4.10 / House of Cards

4.28

/ From the Archives: Shotgun!

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4.27

/ From the Archives: Crafts and Arts

August 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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4.25

/ From the Archives: Worse Than Queer

August 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…

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4.26 / A Day for Detroit

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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4.24

/ From the Archives: Instability

August 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.

4.23 / From the Archives: Close Encounters

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…

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4.22 / From the Archives: Political Now

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.

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4.21 / From the Archives: Crosstraining

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…

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4.20 / From the Archives: Photo-Sensitive

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…

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4.19 / From the Archives: The Glories of the Possible are Ours

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…

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4.18 / From the Archives: No Roadmap

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…

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4.17 / The Fourth Year

June 13, 2013. For my fourth birthday, my father took me to the Meadowlands racetrack in New Jersey, where we bet on the fourth horse, which won. Afterwards, he took me to a pub and bought me a Shirley Temple with the winnings. I recall a midday drunk leaning across the bar and saying “Forty-four! You don’t look old enough.” It is a very happy memory, and four has been my favorite number ever since. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that this…

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4.16 / The Museum, Part 1: The Mutable Object

May 30, 2013. As the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive begins construction on its new home in downtown Berkeley, and as the pending three-year closure of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on June 2 is just days away, the expected radical spatial reconfiguration of each institution has prompted an increasing level of conversation, speculation, and even anxiety among the audiences for both. Just as these museums' edifices will be permanently altered or relocated, so too will our recognition of and…

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4.15 / Commencement

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…

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4.14 / Outer Spaces

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…

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4.13 / Of Monsters and Memes

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…

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