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P.S. The Constellation on Cartographies, originally planned for August, had to be postponed. Look for it in October!

From the Counter Cartographies Collective to the Body Cartography Project, the drawing and re-drawing of maps has recently experienced a renaissance. In Quodlibetica’s August issue, we are looking for contributions that engage with contemporary and historical, critical and creative cartographies. Send your ideas for the Cartographies issue by July 1st to <quodlibetica@gmail.com <mailto:quodlibetica@gmail.com>>. Draft essays of 800-1600 words in length will be due by July 16th.

Branden Martz, Cardigan: General Custer’s Last Stag Hound (2009).

An Arrangement of Skins

Struck by a slew of exhibits invested in the relationships among art, science and wonder, we have devoted Quodlibetica’s June constellation to that very intersection. From electricity to the spark of creativity, taxidermy to taxonomy, Greek myth to digital manipulation, this constellation speculates on just how manifold art’s interactions with science can be.

To name just a few of the individual points in this constellation: Tom Haakenson’s piece on exhibitions at the Bell Natural History Museum suggests three media alternatives for use in getting at the stuff of life.  Diane Mullins’s contribution continues the Benjaminian conversation on technical reproducibility, asking whether media’s new digital ubiquity constitutes a qualitative revolution or merely a quantitative sea change.

Furthering our mission of printing writing that we like but can’t define, we invited art and science groover Dia Felix, who spends her days in San Francisco’s Exploratorium, to contribute a piece on the scientific origin of inspiration. The resulting piece, part free verse, part interview is – how do you say? – inspired. In a Quodlibetica first, we commissioned our intern and College of Visual Art graduate Jake Ramberg to rush illustrations for the piece, and in the spirit of keeping all data, we have printed them both.

In this issue, we welcome our new co-editor, Thomas O. Haakenson, Chair and Associate Professor of the Liberal Arts Department at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Haakenson, previously a contributing writer, now joins editors Christina Schmid and Collier White to broaden our editorial voice while furthering a spirit of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary cooperation.

- Christina Schmid and Collier White

–Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

Art and science take center stage in Quodlibetica’s June constellation, which seeks to cover a wide range of interactions, confrontations, and identifications of and with science and indeed art. We plan to cover “Shedding Light: Art Explores Science” at the Phipps, a group show curated by Susan Armington; at the Bell Museum of Natural History, “A Forest, an Archive,” a show which promises to intersperse contemporary art—from John Bell’s enigmatic specimen paintings to taxidermic sculpture by Branden Martz—with the Museum’s collection; the elusive rogue taxidermists of Northeast Minneapolis; and a piece on photographer David Goldes.

Wherever your interest in art and science may take you—from Electric Sheep, Black Shoals, genetically engineered gardenias and glowing bunnies, to alchemy, artillery, or Orgone boxes—do let us know. We’d love to have you on board.

About midway through Colum McCann’s 2009 National Book Award winning novel, Let the Great World Spin, we meet a pair of conceptual artists, Blaine and Laura. They drive the mysterious black car that extinguishes the novel’s Christ figure in a hit and run accident. Later, McCann has Andy Warhol wander through, looking for a rent boy. McCann’s hostility toward conceptual artists is so commonplace that it wouldn’t bear mentioning, but his novel has so conquered the middlebrow consciousness that it was praised hourly on public radio as we began assembling the Fakeries and Fabulations issue of Quodlibetica.

We don’t need to remind our readers that art describes many things, not just the development of media and their potential, but the creation of alternative ways of seeing and thinking. In this issue, we are moving beyond craftmanship, stepping over the masters of form, and giving the content of conceptual art its due.

The resulting essays range from Jan Estep’s cogent and careful defense of the abstracted ideals behind conceptual art to Emily Atchison’s “On Being Duped,” a startlingly honest tonal tribute to an especially mystifying installation at the Walker, where the opaque and corporeal work intersects with the ego of the spectator. Adjunct art college instructor Ed Charbonneau examines the fraudulence inherent in pedagogy as he inverts a familiar student nightmare. Despairing of art’s falling currency with an increasingly apathetic public, Sheila Dickinson surveys the work of culture-jammers Hasan Elahi and The Yes Men.

In keeping with our commitment to foreign correspondence, we bend time and space to fill out the remainder of our slots. Tom Haakenson writes about Dada and resurrects Nietzsche in the context of 21st-century Munich. Editor Christina Schmid sends us a “wish you were here” from conceptual art utopia, Grace, MN. And in a dispatch that may come from another world entirely, Jake Ramberg, in “Antique Fables & Fairytoys,” takes an implicating trip through heir apparent David Sollie’s presentation of advertisements from his grandfather’s defunct company, The Shackway Corporation.

In conjunction with this issue, we are hosting a Quodlibetica first: we will be screening a 35mm print of the Orson Welles’ classic art documentary F for Fake at Trylon Microcinema on Sunday April 4th. You can decide for yourself whether the film is genre-busting, myth-busting or truth-busting. Certainly, it challenges notions of expertise and mastery in the art world.

