The Work of the Task Force to Implement Amendment 64: A Case Study

This short essay – taken from a keynote address given at the University of Denver’s Marijuana at the Crossroads Conference – describes the dynamics of marijuana law and policy in the United States with a particular eye toward the federalism implications of marijuana legalization in the states. The essay discusses the history of marijuana regulation in the United States, sets forth a number of possible scenarios going forward, and makes a few, tentative predictions about the future.

Beautiful victims : childhood and the holocaust in the work of Gottfried Helnwein

"For the past three decades, contemporary artist Gottfried Helnwein has shocked viewers with his Holocaust-related paintings, drawings and installations. Born in Austria in 1948, Helnwein witnessed the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe from a child’s perspective. Consequently, the horrifying images summoned from Helnwein’s imagination are inspired by the memories and repercussions of this tragedy. His work addresses his parents’ unwillingness to speak of the atrocities as well as the exploitation of the Holocaust in contemporary popular media. His work questions not only how such a tragedy could have taken place, but also how contemporary perception of this event has been affected by total media saturation and the passage of time. To shock viewers, Helnwein portrays strikingly realistic images of distressed, wounded and morally ambiguous children in works that have been regarded as controversial and outspoken"

Closer to life : the work of sari dienes

Like many of her female contemporaries, artist Sari Dienes’s contributions to the art historical dialogue have been largely overlooked in favor of her male counterparts. Often seen as a mentor and mother figure to neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Dienes was an active member of the New York avant-garde circle surrounding composer/choreographer duo John Cage and Merce Cunningham in the 1950s and 1960s. These social relationships are central to the existing discourse on Sari Dienes, while her work remains little discussed. The fact that her dynamic, ever-changing style lacked aesthetic consistency was commonly lamented by notable figures such as Betty Parsons, however, I argue that Dienes’s diverse oeuvre is unified by her philosophies on art and life. The unification of art and life, denoted clearly by Dienes’s use of the found object, experimentation and chance happenings, and sensory experience, marks her as an innovator and catalyst in the neo-Dada movement as well as in other experimental art endeavors that took place in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism.

Marilyn Minter in dialague with post-pornography

This paper analyzes post-pornographic practices – an activist and theoretical movement that recognizes pornography as valuable in understanding social, cultural, and political systems that construct and reflect identity – through the work of American artist Marilyn Minter. The analysis contextualizes post-pornography and concludes with an examination of several of Minter’s recent paintings and photographs through a postpornographic lens to assert that these examples of her work explore sexuality and gender by incorporating aesthetic and ideological references to porn and by invoking the postpornographic tenets of collaboration, disruption of public space, and the inversion of heteronormativity. Creating art with Wangechi Mutu, displaying in Times Square high definition videos of lips that slurp green goo, and painting men garbed in lingerie constitute some of Minter’s endeavors, which reenvision pornographic relationships to authorship and agency, public versus private space, and the expression or repression of fantasy.