7.4 / Moving Target

Visual art and poetry have long been cross-fertilizing forces in the Bay Area. Much of this history is well known and well-documented. Think of the wild sociality of Beat painters and poets in North Beach or the multidisciplinary scene that gathered around 80 Langton Street in the late 1970’s, to name just two moments in time. Other instances, although no less transformative in their own right, have been less documented. Here, local artist and curator Margaret Tedesco’s venue-hopping series, Moving Target, which brought performance, sound, and visual artists together with local writers, comes to mind. But perhaps because its most famous examples are now well accounted for, or because it has long been somewhat routine, such cross-pollination is often taken for granted.

Borrowing its title from and conceived in the spirit of Tedesco’s series, this issue of Art Practical aims to take nothing for granted while providing a different venue for collaborations between visual artists and poets. It begins with a collaborative dialogue between Bay Area artist and poet Tom Comitta and curator Zoë Taleporos, who discuss the possibility of poetry writing and poetry culture in the space of the art gallery. As then, as spring unfolds, so will the issue. Through a series of text-based pieces and commissioned events over the next several weeks, our version of "Moving Target" can be conceived as a series of not-so blind dates that hopes to make manifest relays and conversations that are already happening locally—about form and capital, desire and community, gossip and institutionally, embodiment and aesthetics—or which we’d like to see happen within a larger field of interlocutors. 

We invite you to stay tuned.—Brandon Brown and Matt Sussman