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Contents
Feature
Blowback
Can radical art survive any context asks Francis Frascina
When the context is Blenheim Palace, can even an artist like Jenny Holzer, known for her critiques of power, resist being co-opted?
Lucy Lippard long ago cited Jenny Holzer as an example of an artist employing double coding, with one version of her work acting as a 'Trojan horse'.
Feature
Proxies
What you see is not what you see argues Mark Prince
Artists as different as Jasper Johns and Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Pilvi Takala have all adopted various guises to challenge assumptions about reality and image, original and copy, truth and fiction.
Pilvi Takala pitches herself as presuming the world is a safer, more tolerant, less bigoted place than it proves to be. But the cameras which capture her intervention are placed there by her, in the knowledge that she is a minnow among piranhas; that the assumptions on which her character is based are naive.
Comment
Editorial
Vozhd
It is notable that, at a time when more and more nationalists are being elected to power, the centenary of the overthrow of the last tsar was barely marked in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Are we handing hard-won democratic power back to repressive authoritarians?
As world politics continue to shift to the extreme right, there has been much talk of the need for 'strong leadership'.
Letters
What is Happening?
Laure Genillard asks why won't more galleries voice the fact that art fairs are rapidly eroding their viability.
Artnotes
Occupied
Artforum publisher Knight Landesman resigns over sexual harassment allegations; Armory director Benjamin Genocchio is sacked over sexual harassment allegations; Berlin's prize for young artists is criticised by its shortlisted artists; journalists are detained for trying to report on the labour issues behind the Louvre Abu Dhabi; a sculpture by Ron Mueck is attacked by a mob of religious nationalists in Istanbul; LA anti-gentrification campaigners take their protests to East Coast museums; Marina Abramovic cancels her plans for her performance institute; plus the latest news on galleries, appointments, prizes and more.
Profile
Terre Thaemlitz
Larne Abse Gogarty on the Minnesota-born, Kawasaki-based artist, writer, DJ and composer who explores gender and systolic systems, and argues against reconciliation.
Closing with a 30-hour canto entitled 'Meditation of Wage Labor and the Death of the Album', Soulnessless also stands as a response to the increasing demands for endless content, often freely provided, within online commerce and culture.
Profile
Hannah Black
Lizzie Homersham on the Manchester-born, New York-based artist, writer and activist who addresses the legacies of slavery, censorship and collectivity.
On a Sunday afternoon I observed a few different interpretations of the unstated rules of the show. Nowhere did it say that you could take a copy of the book; some visitors asked at the front desk whether this was allowed, others gave themselves permission to pick up a copy, reading parts of it in situ or tearing pages out for shredding before tossing a remainder back on the pile.
Exhibitions
Alfredo Jaar: The Garden of Good and Evil
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton
Virginia Whiles
Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes
The Hepworth, Wakefield
Maria Walsh
David Dye: Devices
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
George Vasey
14th Lyon Biennale: Floating Worlds
various venues
Andrew J Stooke
Rachel Whiteread
Tate Britain, London
David Trigg
John Akomfrah: Purple
Barbican, London
Jack Smurthwaite
David Panos: Time Crystals
Pump House Gallery, London
Paul Clinton
Orla Barry: Breaking Rainbows
Wexford Arts Centre
Cherry Smyth
Seth Price Circa 1981
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Neil Zakiewicz
Raqs Media Collective: Twilight Language
The Whitworth, Manchester
Tom Emery
Newcastle Round-up: Freedom City 2017
Side Gallery • Great North Museum: Hancock • Baltic
Elisabetta Fabrizi
London Round-up
Tintype • Maureen Paley • Parasol Unit
John Douglas Millar
London Round-up
The Room • One Paved Court • Simon Lee
Peter Suchin
Reviews
Film
Karrabing Film Collective: Saltwater Dreams
Maria Walsh
Here the community become Spect-actors in the Boalian sense of seeing and forming themselves through acting out their everyday conflicts.
Experimenta
Dan Ward
The Experimenta strand of the London Film Festival showed over 30 artist films intended to 'transform our experience of seeing moving images' with a programme that functioned like an audit of what the experimental constitutes.
Reviews
Artists' Books
Tania Kovats: Dirty Water
Michael Hampton
Adhering to the classic newspaper format, Dirty Water's contents become more prosaic as you get into the back pages.
Books
Erika Balsom: After Uniqueness
Seth Pimlott
After Uniqueness foregrounds the infrastructures of distribution and the trajectories of circulation that moving-image work has historically taken: processes that are fundamental to the production of meaning and value in the field.
Reports
Letter from Barcelona
Dark Ecology
Rob La Frenais
As I left Catalonia by road hours before the declaration of independence on Friday, the Spanish border had a heavily armed roadblock manned by masked Guardia Civil, something I have only ever seen in rural Mexico.
Letter from Budapest
The Castle and the City
Maja & Reuben Fowkes
'You hold the castle, but we have the city' was the combative slogan with which the second Off Biennale Budapest was launched this autumn, a grassroots biennale organised on the principle of preserving artistic independence by eschewing government funding and avoiding state-run venues.
Letter from Los Angeles
LAX ART
Catherine Spencer
The works in 'Radical Women' are not quiet and their feminisms are not necessarily aligned: this literal and conceptual noise is one of the show's most powerful effects.
Artlaw
Ways of Working
Digital Drivers
Henry Lydiate
A dealer-signed certificate has little or no value in the wider art market to prove to subsequent purchasers (on resales) that the work is authentic. Similar credibility problems surround authenticity certificates signed and issued by executors or trustees of a deceased artist's estate. |