Spending Time / Wasting Time: In Praise of Boredom and Confusion (Part I)

by A.R. Warwick , Summer 2011 The birth of the idea of boredom is contemporary with that of modernity. The rise of industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created repetitive, tedious labor for the lower classes and increasing periods of leisure for the upper classes. In nineteenth-century literature boredom developed into a sense of…

Museum Education and the Pedagogic Turn

by Michelle Millar Fisher , Summer 2011 Beginning in the 1970s and exploding in use recently, curators and artists have claimed the terms “discursive turn” and “pedagogy” to describe elements of their practice within museums. From Institutional Critique (Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser) through the loose associations of New Institutionalism (Charles Esche’s multifarious projects at Van…

The Single-Channel Fallacy and Other Myths About Curating Video Art

by Corinna Kirsch , Summer 2011 In a recent show at MoMA, video art received less-than-preferential treatment, exhibited in a wedge-like corridor between an elevator and a wall. This thin walkway disguised as an exhibition acted as a curatorial dumping ground for video, a common fate for this difficult-to-exhibit form. Although video’s become a well-historicized…

Mere Mortals: Myth and the Mundane in Pasolini’s Neorealist Film

by Anna Khachiyan , Summer 2011 If the restoration of mythical stature to everyday life is to become a cultural agenda it demands the guidance of an equally mythical persona. On the continent, such a role was primarily filled by Pierpaolo Pasolini (1922-1975), Italy’s most prominent auteur after Fellini and Antonioni, but one who has…

Murakami: That Obscure Object of Desire

by Lucy Cantwell , Summer 2011 As a world famous artist who works partly by mimicking the commercialism he sees around us, collaborations by Takashi Murakami can be expected. It was after all his work with Louis Vuitton in 2003 that set him on the international stage, suddenly appealing to those who didn’t even know…

A Letter from the Editor

by Danny Kopel , Summer 2011 Dear Reader, The last few months, the short quarter since our relaunch this past spring, have been some of our most generative. Looking through the archive, I realize that the work we’ve published in this window of time has been some of our strongest, in large part due to…