May 7, 2013. In her review of the symposium “Painting Expanded,” Leigh Markopoulos describes participant Tom LaDuke’s practice in a manner that resonates with both reviews of Christian Marclay’s The Clock included in this issue. She notes “In situating the development of his art directly alongside his life experiences, and in expressing doubt and desperation, LaDuke placed painting firmly at the center of a sentient artistic practice.” We can't divorce art from life, and the time taken up by making and consuming the former is always imbricated with how we take stock of the latter. This is something The Clock literalizes in an epic, dramatic fashion befitting its equally dramatic source medium: cinema. “The synchronicity of cinematic and real time unfolding…grounds us in what the time actually is along with how much time has passed,” observes Patricia Maloney in her review of the piece. Cognizance of how much time has elapsed and how little may be left is also acutely apparent in Richard Misrach’s images of the Mississippi River's most environmentally impoverished stretch. Lea Feinstein, reflecting on the collection, expresses hope that these visual indictments are spurs to action, effecting change before it’s too late. Enjoy—MS

April 24, 2013. Astrophysicist Carl Sagan and the philosopher Henri Lefebvre make for interesting bedfellows. Matt Stromberg quotes Sagan in his review of Falling from Great Heights, in which the scientist describes contemplating the cosmos as “a faint sensation of a distant memory.” Meanwhile, John Zarobell calls upon Lefebvre's idea that “[e]very language is located in a space...and every discourse is emitted from a space.” However much of a stretch it is to connect cosmology to Marxism, the juxtaposition of the two quotes invites reflection on how we delineate space. In one sense, boundary-making is always a synthetic exercise; the territorial edges articulated by language or technologies or economies. At the same time, these limits demarcate another space, beyond what our current politics may allow. For this reason, the Star Trek character Nyota Uhura—the subject of a video by the artist Simon Leigh, profiled in this issue—traverses a radically different frontier than those of her fellow shipmates, one her very presence makes less impossible to imagine. Enjoy – PM

April 9, 2013. Fittingly, one of the most the widely circulated quotes following the passing of film critic Roger Ebert on April 4 expressed the contentment he found in Richard Dawkin's concept of memes, which, Ebert noted, "move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body." Memes have a tendency to disrupt claims to authorship and audience as they are perpetuated and recreated: they never really belong to anyone, no matter how public their circulation. Here, Matt Sussman, in his review of The Modern Monster and Legacy Russell, in her interview with Amy Adler, explore the convolutions and divinations that appropriation produces, be it zombies or street art. We are also are pleased to present in this issue Shotgun Reviews by the five finalists for the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium (ACAC) Writing Fellowship. Sheryl Cheung, Joshua Kim, Elizabeth Parke, Heidi Rabben, and Hentyle Yapp were selected by jurors Lee Ambrozy, Joseph del Pesco, Claire Hsu, and Pauline Yao based on their insights into contemporary Asian art practices and discourses. We look forward to announcing the recipient—and to welcoming a new contributor to Art Practical—in the coming days. Enjoy.—PM

March 26, 2013. Somewhere between the crosshatched, imagined utopias of Lebbeus Woods and the fan-shaped concrete edifice of the UC Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA) lies the space where history can "rewrite itself into the future,” as Ellen Tani quotes New Museum director Lisa Phillips in her review of 1993. Woods conjured a vision for architecture that allowed the tumult of the present to intervene in his forms, so that one could perceive the human capacity to resist or create. In February, the legendary dancer Anna Halprin reprised the dance Parade and Changes at BAM/PFA, heralding the pending closure of that building while simultaneously recalling the museum's inception. The accordion-like collapse and expansion of history that Woods and Halprin wrought is what 1993 strives to enact, but as Tani notes, it is difficult to periodize a moment defined by historical slipperiness. To what extent can we ever grasp it? Enjoy.—PM

March 12, 2013. As Matt Stromberg notes in his review, the closure of the Colby Poster Printing Company at the end of 2012 halted production of the broadsheets that had become a ubiquitous facet of the Los Angeles cityscape. In a city characterized as continually erasing and recreating itself, one wonders for how long their absence will be discernible before being swallowed up by the relentless flow of the present. Similarly, in discussing Sadie Barnette’s current exhibition, Liz Glass highlights the entropic degradation that blurs both temporal distinctions and subjective experiences. But she also poses a rhetorical question about the “ordered universe” from which the work's deteriorated condition evolved. While Terri Cohn notes the point of origin for Gutai’s rupture of gesture and form evidently lay with the cataclysm of World War II, most often the “condensation and displacement of time, space, and bodies” that Matt Sussman observes in the film Morakot (Emerald) (2007) allows for only the slightest trace of prior histories to remain visible. Combating that subsumption, of course, is art and our drive to make it. Enjoy! – PM

