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This, the final issue of ARP!, features timely articles on beginnings and endings alike as well as interviews, conversations about art and practice, and gems from the pages of previous issues of ARP!. EDITORS: Ariel Pate, Tiff Hockin, Troy Pieper, & Rusdon Kern Torbenson (copy editor / proofreader) Paperback, 5 x 7.25", 204 pp. $12 |
HET EINDE CAN ALSO BE FOUND AT THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS: MINNEAPOLIS:
WHAT'S INSIDE? … AND THE LANDSCAPE Thomas Cole, the early-nineteenth-century American painter who made a case against excess with his five-canvas Course of Empire never imagined today’s affront of big-box stores or threat of nuclear war and global warming. Sopinski Perlman juxtaposes Cole’s work with that of five Minnesota-based artists: Ginny Maki, Paula McCartney, Nick Conbere, Andréa Stanislov, and Lindsay Smith. Their works depict the American landscape in the twenty-first century, making us examine our selves, our assumed place, and our own strident part in the land.
AN AUTOMATED CONVERSATION IN 23 FRAMES/LINE Korth interviews Rembert Hüser, associate professor of German at the University of Minnesota and former interim head of film studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, about his move back to the U.S. and his various writing projects. Hüser in turn interviews German experimental documentary filmmaker Harun Farocki—in 1999. Farocki reminisces about French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut’s endless hours of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in the ’60s, and then closes by offering a scathing critique of railway stations and public swimming pools.
BEAUTIFUL FRIEND “Beautiful Friend” mines our bookshelves for the beginnings and endings of books, digging up a few epigraphs and epitaphs in the process. Mueller quotes Borges, Bukowski, and Baudrillard — among other novelists, poets, and philosophers, and writers in the fields of psychiatry and sexology. Here’s hoping that “everything that ever was will just barely be enough to fill out this one moment in which silence enters.”
A CRITICAL MEMOIR Diane Hellekson reminisces about scraping by as a freelancer for City Pages and Artpaper in the late-’80s, and about her time as an arts writer and reluctant restaurant critic for the Pioneer Press.
THE CULTURE WARS The early-1990s found the United States in a full-blown culture war, and Minneapolis at the front lines. Pieper traces the struggle of the National Endowment for the Arts to retain both integrity and funding in the face of opposition to its support of controversial art—from Piss Christ to Mapplethorpe to The NEA Four, and culminating with the “jarring display of inadequate reporting” by the Strib’s Mary Abbe that made the Right across the country stand up, and the NEA, finally, lay down. John Killacky, former Walker performing arts director; Patrick Scully, founder of Patrick’s Cabaret; David Fraher, executive director of Arts Midwest; and Neal Cuthbert, former publisher of Artpaper, comment on what was happening locally and nationally and on what might have been done both to preserve the NEA as it was and to cause public opinion regarding the value of the freedom of expression to progress.
MANAGING THE MERITOCRACY “The way you make serious money as an artist is to become a voice in the larger culture, and the way you do that is not through internet marketing.” After quitting her position as editor of mnartists.org, Ann Klefstad sat down with Pate to discuss mnartists.org’s role in helping local artists and the site’s value as a “maker-driven network” in an otherwise mostly “market-driven” arts community. Pate also interviews then-incoming (and current) mnartists.org editor Susannah Schouweiler, who talks about the scarcity of venues for arts writing in Minnesota and the necessity for sites such as mnartists.org to forego “arts writing for arts writing’s sake” in favor of “arts writing that’s accessible for everybody.”
A SHORT LIST OF QUESTIONS REGARDING THE POSSIBILITIES OF ALTERNATIVE ART SPACES; MORE GRATUITOUS QUESTIONS AND MORE ARP! first printed “A Short List of Questions” three years ago, in issue number 1. Some of the questions concern money (“Do alternative spaces have to be practice for the commercial art world?”), others the function and scope of installations and openings for social beings (“Isn’t a cultural space a social space?”); all could stand to be asked again. Wolf adds to that list of questions for ARP!s final issue.
1908 TUNGUSKA EVENT KAPOW!
SOL LEWITT ON THE INTRICACIES OF DATING If you were looking for obscurantist dating advice from the guy who brought you incomplete open cubes, who colored on museum walls with crayons, pioneered the notion of the visual artist as composer, reinvented the autobiography, championed less-successful artists, and loved his wife till his death at 78, you’ve come to the right place.
WHAT HAVE WE DONE DURING THE TIME WE LIVED? Frequent ARP! contributor and consummate man about town Andy Sturdevant decided it would be fitting to bookend his first ARP! article—a look at some of the alternative art spaces that had come and gone in the Twin Cities during the preceding 20 years (in issue number 2)—by digging through stacks of papers and miles of microfilm, looking for the letters from the editors of the last issue of arts and culture publications stretching as far back as before WWII. Documenting the familiar—Twin Citian, Connie’s “Insider,” Artpaper, Your Flesh—alongside others either long-forgotten or inconspicuous from the start, “What Have We Done During the Time We Lived” is a compilation of excerpts from the farewell letters from a slew of young and idealistic editors who worked around the clock for little more than their own satisfaction in having contributed to the ever-fluid community each valued during his or her time as a member of it.
THE SEVENTH SEAL OF CINEMA Williams explores the relationship between our fascination with “Armageddon” blockbusters and our response to real-life disasters, such as 9/11, in a discussion involving technological singularity and transhumanism, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, “the green scare” and predictive programming, Ray Kurzweil, Walter Benjamin, and the Unabomber and the “four living creatures” of the book of Revelation. From 1951’s black-and-white The Day the Earth Stood Still to the Terminator movies to the special-effects bonanza that is 2012, “the end of the world is a projection” … and a progression—if you look at it that way.
WHAT'S A UNION TO DO? In November 2008, members of the now-defunct Visual Arts Critics Union of Minnesota (VACUM) debated online the effectiveness and actual function of unions such as VACUM, along with the value (5¢/word, anyone?) of arts writing, the National Writers Union, blogs, Rain Taxi, and the effect of academics doing for free the work of freelancers.
YOU + ME, TOGETHER = ART Haakon-Thompson recounts the beginnings of participatory (or relational) art—Marcel Duchamp, the Happenings of the late-’50s and ’60s—and recent attempts by, among others, Relational Aesthetics author, Nicolas Bourriaud, and art historian Claire Bishop to define it. He discusses 2009’s Common Room (at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis) and recent gatherings at the West Bank Social Center, and then relates his desire to see participatory art in the Twin Cities be brought to and involve non-artists, with the grand and truly genial goal of “erasing the separation between art and life.” |