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This month in Artforum:
Art and Identity: A special issue:
“This issue of Artforum aims to examine who is speaking, how we see, where we are. It’s precisely the we that’s at stake: because identity is never about some singular individual. Every form of subjectivity is also a form of exclusion and coercion.”
–Michelle Kuo
Collective Consciousness: To map the shifting coordinates of identity and difference in culture today, Huey Copeland moderates a roundtable with Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Joselit, Kara Keeling, Michelle Kuo, Kobena Mercer, and Emily Roysdon:
“People in power who don’t understand why people invest in identities are also people who are already invested themselves.”
–Dipesh Chakrabarty
Artists on Identity:
A. K. Burns, Antoine Catala, Zackary Drucker, Coco Fusco, Cathy Park Hong, bell hooks, Iman Issa, Mary Kelly, Bouchra Khalili, Ajay Kurian, Kalup Linzy and Dan Colen, Park McArthur, Oscar Murillo, Senga Nengudi, Rashaad Newsome, Will Rawls, Aki Sasamoto, Christine Sun Kim, Martine Syms, Hank Willis Thomas, Wu Tsang, Carrie Yamaoka, and Samson Young:
“The idea that artmaking could be exempt from questions of identity and subjectivity seems misguided at best, amnesiac at worst.”
–Will Rawls
“Within a culture of domination, all our political struggles risk commodification in ways that diffuse their radical intent.”
–bell hooks
“For me, as a human, an artist, and a trans person, art and politics and the personal are one, and the act of living is a fully realized work.”
–Zackary Drucker
“Now there would be no turning back, no holds barred.”
–Mary Kelly
Artists’ Projects for Artforum by Andrea Crespo, fierce pussy, Barbara Kruger, Zoe Leonard, Adrian Piper, and Claudia Rankine and John Lucas
Writing the Void: Homi K. Bhabha on Language, Identity, and Migration:
“The Rwandan tragedy was banal in the archaic meaning of the word that relates to customary and communal life: it was a genocide of neighbors and neighborliness.”
–Homi K. Bhabha
Personae of Interest: Lynn Hershman Leeson and Juliana Huxtable in conversation:
“I like the idea of using performance and technology as a way to create screens, or distractions from the idea that it’s a real, raw person in front of you.”
–Juliana Huxtable
“Fuck You! A Feminist Guide to Surviving the Art World”:
“Walk Piece is Yoko Ono’s polite way of saying, ‘Go fuck yourself if you think you can penetrate my mind with your dick.’”
–Ara Osterweil
Hannah Black on the Identity Artist and the Identity Critic:
“The identity critic can miraculously arrive at nonsexism and nonracism without considering race/gender, which have always just stopped being real: some new civic gain (freedom, the vote, a movie) has always just obliterated history.”
–Hannah Black
Brian Wallis on the art of Danny Lyon:
“A photograph, Lyon seems to say, is a provisional statement, perhaps even a moral proposition, a fragmentary attempt to evaluate a slice of humanity.”
–Brian Wallis
Passages: Mark Wigley, Anthony Vidler, Daniel Libeskind, Nasser Rabbat, Bernard Tschumi, and Frank Gehry on Zaha Hadid:
“Zaha was the exception, and she became a model.”
–Frank Gehry
And: Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman on the United States–Mexico Border, Louis-Georges Schwartz on video evidence; Ed Halter on the films of Marlon Riggs; and Daphne A. Brooks on modern protest pop.
Also: Thelma Golden on Black Male; Elisabeth Sussman on the 1993 Whitney Biennial; John Tain on The Theater of Refusal; Wayne Koestenbaum on ‘My’ Masculinity; Dawn Chan on Asia-futurism; and writer Rivka Galchen shares her Top Ten.
Plus: Summer Reading: Nairy Baghramian, Naomi Beckwith, Carissa Rodriguez, Ben Lerner, Yvette Mutumba, Mark Dion, Lauret Savoy, and Tony Tulathimutte share the books they’ll be reading this season; Jack Bankowsky on Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age; and Philip Tinari on M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art.
