Friday, May 1, 2015

Why Wallscrawler?

       Are you a rockpiler* or a wallscrawler**?     – Joseph Roeder

Welcome to Wallscrawler, a gazette of pithy exhibition reviews and commentaries by visual artists. When a show (or some other art event) compels us to write, we will strive to deliver muscular substance in 500 words or less.

The past few years have brought a welcome proliferation of online sources for writing about art. Now that writing is often one of many competing obligations in an artist’s incessantly multimodal practice, these sources sometimes suffer from hasty editing. At the same time, many practitioners insist that the only way to produce high-quality work is to commit either to the visual or the verbal, so artists who write are expected to fail.

We offer an alternative perspective: we are grounding this project in our visual practice, as dedicated studio artists who happen to have an affinity for language. Writing helps us see our artwork more deeply, and our art-making helps us perceive the exhibitions we’re re-viewing. So, in this era of the “post-studio,” we dare to advance another paradigm: that of the expanded studio.***

Further, Wallscrawler’s debut coincides with Robert Storr’s forthright critique of many contemporary art writers, in a Yale University radio interview. This is the latest in a spirited series of dialogues about criticism, from panels at the annual College Art Association conference to debates in DUMBO. These developments affirm our conviction that individual, principled voices can have enormous impact.

We aim to post about the most consequential work we see, not to write about our friends. We labor for thoughtful rigor without “artspeak” or hype. We expect to focus on contemporary abstract painting by living artists. We do not accept advertising.

Wallscrawlers


* sculptor or other 3D artist
** painter or other 2D artist
*** Our term nods to the persistence of Rosalind Krauss’s influential essay, “Sculpture In The Expanded Field,” October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.

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