Despite its many shortcomings, language allows for considerable precision: with quasi-mathematical clarity, English verb tenses discriminate between past actions that are truly over and those actions that still have an impact on the present, either by resulting in an ongoing state of affairs or by acute symptoms. (“I have been painting” would be the correct way to account for my actions if I were to open the door, splattered in color, and met your inquisitive eyes.) But the twin knives of beauty and precision, carving the world into manageable portions, excel at obfuscating what falls outside the realm of the sensible and the curious profundities we encounter on the cusp of meaning.

Artists who venture to this edge travel different routes: from sound poetry’s auditory abstractions, to the marvelous world of morphemes, to glitches in muscle memory that transform familiar words, poets and word artists mine happy accidents and accidental coinages. On the level of the sentence, projects like the “frequency poetry generator,” Flarf (discussed by Elisabeth Workman in this constellation) or various forms of cut-ups and verbal assemblage effectively escape the corset of grammar and produce a language running wild with possibilities. Artists try to get lost in translation, defy the demands of linear storytelling—as in the intriguing piece of electronic literature, 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (To Be Played With The Left Hand) by David Carr—and, with varying degrees of subtlety, open up spaces in our minds: language may delimit our world, but there is no good reason whatsoever to stay put or to yield to the imperative to make sense.

Quodlibetica, as a word and a project, is no passive, impartial bystander in such negotiations. We stretched and tweaked quodlibet to not only encompass its conventional meanings–a proposition for discussion, the actual discussion, or, in music, the whimsical combination of different elements—but adulterated it to refer to visual culture and art, before adding an ending that suggests both plurality and playfulness. As a project, open-ended and evolving, Quodlibetica continues to hover between the rigor and occasional unwieldiness of academic prose, the joy of intellectual engagement that seeks to transform the curious experiences we have with art into words, and bridge, as much as we can, the distance between makers and thinkers, criticism and community. The point, if there is one, lies in mining the possibilities of the in-between, of cherishing the nameless piece of prose that is neither scholarship nor journalism, neither fiction nor memoir.

Does it make sense to do that? Probably not. But that is precisely the reason we keep doing it.

Wildly,

Erica

From the unexpectedly profound typo to the meta-meanings of flarf, this constellation mines the spaces in between words, meanings, and typography. Wildly Erika–that is, “quodlibetica,” auto-corrected by itouch–serves as the starting point for word art: connections, connotations, and commotion, stutters, stammers, splutters, and letters at play.

Key Dates for Contributors:
1 March 2012      Deadline for Proposals (100 words or less)

15 March 2012    Deadline for Submissions (750-2250 words; posted to Google  Docs; invite quodlibetica@gmail.com to share)

23 March 2012    Revision Suggestions and Other Comments from Editor

29 March 2012    Final Essay and 3-4 Accompanying Images; if a New Contributor, submit Biographical Blurb (3-4 sentences) and Author’s Photo

1 April 2012        Constellation 19 is Launched

Constellation 20: Re: identity

Proposal Due to quodlibetica@gmail.com: May 1.

Whatever happened to identity politics, that oft maligned way of organizing, thinking, and theorizing? Given the recent resurgence of feminism, suspicions of lingering double standards and resilient boys’ clubs, immigration issues and tokenism, we wonder how artists today take on identity: Do they disrupt the old politics, or does any discourse on identity still need to be rooted in the identity politics of race, class, gender and so on? Do queer, nomadic, virtual, and generally unreliable identifications promise more complicated, messier art, or are such orchestrated disruptions simply a case of the emperor’s new clothes?

Key Dates for Contributors:
1 May 2012          Deadline for Proposals (100 words or less)

15 May 2012        Deadline for Submissions (750-2250 words; posted to Google Docs; invite quodlibetica@gmail.com to share)

23 May 2012        Revision Suggestions and Other Comments from Editor

29 May 2012        Final Essay and 3-4 Accompanying Images; if a New Contributor, submit Biographical Blurb (3-4 sentences) and Author’s Photo

1 June 2012        Constellation 19 is Launched

In Quodibetica’s eighteenth constellation, The Icy Issue, we invited our contributors to think about place: art on view here and now, but also place as landscape, concept, problem.

Lightsey Darst and the artists running One Room Schoolhouse reflect on two of this year’s Art Shanties on frozen Medicine Lake. Andy Sturdevant’s “Word on the Weather” takes us on thin ice, too, when he contemplates Paula McCartney’s recent book of photograms entitled On Thin Ice, In A Blizzard. Lest we begin to feel chilly, Marsha Olson proposes a trip to St. Paul’s Marjorie McNeely Conservatory to ease winter woes, while Thomas Haakenson spent some time warming up by the fireplaces in the Turnblad Mansion, home of the American Swedish Institute’s current wood carving exhibit.

Thinking about place and our relationship to it, we asked Mason Riddle to share her thoughts on two recent shows with us, “Regarding Place” and “Power and Place” at the Nash Gallery. And finally, Christina Schmid was fortunate to get an early look at Megan Vossler’s “Overlook: Landscape Studies,” soon to open at Macalester College.

