Summer 2016
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In this issue: Ieva Misevičiūtė, prosthetics and sculpture, Anne Imhof, native North America, outsider aesthetics, New Scenario, a special section on artists curating exhibitions, Ronald Jones, Gary Indiana, Willa Nasatir, Ragna Bley, Noah Barker, Isiah Medina, the year 1972, relational ontologies, Geoffrey Farmer and Dora García, the emergence of the “Supergroup,” Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud, radical domesticity: Morag Keil and Georgie Nettell, an essay on dress-up.
Having trained as a clown in her youth, the Lithuanian-born artist Ieva Misevičiūtė works at the intersection of dance, physical theater, butoh, and stand-up comedy. Her absurdist, association-driven performances involve character studies and even impersonations of anything from animals to football fans, Slavoj Žižek to illustrations of abstract and philosophical concepts. An overview by Jacquelyn Ross.
The technology of prosthetics—artificial devices that replace missing human body parts—accelerated fast with the end of World War I, as mutilated war veterans returning home needed their physical abilities restored so they could reenter public life. Lisa Le Feuvre analyzes how art has historically responded to, integrated, and reconceptualized surgical (re)enhancements of the human body.
Anne Imhof won the latest edition of Preis der Nationalgalerie for young artists. In this in-depth conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, she talks about her work in performance and introduces Angst, an opera in three parts: the first premiering at Kunsthalle Basel in June, the second in Berlin at Hamburger Bahnhof, and the third in Montreal as part of the Montreal Biennale.
Andrew Berardini presents a conversation between Richard William Hill and Candice Hopkins—with portfolios of Raymond Boisjoly, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Walter Scott—regarding indigenous artworks of great aesthetic potential, emotional force, and intellectual engagement, operating at the forefront of contemporary discourse.
What provokes sudden and unexpected advancements in art history? In this essay, Jens Hoffmann focuses on the long-established—but rarely recognized—interest in outsider art and the related trend of artists consciously appropriating outsider aesthetics: a resistance to established categories that Harald Szeemann called “individual mythologies.”
Melanie Bühler interviews Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig (New Scenario). For the past two years these Dresden/Berlin-based artists have worked under this moniker. They have commissioned and staged works—from prehistoric settings to body holes to passages through deluxe limousines—that question classic display formats within the changed conditions of art reception, by making the exhibitions accessible only through the internet.
“There are more and more large-scale shows curated by artists; why do you think that is?” Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Thomas Demand, Barbara Bloom, Christian Jankowski, Elmgreen & Dragset, Michelle Grabner, Tobias Rehberger, Ugo Rondinone, Harrell Fletcher, John Miller, and Paulina Olowska answered our questions about artists as curators.
The artist and critic Ronald Jones—here in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen—gained prominence in New York in the mid-1980s by using disparate formal and minimal languages to explore history as a medium. Through juxtapositions of often seemingly unrelated historical facts, innovations, discoveries, episodes of violence, and fears, he created complex interrelations of events as they shape our perception of ourselves and the world.
As an art critic for the Village Voice, Gary Indiana came to prominence in the mid-1980s for his witty and caustic style. He later moved on to literary work, most famously with a trilogy of books about notorious American criminals. In this conversation with Andrew Durbin, he talks about the art world, his writing, and Cuba.
The photography of Willa Nasatir is hard to place. It connects to contemporary approaches to still life or portraiture as seen, for example, in the work of Eileen Quinlan or R. H. Quaytman. But it has also been likened to the work of Lee Bontecou for its inorganic textures, and it draws upon queer aesthetic history. In this exchange with Lauren Cornell, she discusses her process and her negotiation of photography’s “nascent” history, and the way the subconscious manifests in her work.
Nice To Meet You:
A triangle, a rectangle, a circle—geometry softly dripping down a beige canvas. A liver, a hand, a stomach—beautiful visceral masses that have their own nervous systems. Filipa Ramos introduces the Swedish artist Ragna Bley in the form of an abecedarian conversation.
New York–based artist Noah Barker talks with Mark Beasley about the role of negation in the thinking of the last century, specifically the ability of art to test capital while describing its social functions, and the continually on-call mode that has become prevalent even among art professionals.
Pia Bolognesi offers a telling introduction to the Canadian experimental filmmaker Isiah Medina, whose debut feature film 88:88 recently premiered in the Festival del film Locarno. 88:88 takes its name from the flashing displays on home appliances when power is suddenly restored. Medina focuses on instances experienced by those who live in poverty and frequently cannot afford to pay the electricity bill.
A 1,972-word-long investigation of 1972: the year in which author Dieter Roelstraete was born, under the sign of the groundbreaking exhibition documenta 5 organized by Harald Szeemann in Kassel. Those same twelve months gave birth to Miles Davis’s pivotal funk-jazz masterpiece Across the Corner, The Feminist Art Journal, and the beginnings of modern finance, which arose from the ruins of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary management.
Anselm Franke discusses the rising popularity of “relational ontologies” in theory and the arts, and the lack of a critical language to describe a world that is no longer shaped by objects produced through human labor: a world in which devalorization, exploitation, environmental destruction, lawlessness and abandonment are increasingly difficult to access, represent, and comprehend.
The artists Geoffrey Farmer and Dora García talk about shared memories, James Joyce, Jacques Lacan, Allan Kaprow, and many more influences and references in a grid that offers a perspective on their own work.
Reflecting on her involvements in art education and curating, Chus Martínez anticipates the idea of “Supergroup” via a conceptual map that roams through such topics as labor, procrastination, innocence, and ignorance.
Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud have been performing together for more than a decade. Their work combines forms as varied as modern dance, ballet, and nontheatrical approaches coming mainly from underground club scenes such as jungle, dubstep, reggae, house, and voguing. A conversation with Kathy Noble.
Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen engage in dialogue about domesticity and radicalism with the artists Morag Keil and Georgie Nettell: what is the connection between home ownership and the normative values of nuclear families? Where is fascism in everyday life?
In a dreamlike essay considering and praising forms of art making involving ornament and idealism, sensuality and bricolage, Sabrina Tarasoff finds inspiration in the art of Paul Pascal Theriault, Susan Cianciolo, Patrick Hill, and Jack Smith.
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