In This Issue: Aesthetic Practices

Abstract

In This Issue: Aesthetic Practices Art encourages us to seek the overlooked in the frequently examined. It questions why innovation hardens into orthodoxy. And it reveals that orthodoxy often opens paths to new possibilities. This issue of Art Journal is a discursive journey. It offers different perspectives on the relationship of innovation and orthodoxy, seeing and understanding. Most of us experience moments when an emerging pattern of ideas or phenomena seems inexplicably inevitable. At other instances, different trajectories and ideas appear and opportunistically mix and mingle. With all of its independent pieces, this issue offers a series of vivid encounters with the ways that art is created and disseminated, experienced and considered. This eclectic collection of reexaminations, reflections, and interventions represents art's resiliency and capacity for perpetual re-creation. Two art-historical essays reexamine, through single works, overlooked and significant moments in two artists' careers. Janine Mileaf speculates on the structure of confession in the work of Man Ray. She explores his legendary preoccupations with sadism and masochism, oscillations of power and identity, and creative and destructive impulses in his strategically and inadvertently ambiguous self-portrait. In a single summer, Joan Mir6 created a small series of drawing-collages that combined nostalgic early twentieth-century postcards with spare, spontaneous drawing. While many critics dismiss or overlook these works as playful diversions and personal distractions from the greater responsibilities of painting, Jordana Mendelson offers an alternative critical interpretation of the significant relationship of art, mass culture, politics, and Surrealism through Mir6's affectionate, if anxious, fascination with early twentieth-century postcards and pre-World War I popular culture.. Two interviews produce other narratives of reflection and immediacy. Joseph Nechvatal's conversation with the alternative art historian Frank Popper explores his intellectual paths and how they lead to his current research on virtual art. With passionate, yet balanced eloquence, Popper traces a fruitful melding of the technological and aesthetic that raises promising questions about the roles of artists, the processes of creative invention, the agency of spectators/participants, and the transformative potential of technology in art and life. And Ana Finel Honigman explores ideas of beauty, witnessing, history, and identity with artist Kutlug Ataman, whose spectacular work examines the content, omissions, embellishments, truth, and fictions of both official histories and personal stories. Shifting from scholarly articles and timely interviews, curator Nato Thompson has gathered a series of artists' projects for this publication. Continuing with questions of agency, pedagogy, and engagement explored in Upstaging Pedagogy in the Theater of Conflict, a panel at the 2003 College Art Association Conference, Thompson invited four artists and researchers to develop projects for the pages of Art Journal. While interrogating the impact of print-based media, these artists critically question our endless negotiation of truth and fiction, experience and imagination in a hypervisual world. Like the contents of this issue, StrategicVisuality offers a discursive look at the shifting historical and individual commiserations of seeing and knowing. There is no single path. Whatever routes you may choose, I hope that you enjoy the trip.