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poopopopweb design by
Ronin Reeves
&
Adrian Wong
Currents Magazine
IssuesEvents & ventures
Residencies
About
web design by
Ronin Reeves
&
Adrian Wong
All of History
It’s about time we took on ALL OF HISTORY. For Currents’ longest issue of all, we invite you to move through histories of portraiture, cement production, and Mae Colburn’s family archive of 632 wool skirts.
Robert Glück writes that “History is endlessly porous.” Instead of chasing an elusive “middle distance,” he suggests a combination of “extreme close-ups, historical long shots, and autobiography,” leaping across the gaps in historical narrative. We have extreme close-ups: you can squint into Ava Chickering’s Bolex viewfinder for a tiny, keychain photo of the artist’s mother, or you can put your ear to Tommy Smit’s Whisperstone for the hottest town gossip. We have historical long shots: Julia Weist surveys drivers from above, while Wendell Lewis blogs a history of copyright law from Ancient Greece to SoulseekQT. We have autobiographies compiled from data, bricks, and piss.
This issue has two luthiers, two Tuere Nicole Lawton paintings, and two Special Collections Librarians. Christopher Barbour and Darin Murphy talk medieval devotional books, finding treasures in the stacks, and “online fish.” Meanwhile, Julian Lentchner interviews Kianja Strobert about her show Pennies From Heaven, in which a bench is a painting is Bloomingdale’s “medium brown bag,” and each object registers the history of its predecessors.
In lieu of a Paul Revere lookalike, we have other historical impersonators: Diana Gateño reproduces Panamanian dictator Noriega’s teddy bears, and Lucie Babcock supplements an Old English Leechbook with all of today’s “most common and necessary cures.”
Jacob Seferian’s Dad’s Bike is desperate and final—like a poster slapped to one last telephone pole and that’s the end.
And the rest is history,
Clara, Avery, Lili, and Ronin
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