February 26, 2013. Building a house of cards is an undertaking that courts precariousness and demands perseverance. Mary Anne Kluth elucidates this latter quality when she describes how the assembled cards in Elisheva Biernoff’s sculpture House of Cards (2012–13) “suggest mastery and dedication.” Rigorous devotion is also central to the artistic practices of Jay Defeo, Colter Jacobsen, and Takming Chuang, all of who, in their own way, strike a delicate balance between structure and impermanence. At the same time, Glen Helfand’s illumination of “Happiness Is…” reminds us that joy can materialize in many different forms, even when the cards fail us. Enjoy! — KQS

February 12, 2013. The subject matter of the cover image for this issue, Christian Marclay's 2006 silkscreen, Silence (The Electric Chair), was a sign that appeared in the execution chamber at Sing Sing prison, and more specifically, in Warhol's series of silkscreened images of the electric chair housed there. One wonders who is commanded to be silent: the condemned, the executioner, or the witnesses? Several of the articles in this issue look at practices that navigate around the strictures, institutional or otherwise, that would enforce mute accounting in the face of violence. The polite distance maintained as neighbors in Claudia Joskowicz's video stands in stark contrast to the brash humor of Saul Garcia Lopez's taxi driver in Monterrey, Mexico, but in both cases, defensiveness and defiance are conveyed through performance. For other work, the archive is the place from which one speaks. Taraneh Hemami, Molly Springfield, Bean Gilsdorf and A. Will Brown all reckon with the inscription, articulation, and preservation of personal memory in the face of prevailing narratives; collectively, there is urgency, even humility, as Jordan Stein notes, in the task of audibly and visibly rendering these perspectives for others. Enjoy—PM.

January 29, 2013. In this issue, Art Practical is honored to present the U.S. premiere of No Portraits, a photo-performance portfolio by Guillermo Gómez-Peña that pays tribute to eight artists influential to his career. The ever-inventive artist describes his close collaborations with numerous photographers over the years in creating such portfolios of performances enacted strictly for the camera. As subsequent witnesses to these performances, we see Gómez-Peña’s close scrutiny of a embodied language who lineage he has learned, embraced, elaborated, and shared; it extends beyond the tightly cropped spaces of No Portraits into the studios of other artists, including that of Jaime Cortez. "You have to understand that your practice is an animal, and it has to be fed," Gómez-Peña told Cortez. Taking a second look, it becomes easy to perceive these photographs not only as homages, but also as nourishment. Enjoy- PM

January 17, 2013. Even without the vividness of Randall Miller's descriptions, we would recognize the photographs about which he writes. The gestures that herald the disbelief, heartbreak, and grief of an entire town are readily recalled or at hand, preserved in media and in memory. They are already the signifiers—the vocabulary—for so many things: Newtown, gun violence, senselessness. This role disallows for the "tender neutrality" that Matthew H. Tedford attributes to photojournalist Gabriele Stabile's photographs, which do not "sensationalize, glorify, or villainize; instead they treat their subjects as individuals." And perhaps that is why the images of the Newtown massacre are inert; the act of representation shortens their reach. As much as photographs allow us to sympathize, they also compartmentalize. As Sarah Hotchkiss aptly suggests in her review of Fiat Lux Redux, do the images of the present curtail our visions of the future or allow us to project our hopes and dreams forward? Enjoy - PM

December 18, 2012. As 2013 approaches, we take a moment to reflect on some of the conversations published during what has been an invigorating and ambitious year for Art Practical. Our seventieth issue is a snapshot of the forms those conversations have taken, beginning with some of the outstanding interviews that have invited artists and cultural producers to speak frankly about their practices. It includes a selection from the Visiting Artist Profile series, which highlights the critical dialogue that reverberates in the various local lecture halls that are a hallmark of the Bay Area art scene. Last but not least, we offer the Shotgun Reviews produced last March when a group of Art Practical editors and contributors teamed up with 826 Valencia to facilitate an arts writing workshop for middle school students. The result was a series of perspicacious observations by our youngest contributors yet. As a whole, this issue, brought to you by our distinguished contributors, offers an opportunity to indulge our admiration for the producers and artwork we’ve encountered this year. Cheers! —KQS