The Year in Review

We end the year with a brief pause for reflection. 2014 has been among the most tumultuous of times, recorded both here and in art at large. What began unassumingly enough has splintered into a year of outrage: over police brutality and curatorial bias; Donelle Woolford and Darren Wilson; identity and assault; gentrification and placemaking; art degree debt and adjuncts organizing. Artists have been called out alongside critics, funders and flippant collectors. The audience of art has been questioned – Who do we speak to? Who do we serve? Nothing, seemingly, in the art world or the world beyond it was untouched by the tumult.

We began our year with a relaunch of our digital space and a reconsideration of our own form’s reflection of our vision and values, but we ended in the streets alongside a world on guard, in grief – a world unquiet. When we look back over a year of our writings, we see a record of some form, its shape snaking through one time and into the next.

So here is our year in review.
Our year in images.
Articles we proudly published.
The best we could do.
This is the 2014 we recorded.

To Make a Public: An Anti-Profit Publication

Temporary’s relaunch text that started off our reset year.

“The public space of the site is an expression of underlying ideals and we are intent on continuing to experiment with our own form in order to push forward the discussion on artist-led action and the latent potential it carries to transform our art worlds, our institutions, our means of expression and ourselves.”

Shannon Stratton, Can You Make Your Own MFA?

“It would seem a logical extension of art to interrogate the corporatization of its own dissemination, and to do so beyond art objects that merely critique the market (but are sold within them), through actions that take back the field of art from its increased remodeling into a commodity. Rather than purchase designer educations, why not fashion the spaces and values we want for art, for ourselves?”

Image: Sabrina Ratte

Rachel Reese, Futures – Art Writing

“We haven’t resolved out a comparable translation from print to digital experiences, and the standard conventions for reading “text” and reading “image” still seem to dominate publishing forms of art criticism…”

Cassie Thornton, Save the System 

“While the nation has chosen to turn away from school, why should we? What do we value? How can we demonstrate our values?

We will go to school. We will not pay.”

State of the Art: A Social Response

“State of the Art has been thoroughly dissected in one sense – as an anomaly in the art world given its context and perspective and as a much-touted narrative of curatorial research, travel and discovery – yet equally ignored as an exhibition with a unique public, complex goals and still evolving scope.”

Sarrita Hunn, How to…Make and (Alternative) Institution

“Inspired by Ad Reinhardt’s “How to Look at Art” series, “How to…Make an (Alternative) Institution” is an instructional activity cartoon that asks viewers to look at existing institutions in a new way, invent their own and negate those which are failing.”

Martha Raoli, Miami as Idiom

“If any city is poised to invent its own idiom, it is here.

In this sprawled out, inconclusive phrasing of a city.

If Miami were punctuation it would be a colon: porous and prophetic.”

Banner by Jelani Brown

Sarah Hermes Griesbach, The Ferguson Artrising

“The people at the core of this initial response were largely young people who were tinderboxes of frustrations, now sparked into action. They came day and night, again and again, to offer their bodies and voices as evidence of their demand for justice.”

Eutopia, Art Voice: Institutional and Social Critique

“Playing Civilization six hours per day during the Whitney Biennial 2014, Leclery huddles under a bridge, freezing while casually building and destroying worlds. Recontextualizing a long-time hobby Leclery’s isolated, time-intensive act of creation has had virtually no impact on the outside world, metaphorically paralleling many studio practices…Exiled from the galleries the outsider performance futilely besieges the museum and art productivity, while it’s Whitney inclusion sublimates the former act of escapism into suspicious legitimacy.

The Troll Bar in Fargo, ND, was one of the social gathering sites for the Plains Art Museum’s Central Time Centric.

Julia Cole, Occupy Yr Sopra

“Underlying the pressing global issues of racial, economic and environmental injustice we can recognize the divisive strategies of hierarchical power structures, and seductive invitations to VIP membership: money, social privilege and ideological validation for example. It was surprisingly easy to see parallels between our hegemonic social condition and the critical art community that gathered at Central Time Centric.”

Photo: Adam Carr’s blog Milwaukeeier Than Thou, www.milwaukier-than-thou.tumblr.com

Brad Fiore, Rephrasing an Old Parable

“The alternative is understood to refer to that which lies outside of the mainstream, potentially including everything from RC cola and Libertarianism to bringing your own reusable bags to the supermarket. However, history has informed our understanding of this term to indicate something more specific, and while difficult to pinpoint, the concept sits comfortably in our collective conscious…The fact that readers are able to understand otherwise nonsensical utterances like “Milwaukee is the New Portland,” is a testament to the embeddedness of the concept in our society.”

Caroline Woolard, NYCTBD: An Artist-Led Land Trust

“How can I, a thirty year old artist who is surrounded by unemployment, soaring rents and a graduating class of 100,000 creative debtors each year in this nation, dream about belonging to one neighborhood for life?”

James McAnally, The Hand that Takes

A first-hand account of our editor’s arrest and detention at a peaceful protest following the no-indictment decision of Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO on November 25th, 2014. This is the year we experienced and the one we recorded.