Monthly Archive: March 2023

Several of the texts and projects in this new issue of ARTMargins underscore the role of photography and performance in rendering visible our “ways of seeing” and what they occlude: forms of imagining and inhabiting urban space that are suppressed by official discourse, clandestine archives that simultaneously register and obfuscate the humanitarian crimes of the last Brazilian dictatorship, and deaths forgotten or naturalized as part of the AIDS epidemic, among others. The insistence of that which is alternately invisible and reified—illegible and overcoded— runs like a thread through this issue, raising questions about the nature and stakes of the interpretations … Read more

Exploring two major books on the visual and performance histories of the ongoing and historical AIDS crisis in the US and beyond—Brian Getnick’s edited volume Final Transmission and Avram Finkelstein’s firsthand account, After Silence—this review asks how we have come to contemplate and understand the intensities, losses, and absences of the AIDS catastrophe. Drawing on theories on death, dying, and the cultural expressions around them, the review puts pressure on the particular offerings of these two very different books, ultimately pulling out passionate moments of vulnerability and self-reflexivity in each book as the most effective and powerful ruminations on … Read more

This introductory study analyzes two key texts from the short-lived Argentine collective, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention, or AACI). Published in 1946 in the same issue of the group’s official organ, they collectively theorize the “co-planar,” the AACI’s key contribution to the history of abstract and concrete painting. While Maldonado’s text offers a historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the co-planar as the culmination of modernist investigations of the plane and the problem of composition, Hlito’s text outlines the understanding of Marxist materialism and dialectics that underpinned this particular take on the task of modernism.

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This article reviews two recent books on Chinese contemporary art, Sasha Welland’s Experimental Beijing (2018) and Jenny Lin’s Above Sea (2019), concerned with the sociopolitical contexts of the 1990s–2000s’ globalizing Beijing and Shanghai respectively. By examining the two authors’ respective methodologies—Welland’s ethnographical field research and Lin’s urban cultural research—, this article interprets how these two books shed light on the role of tensions in the intersectional global-local spaces of Chinese contemporary art. It argues that this field of art history necessitates the employment of non-art historical methodologies, as shown by the two books, in order to locate and make visible … Read more

The book, The Asian Modern, by John Clark (with an Introduction by the Manila-based critic and curator, Patrick Flores) seeks to construct a “cross-Asian” account through a detailed historical and empirical focus on 30 artists spanning Southeast, East, and South Asia, as well as Australia. At the core of the book is the premise that the given place, “Asia,” is the locus for a critique of the normative account of modernism tethered to another locale, identified by Clark as “Euramerica.” These focused geographic arenas provide the basis for novel itineraries, dynamic dispersals, and alternative sightlines that reject the conventional … Read more

This introductory study analyzes two key texts from the short-lived Argentine collective, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention, or AACI). Published in 1946 in the same issue of the group’s official organ, they collectively theorize the “co-planar,” the AACI’s key contribution to the history of abstract and concrete painting. While Maldonado’s text offers a historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the co-planar as the culmination of modernist investigations of the plane and the problem of composition, Hlito’s text outlines the understanding of Marxist materialism and dialectics that underpinned this particular take on the task of modernism.

ARTMargins Online… Read more