Diminishing Returns: Wartime Art Practices
During the Vietnam War, artists stopped making work as a form of political protest. Why is a similar response to Iraq unthinkable? Ara H. Merjian offers an explanation for the shift in tactics, along with examples of what the artistic community is doing instead.
Home Delivery: Martha Rosler’s Photomontages
Antiwar photomontages from Rosler’s "Bringing the War Home" series have appeared in both magazines and political broadsides over the past 40 years. Richard Meyer explores Rosler’s use of printed media as a means for protesting the war, a method she first employed during Vietnam, and is now revisiting in response to the conflict in Iraq.
Five Years and Counting
A portfolio showcasing contributions by artists, writers, and filmmakers, including Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Paul Chan, Liam Gillick, Jorie Graham, Jenny Holzer, Maryam Jafri, Jon Kessler, Zofia Kulic, Erik van Lieshout, Steve McQueen, Naeem Mohaiemen, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Michael Rakowitz, Collier Schorr, Hito Steyerl, and Jalal Toufic.
Display Tactics: Political Curating
Tirdad Zolghadr offers an incisive critique of the recent spate of international art exhibitions that have addressed the Iraq war and the global "war on terror." From "Memorial to the Iraq War," at London’s Tate Modern to "Meanwhile in Baghdad…" at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, exhibitions of political art are being mounted in increasing numbers; Zolghadr explores the political and artistic motivations behind such curatorial choices, and the very effectiveness of the art itself.
Matthew Collings on the paintings of Gary Wragg and his former student
Peter Doig.
Michael Atkinson on Hollywood’s Iraq-inspired big-budget war movies.
Tom Vanderbilt on high-tech developments in the design of camouflage
Los Angeles: Alan Koch on Michael Asher at Santa Monica Museum; New York: Eva Diaz on Tom Burr at SculptureCenter, NYC; London: Sarah Kent on "Laughing in a Foreign Language," at the Hayward Gallery; Sydney: Ara H. Merjian on Sidney Nolan at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Plus: Boston, Austin, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Montreuil
Jenni Sorkin on Thinking Through Craft, by Glenn Adamson, copublished by Berg Publishers and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Thom Donovan on Undeserving Lebanon, by Jalal Toufic, published by Forthcoming Books
Claire Barliant writes on artist Rachel Mason’s ongoing project "The Ambassadors," for which the artist has sculpted 108 small figurines of political leaders from each side of a war that took place during every year of her life beginning with the year she was born: 1978.