If you like what you see on the site and want to get involved, please take a look at the calls for contributing to our April and June issues below. We’d love to hear from you!

Image: Paula McCartney, photogram from On Thin Ice, In A Blizzard.

Call for Constellation 19: Wildly Erika: Fun With Word Art
Proposals Due to quodlibetica@gmail.com: March 1.

From the unexpectedly profound typo to the meta-meanings of flarf, this constellation mines the spaces in between words, meanings, and typography. Wildly Erika–that is, “quodlibetica,” auto-corrected by itouch–serves as the starting point for word art: connections, connotations, and commotion, stutters, stammers, splutters, and letters at play.

Key Dates for Contributors:
1 March 2012      Deadline for Proposals (100 words or less)

15 March 2012    Deadline for Submissions (750-2250 words; posted to Google  Docs; invite quodlibetica@gmail.com to share)

23 March 2012    Revision Suggestions and Other Comments from Editor

29 March 2012    Final Essay and 3-4 Accompanying Images; if a New Contributor, submit Biographical Blurb (3-4 sentences) and Author’s Photo

1 April 2012        Constellation 19 is Launched

Call for Constellation 20: Re: identity
Proposal Due to quodlibetica@gmail.com: May 1.

Whatever happened to identity politics, that oft maligned way of organizing, thinking, and theorizing? Given the recent resurgence of feminism, suspicions of lingering double standards and resilient boys’ clubs, immigration issues and tokenism, we wonder how artists today take on identity: Do they disrupt the old politics, or does any discourse on identity still need to be rooted in the identity politics of race, class, gender and so on? Do queer, nomadic, virtual, and generally unreliable identifications promise more complicated, messier art, or are such orchestrated disruptions simply a case of the emperor’s new clothes?

Key Dates for Contributors:
1 May 2012          Deadline for Proposals (100 words or less)

15 May 2012        Deadline for Submissions (750-2250 words; posted to Google Docs; invite quodlibetica@gmail.com to share)

23 May 2012        Revision Suggestions and Other Comments from Editor

29 May 2012        Final Essay and 3-4 Accompanying Images; if a New Contributor, submit Biographical Blurb (3-4 sentences) and Author’s Photo

1 June 2012        Constellation 19 is Launched

On-line via Facebook, Rene Meyer-Grimberg and Thomas Haakenson paid a visit to Air Sweet Air, an ambitious new art space run by Cheryl Wilgren-Clyne, in St. Paul. On the other side of the river, Stephanie Xenos talked to Wing Young Huie about The Third Space in South Minneapolis. And moving beyond, Jonathan Kaiser takes us from alternative spaces to alternative models of art-making in his far-ranging reflection on artist collectives and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Meanwhile, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Jen Caruso spent time with the MAEP’s latest, the three-person exhibition entitled “Semblances,” while Christina Schmid was busy thinking about Rachel Breen, beetle beans, and Andrea Bowers.

Enjoy!

As Jan Estep points out in her observations of the night, many of us felt that we had only scratched the surface—which is why we plan to continue talking about art and design education on October 16, 2011. Stay tuned for details.

We thank our panelists for this first salon experiment—Aaron Van Dyke, Ana Lois-Borzi, Patricia Briggs (who represented a model developed in collaboration with Monika Haller), Jan Estep, Wing Young Huie, Tucker Hollingsworth, and Brandon Regner—and everyone who attended and participated in the conversation!

On a different note, we want to take a moment to thank Collier White for his creative and critical contributions to Quodlibetica. This September, he decided to pursue other projects, and we wish him the best in his new adventures.

Andy DuCett starts us off by heading “Elsewhere” in the east, a literal place in North Carolina where one can make art. Susan Armington jumps “the pond” to go unconscious in the Netherlands, where she participates in a dream art workshop. Tom Haakenson then tries to wake us up in Berlin, where he documents a dismaying trend in relational aesthetics. From there, Christina Schmid heads south, hitting the high-speed rails to the Venice Biennale. Collier White looks for meaning in the heavens-gazing zombie miasma, and finds a new primitivism in emerging representations from Mali to Thailand. Bringing our summer travels full-circle, in our first student-written essay, Adrienne Czech visits a Russian Art museum, albeit the one here in Minneapolis.

Finally, we editors acknowledge an important detour in this summer travel constellation: We have decided to leave blank a space where an interview with an artist in China should have appeared. The artist, fearing political repercussions, withdrew permission to be interviewed for Quodlibetica. Writer Emily Atchison regretfully complied with this act of self-repression. As did we. By not speaking or writing about the art and artists tenuously located in this particular somewhere else, we editors hope this blank space makes us more aware of why art still matters.

In this constellation of Quodlibetica, we contributors and editors take you beyond the line, behind the surface, and through the looking glass.

We explore the changing cultural role of the book and the lingering appeal of book arts. From book makers to book matters, from translators to typesetters, lovers and critics of the book unfold themselves in these ephemeral sheets.

These loudly silent voices speculate on how to translate the practices associated with the book arts and artists books beyond the discreet object, beyond the singular page, beyond the plenitude of the isolated thought.

