
Slapstick and the Sublime
By Jonn HerschendHow we view ourselves and our own narrative is shaped by the films we see, the art we champion, and the books we read.
More »This issue of Art Practical offers observations on the current relationship between art and entertainment. Although this relationship has been evolving for some time, it’s become increasingly apparent to me over the past few years as more and more artists embrace elements of entertainment in their work. They are investigating entertainment and its uses from the gallery as well as from Hollywood. These are artists who are taking on the medium and working to push beyond the traditional art exhibition, the all-too-trite blockbuster, or the indie romance plot structure. They aren’t simply adopting the standard entertainment format; they’re examining its structure. They are also broadening the audience and asking more of them. They are asking: Is the purpose of entertainment escape or invigoration? Or is it both?
The art world that we operate within is shrinking, and even that audience is already incredibly small. Without any sort of larger support of the arts from a national standpoint, we are more or less at the whims of society, which is to say the whims of a capitalist society that consistently asks, “What is the value of what you are producing?”
The contributors for this issue are writers, artists, filmmakers, and actors who have a stake in the conversation. Some of the pieces are traditional essays and conversations, and some of these are projects commissioned for Art Practical. You can view it as a sort of mash-up of art and entertainment, or a distraction from reality. But it's also quite possible to read them as a call to action.
How we view ourselves and our own narrative is shaped by the films we see, the art we champion, and the books we read.
More »I don’t even take credit for Alien. He is Harmony’s. As he says, Alien is a gangster–mystic. A clown, a killer, a lover, the spirit of the age.
More »And here, on these pages, they have been removed and refrozen as elements of a larger, intentionally arranged still life.
More »For what astonishes me about my life as a moviegoer is cinema’s staggering capacity to collapse the decades of my life into one continuous responsive daydream
More »They smashed the backdoor, ransacked the store, staged a robbery and created a handful of photos of suspicious characters engaged in questionable activity in the neighborhood.
More »We’d like to give voice to that used bike pump, that box of office supplies, and those dusty silk flowers that so rarely get center stage. Who knows, the next deal could be yours.
More »Perhaps the asshole behavior we scorn in successful artists and other celebrities is not only perpetuated by lazy typecasting, but is sought out and celebrated by us as a culture that romanticizes creative outliers.
More »Today I’m wondering if I should be in one of the casts? Or in every cast? If so, whom will I play? I think the wolf-headed goddess Anubeth, who speaks only wolfish but understands ten languages
More »It opened up a whole new range of possibility, like one of those dreams where you suddenly discover another room in your apartment.
More »As the region’s traditional art world has struggled, Burning Man and its maker ecosystem has slowly risen to become the vox populi of the Bay Area arts.
More »Balancing the experimental ethos of art with the accessibility of entertainment, an approach I’ve dubbed High Entertainment: that’s the future I want to explore and reinforce.
More »I was informed by my social media that Miley Cyrus told a drunken Jennifer Lawrence to “get it together” after this year’s Oscar ceremony.
More »We invited contributors to consider collecting as both an individual and instituting activity, as well as the relationships, intimate or problematic, that people have with the objects they live with.
Notes from di Rosa is produced in conjunction with Art Practical's yearlong residency at di Rosa, in which the museum's collection serves as a focus and cornerstone for an in-depth exploration of Northern California contemporary art.
For this assemblage, we invited a range of artists to create small, artist-led workshops devised to spur dialogue, action, and art making around questions of art, labor, and economics. Others led discussions and surveys on the wider Bay Area landscape of cultural labor.
Here, readership takes on multiple valences: an intellectual orientation, an activity implicated in identity and community formation, a mode of exchange, a site or location of acculturation, a group of consumers.
This issue of Art Practical is intended to be a highly personal selection of eleven exhibitions that cumulatively form a history of contemporary art in the Bay Area over the past half-century.
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/ From the Archives: Crafts and ArtsAugust 20, 2013. In his interview with Art Practical, Glen Adamson states that he wants “craft to be not so tacit or unspoken, not so hidden offstage. I want it to be something that everyone sees happening before their eyes and thinks constantly about how it should be structured.” It’s hard to think of an art-related word as thorny, sticky, and slippery as craft. Anyone who has ever tried to translate the word into another language knows…
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/ From the Archives: Worse Than QueerAugust 13, 2013. This issue’s title comes from the Bikini Kill song “Suck My Left One,” (1992) in which frontwoman Kathleen Hana exhorts her fellow sisters-in-arms to show the world that they’re “worse than queer.” I read the line as both a rallying cry for the radical possibilities and reminder of the high stakes of a life lived, to whatever degree, outside of dominant norms of gender and sexuality.
However, the stakes and possibilities of…
August 14, 2013. Art Practical and Daily Serving are proud to jointly participate alongside other art media in heralding A Day for Detroit. Eight writers from both publications have each selected a work from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), a treasure trove that could inconceivably be sacrificed if Detroit’s emergency manager forces a sale of the collection to alleviate some of the city’s staggering debt. We present the works here along with commentary…
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/ From the Archives: InstabilityAugust 6, 2013. Art produced on the West Coast often eludes easy definition. Its slipperiness does not stem from a lack of clarity or rigor, but rather from an embrace of the unstable. Its iconoclastic resistance to simple legibility springs in part from the unyieldingly sublime western landscape, which simultaneously underpins and threatens every westerner’s existence. California, and particularly the Bay Area, amplifies this unstable potential by combining a cacophonous cultural confluence with the most volatile and majestic aspects of nature.
July 31, 2013. Though Art Practical has always published profiles closely examining the work or lives of artists who give lectures or public workshops in the Bay Area, we’ve dedicated a portion of every issue to the Visiting Artist Profile series since our third year of publication. The profiles collected here represent the pioneering writers who have brought their own unique approaches to this regular feature since its inception.
Elyse Mallouk wrote the first installment of the Visiting Artist…
Each day, it seems, some “Fill-in-the-blank” collapse captures space as a front-and-center headline in daily papers. It is not surprising that during this time, artists are working to incorporate local, global and personal politics into their work.
July 16, 2013. It’s jocks vs. nerds: athletic and artistic abilities are unrelated if not mutually exclusive, if we are to believe our friends at Bad at Sports, who note, “if you were good at sports you were probably too busy dating to be that interested in art.” Enter Matthew Barney, who counters this limiting perspective with an athletic bravura grounded in metaphors of muscles and the body’s response to distress, which is central to his…
July 9, 2013. Photography is 175 years young. Throughout its lifetime, its uses and perceptions have shifted radically from novelty to ubiquity and from scientific tool to fine art medium. Not only has photography changed how we see the world with the naked eye, it has ensured that we always see with perceptive vision. People are more observant, more discerning of those decisive moments when one might want or need to stop and look, commit a sight to memory, whether mentally or digitally, as is now often…
July 2, 2013. The essays, interviews, and reviews chosen for this issue, whose title comes from the 1866 Bayard Taylor poem The Picture of St. John, reflect a particular willingness to investigate art and praxis in an open manner. These keen and thoughtful writings, as well as the events and exhibitions on which they report, are not prescriptive in their opinions nor attitudes, nor do they attempt to be comprehensive.
Instead, some of these articles offer snapshots of the here and now. For…
June 25, 2013. Building a life in an arts community is not always a straightforward task. Emerging artists, critics, curators, and arts workers all face multiple options when it comes to finding and defining their role in the Bay Area—not to mention the national and international scene, and the unwieldy Internet. In pieces from four years of AP archives, writers address a wide array of responses to these various forking paths, reflecting on institutional setbacks and local growing pains, but also on the…