Click here to proceed to the issue.

For more information about our F for Fake screening, click here. To buy tickets, click here.

Contributors to Constellation 7 include Tom Haakenson, who will write about Dada’s contribution to fabulation, and Sheila Dickinson, who will write about The Yes Men and conceptual artist Hassan Elahi. Jan Estep and Emily Atchison will take opposite sides of a more general discussion on conceptual art, while Ed Charbonneau will talk about pedagogical fraudulence. We will also have studio visits with Marcus Young and David Sollie.

We would like to take this opportunity to extend congratulations to Jan Estep, who was recently awarded a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Estep last wrote for Quodlibetica issue 5 about animal cruelty in the name of art.

In this issue of Quodlibetica, we investigate the material paths that art has taken on its way to our eyes. Our magazine – in its local and international focus, in its selection of themes, and in its use of digital reproductions – participates in one of fine art’s greatest illusions: the illusion that erases the material circumstances by which art reaches us. As means of production and reproduction have changed many of the rules of the game, one cardinal rule often remains: the process by which art is authorized on its way to our eyes must be obscured.

In general, viewers want their experience of art to be simultaneously subjective and universally approved. Foundations, galleries, and museums assure the public of the significance of this or that work. The path that most contemporary artists take – education by institution, creation by generous grant, and showing by selection of docent or curator – increasingly replicates the claims of a marketplace. Art’s own survival becomes proof of its significance. The marketplace will invisibly eliminate art that does not merit our attention.

Yet even as the grant process increasingly concentrates power in the hands of a few foundations, there are exceptions to the rules. There are renegades and alliances.

In this issue, we’ve invited museum director Kristin Makholm to write about her own museum. A trustee of that museum, Bill Wittenbreer, comments at length on the significance of one of its paintings, while another, George Slade, offers pictures from the MMAA vault, photos that reflect a search for “shelf life,” for the vitality of a collection in suspended animation.

Christopher Atkins, who directs the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Art pleads for your trust as he recapitulates recent adventures in conflict of interest.

In our own pieces, co-editors Christina Schmid and I have inserted ourselves into the frame. Schmid explores a personal experience with a painting in Austria. I have written about work by Marjorie Schlossman, an abstract expressionist painter who is a friend of my mother’s.

Fine art can snub these personal connections and responses, an attitude meant to shun the provincial, the local and the community in favor of greatness. But this attitude is disingenuous and inaccurate to the way most of us experience art.

I would argue that these unauthorized paths become even more important as digital reproduction again encroaches the personal experience of art. Tom Haakenson updates Walter Benjamin’s seminal “Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”, and Patricia Briggs checks out “Benches and Binoculars” at the Walker Art Museum.

Ultimately, we want to celebrate the many ways that art reaches us, to undermine the assumption of any centralized art authority in favor of a plurality of modes of making meaning and of seeing, and to remember that no matter who has lately slain them, the great ideas in art never die; they just go in and out of fashion. Let us not only skim the surface of contemporary art’s waves, but dive deep into the simultaneity that is available in a world of art.

-Collier White

January 2010

Featured artists include:

Amelia Biewald, Allen Brewer, Andrea Carlson, Eric Carlson, Serena Cole, Erin Currie, Jennifer Davis, Samantha French, Ben Garthus, Greg Gossel, Lindsy Halleckson, Noah Harmon, Bethany Kalk, Keren Kroul, Alex Kuno, Kit Lane, John Largaespada, Chris Larson, Rob McBroom, MouseSaw, Erika Olson, Terrence Payne, Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Liseli Polivka, Cory Prahl, Amy Rice, Joseph Rizzo, Joe Sinness, Kurtis Skaife, Lindsay Smith, Sean Smuda, Scott Stulen, Angela Strassheim, Sean Tubridy, Deuce Seven, Pamela Valfer and John Vogt

DJ Double Trouble will be spinning tunes throughout the evening.

At Soo Visual Arts Center
2640 Lyndale Avenue South, Minneapolis
Saturday, January 23, 2010 7pm-11pm CASH BAR
Advance Tickets: $20 for members | $25 Tickets at the door: $35

Ana Lois-Borzi, Very Very Funny

Death is an ideal subject for art: marginalized, terrifying, and ultimate. In our second constellation, Quodlibetica looks at death in contemporary art and invites writers and artists to talk about death, art, and ethics: Jan Estep questions whether killing animals can ever be justifiable in the name of art, while Collier White visited with Pamela Valfer, an artist who draws and works with dead animals. Patricia Briggs explores death and violence, kept at a distance, in Roxanne Jackson’s work. In our portfolio, Ana Lois-Borzi explores death up close, in a grieving process mediated by art. Christina Schmid focuses on angels and road movies, staples of American folklore, in current and recent shows at Franklin Artworks and form + content, while Collier White’s reviews of Antichrist and The Box dive into pop culture’s lingering obsession with death. Read more at Quodlibetica.com.