jackson both note, the invitation arises from locating the symbols that are at once expansive and tangible enough for others to find their voice in. Enjoy—PM

June 30, 2011. This morning, I noticed that still pinned to a sweater in my closet was the “Free Ai Weiwei” button I have been wearing periodically over the last two months. Given that last week Ai had been freed on bail after confessing to tax fraud and for health reasons, according to the Chinese government, the button suddenly amounted to little more than an outmoded accessory. It is also a prime example of what Hou Hanru describes in his letter to Hans Ulrich Obrist as the type of symbolic gesture that reduces the complex realities and needs of different realities to simple representations, a simplification that Matthew Rana confronts as well in his encounter with the images and work of Ahmed Basiony in the Egyptian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Is it possible for art and artists to speak beyond such gestures, or away from such gestures, as Hou proposes? What does a true gesture of solidarity look like?— PM

June 16, 2011. In her conversation with Bad at Sports, artist Julie Ault notes that the language she presently uses to describe Group Material’s early decisions and projects historicizes those experiences, creating a framework in which the past is skewed and the consciousness of the original moment is replaced by the context of hindsight. We all do this: use the words through which we now understand ourselves to describe our past actions. Perhaps it’s an effort to create continuity between then and now, a desire to recognize our former selves within our current incarnations. Ault also alludes to the moment of looking ahead; the moment when we are confident that the past has finally lost its hold only to have it reappear and collide against our future intentions. In such moments, we’re struck by an awareness that things don’t change as much as the words we use to understand them do.—PM

June 2, 2011. In the Middle East, demonstrations and demands for regime change continue to grow, despite the threat of deadly force; in Syria, the gory images of a thirteen-year-old child brutally tortured and killed by the army have catalyzed protesters nationwide. The Arab Spring extends into summer, and Americans are nothing more than uneasy bystanders to the toppling of totalitarian rule while we cope with visions of our own rubble: tornado-ravaged Joplin, Missouri, and the news that ideological bickering may force this nation to default on its debt. In our digital age, these moments of great global economic, political, environmental, and technological uncertainty are visualized and collapsed into a daily slideshow. But as noted in reviews of work by artists Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa, Alex MacClean, and Doug Rickard, they also becomes inscribed on the American landscape as deeper, psychological, almost seismological shifts. - PM