In a campaign year, the media’s focus is mainly on Politics with a capital P and all it entails during the horse race of an election. This series is interested in another kind of politics—the lowercase p concerns about power, inequality, and participation—and ways that artists’ personal values interface with it. At the heart of this project is the firm belief that artists’ voices are vital in the conversation about creating a better society.
Paul Chan is fully aware how strange it might seem to publish a book on Saddam Hussein’s 1970s speeches about democracy. But as an artist and publisher, Chan found the publication of On Democracy by Saddam Hussein “perversely pleasurable,” “profoundly confusing,” and particularly instructive on the eve of a US presidential election.
JoAnn Verburg has featured newspapers in her photos since 1990, piercing idyllic scenes of her napping or lounging husband with news about poverty, war, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a new interview, she discusses how she sees the newspapers as portals into the political, reminding us of the myriad realities coexisting in the world.
When the communications satellite EchoStar XVI launches in October it will be carrying a disk etched with 100 images from Earth, left for future civilizations to discover and decode. In a new interview, Trevor Paglen discusses these “last pictures,” which he dubs a “cave painting from the 21st century.”
Interested in a subjective, confrontational approach to architecture, Israeli writer-architect Eyal Weizman seeks to expand discourse in his field and put it in dialogue with disciplines like…
On September 17, 2011–the day the Occupy movement was born–Jem Cohen was there filming what would become his Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street. A day after the movement’s one-year anniversary, Cohen discussed the project and how these “newsreals” served as a “bulwark against erasure” by mainstream news outlets intent on declaring Occupy dead.
Four years after the Iraq War started, Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout and a friend set out on a mission of their own: to track down evidence of the war. In LA, New Mexico, and, ultimately, Israel, the…
Amid the clamor of Super PAC–powered politicians duking it out on a whole new level this election season, Laurie Anderson’s Dirtday! offers a timely, quietly powerful rejoinder. An artist who…
Confronting a symbol of the American Dream, Fritz Haeg will visit Minnesota in May 2012 to plant a garden in an unlikely place. Situated between “simultaneous, equally valid points of doom and hope,” his Edible Estates will turn a suburban front lawn into a vegetable garden. His aim: to explore the “fantastic notion of what the city I want to live in looks like.”
In the years before Roe v. Wade passed in 1973, a trio of activists received a flood of letters from people seeking a list of doctors who provided safe abortions. Recognizing the continuing…
Meteorologist Paul Douglas—a Republican who believes climate change is real—considers himself an “albino unicorn.” Music-theater artist Cynthia Hopkins decided to make art about the crisis after a 2010 Arctic expedition. Here, the duo discusses global warming and ways that art, science, and spirituality can work together to change minds about a changing planet.
Examining US energy production and use for five years, photographer Mitch Epstein became fascinated by a pun: “electrical power came from political power, which came from corporate power—and civic power met up against all that.” Here Epstein talks with Paul Shambroom, whose own photos examine issues from nuclear weapons to oil, about aesthetics, activism, and the work of connecting the dots of American power.
