After ten successful years, Spike has had a stunning redesign by Munich-based graphic design studio Bureau Mirko Borsche.
The first new issue of the new-look Spike is dedicated to the theme of forgetting. The acceleration of flows of images, money, and data is radically changing art. Over the past few years, “the idea of history itself has completely changed.…[It] has been unblocked, it’s moving again,” explains artist Hito Steyerl in a roundtable conversation with the New York-based collective DIS, curators of the next Berlin Biennale, and the art historian Susanne von Falkenhausen. Their talk ranges widely, from Instagram and Tumblr to the function of the artwork as a stumbling block in digital circulation and whether it’s only corporations who can still project a future.
Various thinkers were invited to respond to questions related to forgetting: Kasper König talks about the market as a memory machine. The cultural theorist Mark Fisher writes on the loss of the present, while writer Sascha Kösch considers whether algorithms are now society’s unconscious.
In one of his rare interviews, Oswald Wiener, a defining figure of the Vienna and Berlin art scenes of the 1960s, talks about his early writings on cybernetics and its relationship to the current standstill of art and science. New York-based art historian Joanna Fiduccia writes on On Kawara’s “I GOT UP,” tracing the labyrinthine trajectory of this fabled work of Conceptual art.
Was MoMA inspired by Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s visit to Berlin? Hans-Jürgen Hafner looks back to the Gallery of the Living, which opened in 1919 and broke new ground with its cross-genre presentations in a museum radically committed to the present.
“Generation Wuss,” meanwhile, only wants to be liked, is incapable of dealing with criticism, and takes everything too seriously—at least, this was the gist of a recent piece by Bret Easton Ellis in Vanity Fair. Responding to this no-holds-barred attack on today’s 20-somethings, the writer Harry Burke comes to his generation’s defense.
Dorothée Dupuis also profiles LA-based artist Samara Golden and marvels at the impact of her otherworldly interiors, which are currently on view at MoMA PS1 in New York. Berlin-based writer Pablo Larios reflects on the ephemeral practice of the artist Wolfgang Breuer, photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans for Spike. In addition, Spike editor Timo Feldhaus watches Werner Herzog’s 2010 movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams on the Retina Display of his iPad and soon drifts back to the present—to the image archives of Corbis.
Spike once again invited artists to engage visually with the theme of the issue. This time there are contributions from Karen Kilimnik, Johannes Wohnseifer, Tom Burr, Verena Dengler and Rafaël
Rozendaal.
Spike has reinvented the review format on the basis of the personal, incisive outlook of its stable of writers. Reviews are now called Views—that means more questions, more conversations, and the introduction of new formats, for example the discussion of exhibition photographs: Timo Feldhaus and Kolja Reichert take Manfred Pernice‘s exhibition at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder as the starting point of an argument about how online documentation changes the experience of art. Further shows in the Views section include The Darknet at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Ryan Trecartin at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Helene Schjerfbeck at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and Georg Baselitz at Haus der Kunst in Munich. Also, the recently inaugurated One World Trade Center is considered as an example of post-iconic architecture and an aesthetic anti-terror strategy.
At the end of January, Spike is launching a new online magazine: Spike Art Daily. It has also been designed together with Bureau Mirko Borsche, and promises to become an indispensable venue for anyone interested in what’s happening in art and the art world.
You can get a first peek at the issue in the video trailer.
To buy the issue, click here. If you never want to miss an issue again, subscribe here.
