Miguel Gutierrez. Age & Beauty Part 2, 2015; performance view, January 14, 2015, Abrons Arts Center, New York. Photo: Ian Douglas.

I’ve just deleted the three hundred words I’d written to start this month’s column, which covers a fraction of the myriad festivals, showings, showcases, etc., mushrooming up around the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York.

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with these words, which talked about the “show-must-go-on New York performance crisis” and how exhausted and overwhelmed everyone is by the whole magnificently underfunded circus. The system is distressingly fucked, has been for years.

It’s just that, well, I wrote about these same exact things in 2012, and then again last year. And while the “system” in which individual artists and tiny, overburdened arts organizations subsidize much of the glittery, crummy situation remains just as gross (indeed, artist fatigue/budget malaise was a theme this year, courtesy of artists like Cynthia Hopkins, Miguel Gutierrez, and Jack Ferver), for 2015 I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about how generally lucky I felt—despite suffering through a few outright stinkers and while disagreeing with some of the politics on display—to be able to take all of this in during my personal audience odyssey. Twenty-two shows in twelve days, and almost all of them strong in parts or whole: Against all odds, or maybe in some unsavory yet exciting ways related to those odds, there is a wealth of vital, progressive, deeply valuable performance being made in America.

Read the full article here.

Contemporary Art Magazines Critical Reading Group meeting, April 27, 2015. Courtesy of Triangle, New York. Photo: Elena Levi.

A year and a half ago, my friend Clara and I emailed most people we knew in New York to see who may be interested in joining us in reading art magazines cover to cover. We called it the “Contemporary Art Magazines Critical Reading Group” (in hindsight, we should have named it something shorter, or at least have a better acronym than CAMCRG) and organized it via the Public School New York. The idea was to focus on a different art magazine at every session, and talk about the overall composition of any given issue, as well as specific articles, and the larger contribution a magazine makes or could make. We started with Artforum. It seemed like it would fit this methodology perfectly, since we all came to reading it cover to cover (for the first time, because really, who does that?) with a particular knowledge or opinion of the magazine, its history, its current status, and its style, and we all had certain expectations from it.

“Any surprises?” was the first thing we discussed in that initial meeting. I remember presuming that Artforum would be much more unequal and—sorry—boring than it was. The conversation very quickly veered from the lovely discovery that reading cover-to-cover is much more engaging than selective reading, to discussing the tone of writing in Artforum, the feeling that the magazine emphasizes a style and language that generates a sense of authority. Which brought about a discussion of how Artforum is actively writing the history of contemporary art—or at least, believes that’s what it does. That’s why the magazine opens with the obituaries, we laughed.

Read the full article here.