Art and Architecture

Cárdenas engages the arid landscape, the dead tree, the dried-out wood, and sculpts into existence a beginning—a way into the future eked out of a barren present.

Today, the poster is rarely, if ever, remembered for its relationship to the Cattle Baron, despite the name printed prominently in the bottom right corner. Instead, in museums and academic papers, Facebook posts and news outlets, it is referred to as a “feminist protest poster” by “anonymous.”

What initially appears to be a dialogue between geometric form, architectural allusion, and figuration transforms into a preadolescent coup d’état by scythe qua jumprope. It is, after all, Baghdad’s people that will make it modern, not shapes on canvasses.

Perceptive critics noted early on that Serra’s sculpture only made sense in relation to its time and place and gave meaning only to those specific conditions against which it unfolded. Serra insisted on as much himself. We might apply such a phenomenological approach, or better yet, a deambulatory one (as the very eminent art historian Yve-Alain Bois proposed when both of their careers were still in their youth, in 1983), to the work as a whole: a “picturesque stroll” through the landscapes, predominantly urban, that Serra punctuated, demarcated, and ultimately produced or dominated as his work found a privileged place in our late-modern world. Revisiting the public sculpture, as emplaced in the contexts or sites it has specifically confronted, and as these have unfurled around the work, we can see how it frames our cultural and social investments in urban space: what is hostile and what is safe, what is art and what is industry, what moves and what stays put.

The tagline of the magazine in question, Popular Western, was “Complete Quick-Trigger Stories,” which could apply to Ruscha’s photographs but not to his paintings. Even his silliest paintings are stately and brooding, often to a fault. The character of the brooding evolved over time. If the later paintings are—often but not always to their detriment—more explicit about our world on fire, the ’60s work prioritizes pleasure: the laid-back loops of the gas pump hoses, the blocky, confident reds, the crisp fluorescents, and the light and shadow on the glass façade provide little indication of the crises to come.

Due to copyright laws that prevent its monetization (and in contrast to the careerism unsubtly promoted by MFA programs), fanfiction cannot technically be other than a labor of love—though Y/N demonstrates how easily legible thinly-veiled references to sufficiently famous celebrities can be. The real problem with fanfiction, from a mainstream literary perspective, is precisely that its authors not only love reading (movies, music, other books) too much, they also love writing too much. And it shows!