Year Six in Review

Each March we mark our founding by reflecting on our previous year as we continue to experiment with our form in order to push forward discussions on artist-led action and the latent potential it carries to transform our art worlds, our institutions, our means of expression and ourselves.

For our five year anniversary last March, we organized a retrospective exhibition, Document V,  at The Luminary in St. Louis, which included commissioned public performances, web-based interventions, site-specific readings and immaterial actions from past collaborators and contributors. Document V was followed with To Make a Public: Temporary Art Review 2011-2016, a selected anthology of the first five years of the online publication and a catalogue of the exhibition. The wide-ranging book was released in December 2016 by Institute for New Connotative Action Press with special events in New York City, Baltimore, Helsinki, New Orleans, North Little Rock, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Berlin, Seattle, Zagreb and Oslo.

We are pleased to share that To Make a Public: Temporary Art Review 2011-16 is now in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), LACMA, Smithsonian Museum, School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum and more! One of the central motivations for the book was not only to reflect on Temporary Art Review as a project, but have the work of the artist-centric practices discussed and archived in multiple forms both on and offline and we are excited to see it spread and collected widely. Help us share this evolving history by connecting us with university and institutional collections and pick up a copy for yourself. To Make a Public is available directly from INCA Press in North America and Motto in Europe.

While To Make a Public archives the first five years of Temporary Art Review, we are also marking our next five years with a new logo with a finite lifespan. Considering the ephemerality of artists’ publications and the incomplete itineraries of an archival project, this logo will gradually fade each year losing weight over time – but gaining momentum toward a yet unknown future.

In 2016, major topical features included Co_Temporaries: Of the Present Time, which considered propositions on alternate timelines and slowing down the art world as a means of care, resistance, or survival; a partnership with Cultural ReProducers to focus on parent-artists and related topics; and a collection of articles discussing Alternative Pedagogy. Additionally, we worked with Common Field and The Miami Rail to publish Field Perspectives: Art Organizing within Accelerated Capitalisms, a series of essays that addressed core themes of the 2016 Common Field convening in Miami including Accelerated Capitalism, Gentrification, Transitions, and Criticality. Field Perspectives is now available as a PDF for download.

And finally, we marked the last few tumultuous months as a Transition, echoing the waiting implied in Gramsci’s interregnum: an indeterminate time in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” As ever, Temporary continues to create a space for discussion across disparate communities, respond to issues that artists and arts organizers are concerned about in the present moment, and attempt to understand how equitable exchange in the arts could be modeled, matured and embedded in our daily practices. We continue to link outward, oriented towards an uncertain future, while attempting to learn and unlearn the present. We continue to write, research, commission, and circulate with the urgency of rebirth.
As we stated on inauguration day: There is no longer non-political art.
We would adjoin to this: There is no non-political publication.