I Am For An Education
By Jan Estep
I am for an education that says “yes”—yes to learning, yes to art, yes to life.
I am for an education that helps students become aware of our own aesthetic, conceptual, and emotional gestures, to discover who we actually are.
I am for an education that helps students to be [...]
Art, Writing, Disciplinarity: The Political Potential of a Mixed Creative Practice
By Jan Estep
Early last fall the faculty of the art department where I teach got together to discuss how we might reorganize. Brought on chiefly by the ongoing budget cuts that are sharply shrinking our program, we wondered how might the six media areas be restructured; we currently are separated along traditional media lines into [...]
The Southern Land Not Fully Known: Naming Antarctica
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Latin words terra incognita began appearing on European maps to mark unknown lands. The term had existed at least since the first century AD when the ancient Roman astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy postulated a southern continent of the same name. A Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Geography, a treatise [...]
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Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?
People often react negatively when encountering conceptual art. Reactions range from the indifferent to the dismissive to the outright hostile. I am less concerned with those who indifferently walk on by looking for something else. Rather the actively aggressive naysayers who charge such art to be “inauthentic” and “insincere” bother me. They argue that certain [...]
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What does it mean to kill an animal in the name of art?
While I was visiting Finland in September I ran into two artist projects that involved the death of animals: Terike Haapoja’s video installation at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, titled Community, presents life-size video projections of real-time infrared images of the energy leaving the bodies of recently dead animals (see http://www.terikehaapoja.net/2009/). As the [...]
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On Disappearing
By Jan Estep
“When I go I leave no trace. The beauty of the country is becoming a part of me.”
—Everett Ruess (1914-1934)
“…an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
—Federal Wilderness Act, 1964
In the summer of 2001, I visited Davis [...]