Art Magazine Reviews

By Trent Morse

WG reads a few local art magazines.
All are available at Spoonbill & Sugartown in Williamsburg and at bookstores throughout Manhattan.

the journal
Entry No 26, quarterly, $15
Compact and glossy, the journal holds like a soft-cover novel but with the vibrant pages of a coffee-table book. This publication is like nothing else out there. Yes, it has interviews and photo spreads, but much of the content farts in the face of convention.
A case in point would be the exquisite-corpse drawings in the Salon XXVI section, in which artists Jack Pierson, Dan McCarthy, and Anton and Linus Kern team up to concoct freaky, incongruent humanoids. Equally confounding is a segment with Caroline Polachek, of the band Chairlift, commenting on cartoony drawings by music editor Andrew Kuo—in lieu of a straightforward Q & A.
The best part of the journal, however, has to be the supplemental artist’s booklet, this time featuring Beat Generation artist George Herms, whose collages and assemblages seem to carry mystical powers. In an accompanying interview between Herms and editor-in-chief Michael Nevin, the artist rambles eloquently about life as a creative person in McCarthy-era Los Angeles, D.H. Lawrence’s poetry, Futurism, and his stint as a PTA president in Topanga Canyon. The interview ends with Nevin and Herms exchanging I-love-you’s.
Like the decades-old stacks of National Geographic that so many of our parents stored in the basement or garage, the journal is a collector’s item—too handsome and sturdy to throw away after reading.

CAPRICIOUS MAGAZINE
Capricious # 9 – “Acts of Secrecy,” biannual, $19
Capricious takes a decidedly curatorial, rather than editorial, approach to magazine-making, with guest editors selecting collections of “fine art photography by emerging artists from around the world” for each issue. Flipping through the pages of Capricious is a purely visual read—it contains almost no text other than a brief introduction and artists’ statements at the end. For issue #9, guest editor Pamela Echeverría has chosen eleven photographers whose work represents creativity under repression, or “Acts of Secrecy.”
A series by Will Robson Scott most overtly suits this theme. His work captures faceless graffiti artists alone at night in nondescript urban locales. Never do we see them actually vandalizing; instead, they wait or scout sites or scale walls, the twilit meantime between acts of art.
Miguel Calderón, this issue’s cover artist, contributes images of families lying supine in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park, as if instantly annihilated by some hideous plague or chemical weapon. His high-contrast color saturation adds a spooky realism to the dismal scenes. One cannot help but think of images of the Jonestown mass suicide when encountering so many motionless bodies sprawled out on the ground.
For her part, Page Blevins shot crisp black-and-white photos of Latino buckaroos working with thoroughbred horses—the irony being that the horses command higher wages than their human handlers.
Each time I open Capricious, I notice a striking image or detail that I missed the last time. It is like clutching an art exhibition in your hands.

ARTSCAPE
# 01 – “On Sale,” June/August 2009,triannual or quarterly, $5
With its unmemorable name and conventional layout, ARTSCAPE at first appears to be just another art magazine. The articles inside, however, go deeper than expected. Jonathan T. D. Neil begins his frank and fascinating article about art and commerce with the line, “I am for sale,” and expands those words into a metaphysical exercise in which he acknowledges that he makes a little money with each word he types—as he’s typing. Neil goes on to examine how art critics, himself included, capitalize on artists by writing about them.
Noam Marcel Sudarsky explores the hypothesis that mediocre art looks better after a glass of wine. And for that reason, smart gallerists won’t cut back on free alcohol at openings just to save a few bucks. But, he adds, “Great art, of course, requires no chemical enhancement; it leaves the soul exalted.”
Based in the Lower East Side, ARTSCAPE launched issue #01 (their premiere issue, #00, came out earlier this year) in June at the Bushwick artists’ space 3rd Ward. While the magazine has flaws—I noticed numerous copyediting mistakes—it shows promise as an upstart art publication, meeting at the crossroads of theory, criticism, and literary nonfiction. It merely needs to get more experimental.