jmcmichael

“Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.”

Triple Canopy works collectively with writers, artists, researchers and other collaborators on projects that deal critically with culture and politics, and the ways people engage them, both online and in the world at large. These investigations are realized in an online magazine as well as in public programs and print publications encompassing various fields and locales. We aim to present work and advance ideas informed by a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, and to disseminate them among a broad and diverse audience. Our first issue was published on March 17, 2008.

Issue #4 (entitled War, Money, Magic) offers up these delights and more:

The Gift of Eternal Life
by Marc Vives
A filmmaker visits the Holy Land Experience theme park, where Christ is crucified twice a day.

Specters of a Young Earth
by Joseph Clarke
The dinosaurs at Kentucky’s Creation Museum are stalking evolution, reason, and the American city.

Original Ideas in Magic
by Tim Davis with Hannah Whitaker
“Think of a number between thunder and money.” Poems and proliferating visions of a magician’s lair without a magician.

Heraclitus Series
by Amir Mogharabi
Currents in logic made ancient, for OS 9. An artist project bringing together the fragments of Heraclitus and the calculus of truth tables.

Thirty years ago, American film audiences pressed low in their seats as a massive white wedge of machine parts passed overhead. With the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars, the smooth, silvery flying saucers that had dominated postwar sci-fi became embarrassing reminders of an obsolete version of the future. Lucas envisioned a World of Tomorrow dominated by black, white, and gray; hard-edged, massive, and inorganic forms, covered with a salty acne of apparatus. The film’s visual program was a departure from the saucers and occasional capsules writ large that sci-fi audiences had grown accustomed to, but its colorless symmetrical ships should have been recognizable to at least a small portion of its audience - those familiar with contemporary art.

In a 1967 essay on minimalism, Clement Greenberg, America’s most influential critic, could have been describing Star Wars: “Everything is rigorously rectilinear or spherical. Development within a given piece is usually repetition of the same modular shape, which may or may not be varied in size.” Greenberg rejected minimalism as pedestrian. “Minimal works are readable as art,” he wrote, “as almost anything is today, including a door, a table, or a blank sheet of paper.” Perhaps because of its fantastic nature, the Death Star has never been recognized as an essential work of minimalism - but it is one. Its destruction has never been acknowledged as a turning point for modernism - but it was one.

(via Kevin Kelly’s Technium)