This summer, painters Mira Schor and Susan Bee invited me to contribute an essay to the 25th anniversary edition of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues. Contributors were asked to choose between two themes, and to include images with our short texts. My piece, Analogue Natives, considers that dwindling group of people born before the advent of digital culture, who embrace it while remaining attached to older technologies....
From the subscription flyer for issue No. 1.
M/E/A/N/I/N/G
25th Anniversary Edition
The editors of M/E/A/N/I/N/G are proud to announce the 25th anniversary issue of our journal. This issue is available online and as a PDF.
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/meaning/05/
This is an unusual moment of global economic crisis, failure of capitalism and of progressive political movements, a moment of political impasse, and of generational shift, following upon a series of traumatic political events and a decade of war. Methods of communication have changed since we began our project 25 years ago and concepts of privacy and individuality seem to be in a process of radical transformation.
Our 25th anniversary issue centers around two themes: the impact of public trauma on art and art critical practice, and the nature of privacy for the artist or critic working in the age of social networking and global spectacle.
The first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues, was published in December 1986. We published 20 issues biannually over ten years. In 2000, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism was published by Duke University Press. In 2002 we began to publish M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online and have published four previous online issues. The M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive from 1986 to 2002 is in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
To address our themes in this online issue, we invited a wide spectrum of artists, art historians, and poets, some who had written for our journal before and many new artists and writers whose work we have encountered in recent years. We are proud to continue our commitment to maintaining an open, non-profit space for independent writing about art.
We are honored to publish the responses we have received, people really wrote what they wanted, what they felt, each very individually, many clearly inspired and energized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began September 17th in Lower Manhattan and has rapidly sent a wave of optimism around the world.
Susan Bee and Mira Schor
New York City, November 18 2011
The contributors list is formidable--here are links to their individual essays, which also include images of their art work (Thanks to Sharon Butler for the formatting!):
NOTE: The 2000 anthology published by Duke University Press is now available in Kindle and other e-book formats.
