Ursula: Issue 12

Echoing through this issue of Ursula, our 12th, is Robert Rauschenberg’s famous exhortation about acting “in the gap” between art and life. Rauschenberg built on the work of Duchamp and Schwitters by rummaging around for art’s sake in the real stuff of life—bedclothes, cardboard boxes, old tires—and considerably narrowed the gap. David Hammons, the subject of an essay, a poem and an oral history in this issue, has for more than half a century now narrowed the gap to quantum size. You might say that all of Hammons’ work is the result of an ongoing performance practically indistinguishable from his everyday life, an act of radical attentiveness that includes object-making.

In this spirit Rashid Johnson, the subject of a career survey opening in April at the Guggenheim Museum, is this issue’s cover artist. He sits down for a talk about art, history and belonging not with curators or critics but with his father, Jimmy, and his teenage son, Julius, sharing family memories and a casual meal. In the pages we also have new writing from the great Lynne Tillman that floats productively between fiction and biography, reiterating the importance of the quotidian in a rapidly virtualizing world. The issue also includes incisive writing by and about the artists Firelei Báez, Ambera Wellmann, Mike Kelley, Francis Picabia and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The late French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote one of my favorite formulations about the mystifying commerce between life and art: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” The dance goes on.

Happy reading until next time!

— Randy Kennedy  

David Hammons' focus in this issue revolves around his lifelong practice of blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life and how he transforms walking, looking and object-making into an artistic practice.