In This Issue: Remediations: Re-Viewing Art

Abstract

In This Issue: Remediations? Re-Viewing Art Under the direction of executive editor Lenore Malen, guest editors John G. Hanhardt and Maria Christina Villase?or dedicated the entire Winter 1995 issue of Art Journal to the topic of video art. Ushered in by a brief and volatile history of production and innovation, the artform was by the mid1990s proliferating dramatically, with artists' videos in museums and international exhibitions?a decisive coming of age for video art. Yet Hanhardt and Villase?or lamented an insufficiency of rigorous theorization and critical discourse on the medium. Following another decade of startling growth of video and multimedia projects and installations, Art Journal reexamines video's temporal, errant, and mutable character in a thematic investigation sensitively organized by Yvonne Spielmann. She has strategically assembled essays by Sean Cubitt, Jean Gagnon, Christine Ross, and herself that together examine, from an international perspective, the significant innovations and pioneering artists of this technology and medium while indirectly speculating on its future. These thoughtful essays confirm that, in spite of its initial marginal critical reception, video art has had striking and substantial consequences for contemporary art. To document multiple perspectives on the role of the university art museum, Art Journal editorial board members Anna Hammond and John Paul Ricco organized a forum at the 2006 College Art Association Annual Conference. Eight museum directors and curators offered thoughtful insights and illuminating experiences on the distinctive missions and features, the promising roles and responsibilities of pedagogically-sited art institutions. I extend sincere thanks to Hammond for proposing this timely examination and for her superb work editing the transcript of the spirited conversation. The issue begins and concludes with independent essays. With eloquent pre cision, Frazer Ward examines the paradoxical performance work of Tehching Hsieh from 1978 to 1999. Living in the United States until 1988 as an illegal alien, the artist created five one-year performances of prolonged, repetitious, restrictive, and often numbing activities that resisted ideas of personal circumstance and subjectiv ity while raising unsetding and shockingly prescient questions about the economic, juridical, political, and documentary systems of exclusion and immigration, alien ation and assimilation. With intellectual levity, Reva Wolf considers another kind of paradoxical production and its relevance for art and art history. Examining a single episode of The Simpsons with engaging intricacy and infectious pleasure, Wolf pon ders the barbecue pit as readymade, Homer's indulgence in fluid and formless installation art, and Homer and Marge's fraught and frustrating visit to the Spring sonian Museum. Questioning all categorical dependability?in art, popular culture, and life?Wolf advocates for a dialectics of conviction with doubt (and humor) as an imperative of intellectual inquiry and the interpretation of contemporary art. To echo central insights of the university-art-museum conversation?and as the other contributors to this issue demonstrate?we must vigilantly seek to embrace concurrent commitments to experience and analyze all that we can about art, and to explore, extend, and advocate for its capacity to connect us to the world. EL