And Quodlibetica begins a new chapter of its own. Co-editor Collier White introduces, with his essay on short film, a space reserved in each constellation for time-based work: short, experimental, narrative, and beyond.

Enjoy this constellation, Alice. We hope you find something magical in these thick, digital pages.

–The editors.

It might be easy to think of “art criticism” as an inherent partner to “art practice”: Without art criticism there would be no art, and without art, there would be no art critic. And indeed an art critic can be an artist’s best ally—and is often the only one who really cares about the artist’s work.

In this constellation, we authors and editors of Quodlibetica explore, extol, and examine the role of the arts writer: As critic, as curmudgeon, as catalyst for conversation. To rephrase another famous, and perhaps more sinister quote, “Fasten your seat belt. It’s going to be a bumpy write.”

But this chicken-and-egg approach misses the point of art criticism. Art criticism is an historical profession—and, for many, an historically “not-for-profit” one. Our ability, our interest, our need to reflect on art through words and ideas is deeply indebted to and imbeded in the democratic functioning of a post-feudal society. It is also a process of creating asynchronous communities beyond the spatial and temporal limitations of the art works themselves. To these ends, see Jonathan Franzen’s powerfully melancholic title essay in his anthology How To Be Alone to these ends.

Without art criticism, we may still have objects called “art,” but we would not have the accumulated and accumulating debates, discussions, dialogue about the meaning of these works. It is the art critic who curates meaning, not the work itself. The art critic is the archivist of art meaning. And the art critic’s gallery is always open—throughout historical time and beyond cyberspace.

Contemporary artists–particularly those with a penchant for all things “relational”–might object to the very existence of the art critic, suggesting that community art, public art, art “for the people, by the people”—and other pseudo-revolutionary aesthetic paradigms—actually bring art “directly” to the people. Such claims miss the point of the label “art” entirely. The work would disappear before it could be discussed as such.

If anything can be art, then we don’t need artists either. What disguises itself mischievously and voraciously as anti-intellectualism—especially and unfortunately on the part of practicing artists—is in actuality an inherent misunderstanding of art. Artists need art critics to create a conversation about the artwork, a conversation that is inherently explicit and social and historically far-reaching. Supposedly bringing art “directly” to the people makes the artist’s role redundant: If there is no “art” there is no “artist” needed to bring anything. Good luck putting that on your resume.

And although I may be different from others who voluntarily or involuntarily take on the label “art critic,” I think of myself as a huge fan of art. Most art critics do. The vocabulary of the image, the meat of the references, the odor of skilled technique: These are the conversations I have with artists and others through and in relation to the work. And without art I wouldn’t have them. And without these conversations, we–and the focus is the “we” here–wouldn’t have art.

While “Outsider art” has, of course, been admitted into the hallowed halls of prestigious museums and is very much part of the “inside” of the contemporary art system, that does not resolve the issue of how outsides and outsiders continue to be produced: consider, for instance, the recent controversy surrounding David Wojnarowicz’s work at the National Portrait Gallery—examined here by Lauren DeLand; or, closer to home, the unresolved—and possibly irresolvable—opinions voiced at a panel discussion on Minnesota identity in the arts last fall, summarized by Shannon Gilley.

Whether nationally or locally, the question of whose work counts as insider art or, in contrast, is relegated to the outside, still matters. Our contributors explore art’s role in locations other than galleries and museums, from coffee shops to public art, and investigate what happened to the famous dictum that “everyone is an artist.” Enjoy.

Someone — no one knows who, really — once said, “writing about art is a bit like dancing about architecture.” The expression seems oddly apropos given the role that space plays in this constellation on public art. After all, isn’t dancing without space a bit like art without thinking?

And think about the space of public art we do in this, our eleventh constellation, of Quodlibetica.

Our eight-plus contributors interrogate and sometimes celebrate the role that public art plays in creating spaces for reflection, for commerce, and for criticism. From bodacious beavers with generous genitals to painterly pizza parlors, our contributors in this constellation examine the best — and the worst — of public art in the Twin Cities and beyond.

Some of our contributions are decidedly positive–or, at least, optimistic. For example, Sarah Schultz and her colleagues examine the Walker Art Center’s recent public art project, Open Field. Others of our contributors are less positive — and perhaps even down-right frustrated — with the uncritical populism that supposedly justifies much public art today. Collier White laments the garishness that substitutes for art in his no-holds-barred criticism of a number of public projects, from Claes Oldenberg and Coose van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry, to the infamous Bemidji beaver named Gaea, to the bronzed shoes titled Personal Journeys on the Greenway Trail, to the Joe Mauer statues that litter downtown Minneapolis. And Sheila Dickinson and Thomas O. Haakenson engage in a debate about Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas on “relational aesthetics”: a theory, a focus on form, a radical rethinking, a reactionary individualism?

As Christina Schmid notes in her essay, “public art is a kind of symbolic intervention in public space.” But some of us are sure to disagree as to whether that intervention benefits the public at all. Enjoy.

–Thomas O. Haakenson