May 3, 2012. The “fragmentation, unfamiliarity, and unknowableness” that Rob Marks ascribes to embodiment in his shotgun review of Stephen De Staebler’s sculptures echoes across much of the performative work from the 1970s that make an appearance in this issue. Produced during a time when systems, language, and actions were the prevailing concerns of Conceptual art practice, as Terri Cohn notes in her review of “State of Mind” at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, these works treat the body as a precarious or malleable object and highlight the inherent instability of an identity rooted in a physical self. They have a tendency to disrupt and critique, but in ways that are farcical, so as Bas Jan Ader plummets off the roof or Martha Wilson photographs herself in drag, we laugh even as their actions call the notion of subjectivity into question. Laughter is a form of rupture, after all; it can irrevocably change the way we perceive a situation or person, but it seems that’s okay as long as we’re in on the joke. Enjoy—PM

April 19, 2012. From the earliest days of sound art, artists and experimental musicians discovered in the genre a medium that is inclusive, participatory, disruptive, and that could embody their political goals. Today, the Bay Area’s technological reign has established San Francisco as a destination for sound artists seeking to advance their practices through the genesis of new mediums. They explore sound’s capacity to conflate sensory experience; sounds are both aural and physical, producing reverberations that register in our ears and bodies and that locate or disorient us in space. How do they respond to different contexts and juxtapose with other artistic forms? This thematic issue of Art Practical delves into the Bay Area’s rich history and attempts to probe the very essence of sound as well as the hybrid practices of contemporary sound artists. Enjoy—TT

March 29, 2012. Treating identity as a set of accessories is a hallmark of preadolescence, that age when character attributes can be added or shorn as easily as clothing or hair. This mercurial sense of who one is at any particular moment compelled us to invite middle school students to participate in our “Art Smarts” workshop, conceived and produced by Tess Thackara in conjunction with the writing center 826 Valencia. Over three Saturdays, a group of eight incredibly bright and creative individuals gathered to explore and interpret the works included in Portraiture Post Facebook at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. The results of their efforts are presented as shotgun reviews in this issue. They focused on individual works of their choosing, and their resulting observations collectively illuminate how portraiture functions as a frame for both subject and viewer. Many thanks to Katie, Rhiannon, Nathan, and the staff at the gallery, to Miranda and Maggie at 826 Valencia, and especially to Aaron, Bella, Britta, Irene, Jade, Kyra, Laura, and Lilah for their words. Enjoy! – PM

Image: Adrienne Rich in 1987. Courtesy of the New York Times.

March 15, 2012. I am trying to imagine the weather when photographer Arthur Tress arrived in San Francisco in March 1964; I bet it was raining. As I write this, the sun has just peeked through the clouds for the first time in three days, and now that damn Beatles song is stuck in my head. I spent too much time this morning looking at Tress’s image of teenage girls rallying for a Ringo presidency and thinking about the Republican National convention that year, which nominated Goldwater over Rockefeller, and how it’s presaged the coming one this summer. The luxury of hindsight is its capacity to weave together disparate events and images into narratives that cohere into logical and predetermined patterns. The present, though, as Hillary Wiedemann and R.H. Quaytman suggest in their work, is full of glares and blind spots; we have to rely on sensory perception and peripheral vision to see. Solar flare disruptions and partisan bile are in the forecast for the remainder of the year; it will be interesting if the look back tells us something different. Enjoy—PM

March 1, 2012. Last month, a team of Art Practical editors and writers visited Kansas City, Missouri, with the task of producing an issue of critical writing on socially engaged art practices in the region. Why did we undertake this project? By temporarily situating ourselves in a city whose artists are similarly experimenting with and questioning what encompasses contemporary visual art production, we sought to reorient our perspectives about the infrastructure and visibility that artistic communities need. Our short trip functioned as a mirror; the impression we took away was a composite informed by the region’s realities and the identities we brought with us. The picture we took home reveals as much about our regional preoccupations and concerns as it does those of Kansas City. In this way, it offered us a comparative context in which to consider two communities: one that we experienced for a short period of time and another in which we are immersed and choose to call home. Enjoy – VG & PM

February 16, 2012. Renny Pritikin attributes the illicit acquisition of the objects included in Illegitimate Business to "human frailty, of succumbing to minor temptations and the love of art." They are also acts of transgression that irrevocably alter the identities of both the possessor and object possessed. However impulsive the gesture, it is impossible to return an object so borrowed without some trace of the act on provenance or conscience. Not so in Ship of Fools, Allan Sekula's photographic series of crew members who sail under flags to which they have no national allegiance and whose cargo ship may change owners and name mid-route. He documents a constant state of transience in which identity and politics slip from grasp. Meanwhile, Kodwo Eshun confronts the alien form "as arriving at the limit of comprehension of what it means to be human." Oppressive social and economic conditions, warfare, and violence disorient us until we no longer recognize ourselves. —PM

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.