Grant Kester

I am pleased to introduce FIELD’s Spring 2024 issue, edited by Jae Hwan Lim, a member of the FIELD Editorial Collective. This issue is devoted to contemporary socially engaged art in South Korea. Jae has assembled a set of articles which examine both the complexities of activist art in South Korea, and the tensions that have emerged around cultural politics more generally in that country.

I am pleased to introduce FIELD's Winter 2024 issue. This is a special issue, devoted to the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers and its affiliated projects, which were developed in Picun, a migrant workers community on the outskirts of Beijing.

One more book review from The Nation. This is a review of Nancy Bristow's Making Men Moral, which explores the cultural politics of gender associated with military training camps during WW1 in the U.S. The book provides a fascinating lens through which to examine concepts of masculinity in the early twentieth century.

We are pleased to announce the launch of FIELD Issue #25 for Fall 2023 (www.field-journal.com). This issue features Karen van den Berg’s analysis of the public scandal over antisemitic imagery that surrounded documenta 15 (2022) in Kassel, Grant Kester's exploration of the recent revival of interest in James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a roundtable conversation among several young curators and artists whose research on socially engaged art practices was supported by FEINART, an EU-funded project that links leading university programs in the UK, Iceland, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Greece and Germany, and reviews of two new books in the area of socially engaged art scholarship: Jacopo Galimberti’s Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso, 2022) and Kuba Szeder’s The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World.

We are pleased to introduce FIELD Issue #24 for Spring 2023. This issue has been guest edited by FIELD editorial collective members Primrose Paul and Laura Thompson and Primrose Paul. The issue presents a range of essays and interviews addressing the broader cultural impact of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) which emerged in the wake of the police killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

FIELD Issue 23 is dedicated to the pioneering environmental art practice of Helen and Newton Harrison. The Harrisons were long-time faculty members in the Visual Arts department at UCSD, where FIELD is produced. The issue has been guest edited by Tatiana Sizonenko, who is also the project curator of an important retrospective exhibition, Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, to be held at the La Jolla Historical Society (September 20, 2024-January 19, 2025). California Work has been funded by the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time initiative. This issue of FIELD was first envisioned as a compendium of papers presented as part of a public event held in La Jolla last March, intended to lay the groundwork for the exhibition. The event, "Listening to the Web of Life," was attended by Newton Harrison, who was in fragile health at the time, and featured many of the key figures in contemporary environmental or ecological art practice. As the copy for this issue was undergoing an initial round of editing we learned the sad news that Newton had passed. As a result, the issue took on a new function; to both document the original proceedings and to honor the broader importance of the Harrison's legacy (Helen passed in 2019). For this reason, we've commissioned some additional remembrances from artists and curators who worked with the Harrison's in the past. It's difficult to overestimate the foundational influence of the Harrison's work within the broader field of activist, environmental art. Certainly there is a broader history of important ecological art practice dating back to the 1960s, but the Harrisons are unique among the generation of artists who emerged at this time for their single-minded focus on issues of environmental sustainability and complex ecosystems, extending eventually to a global scale. They have, at this point, influenced several generations of subsequent artists, as the contributors to this special issue will attest. My own memories of the Harrisons began in the mid-1990s, when I encountered them at the important Littoral events, organized by Ian Hunter and Celia Larner in Manchester, England and Dún Laoghaire, Ireland. Hunter and Larner have played a key role in the evolution of rural-based art practices in the UK, and had a special affinity for the Harrison's work. Helen and Newton were charismatic, generous, and always attuned to the complex gestalt of the ecosystems around them. I was fortunate enough to engage with them again at UCSD when I arrived here in 2000. It was their openness and generosity, combined with an unyielding commitment to the preservation of the natural world, that provided the necessary

This essay was written in response to “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism” by the Danish critic and historian Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen. Both essays were simultaneously published in FIELD (field-journal.com) and the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics (http://nsae.au.dk/) in the winter of 2017.

Back in the 1990s I wrote book reviews for The Nation and I thought I'd upload a few of them. This is one I wrote on Adrian Piper's two volume anthology of writings, published by MIT Press. I'd met her at MICA in Baltimore when I was helping to install some of her work at a show in 1985 or '86. After the review came out Lingua Franca asked me to write a profile of Adrian for them. I flew out to Boston and spent a day or so interviewing her. We had some great conversations, but Lingua Franca's editors weren't happy with the final essay I submitted. They wanted me to be more critical of her and her work,  in ways that I wasn't comfortable with. We parted ways with a small kill fee. Lingua Franca went under in 2001, and I don't know if they ever published a profile of Adrian. I've always felt her work deserves much greater recognition than its received.

Here's another book review I wrote for The Nation back in the day. I've always thought Paul Edwards book was one of the best treatments of the complex epistemological imbrication between computing technology and the military; a topic that is often neglected in subsequent research.

After Baltimore City Paper published the 1989 essay on my research into gentrification they asked if they could also publish some of the research itself. This material was published as "Squeeze Play" in August 1990. The full set of interviews were published separately as a pamphlet and distributed for free through various activist and community groups in the city. I've also posted the full pamphlet here on Academia.

This is a 1989 article from Baltimore City Paper discussing "The Baltimore Survey Project," which I developed to analyze the effects of gentrification in the city. At the time Baltimore was often heralded as a primary example of the positive effects of urban renewal and the concept of "downtown revival" (due primarily to James Rouse's "Harborplace" project). As so often happens in my career, it ended up pissing off some folks, including the former Assistant Secretary of HUD, Robert Embry. I'll include Embry's letter to the editor and my response as well. Sadly, Baltimore City Paper closed in 2017 thanks to declining ad revenues from the internet.