Judith Stein on Susan Stewart

Ursula Issue 2 by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Photo by Ed Park.

March 25, 2019

Hauser & Wirth has released the second iteration of Ursula, a quarterly magazine named for gallery co-founder Ursula Hauser. In this issue, AICA-USA co-president Judith Stein investigates the influential legacy of Susan Stewart's 1984 text On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Stewart's theories left their mark on artists and writers like Ann Hamilton, Rosamond Purcell, Charles Simonds, and David Schutter, among others. Of Stewart's project Stein writes,

Stewart chose the tantalizing noun "longing" for her title, a word that she wrote connoted "a kind of ache." Nostalgia, our "yearning desire" for the past and for things, is central to her examination—through a semiotic feminist-Marxist lens—of the problems that arise when we try to describe things in the world and to make sense of our experience through narrative.

Read on in the issue. Ursula Issue 2 is available on newsstands and to subscribers March 25.