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This month in Artforum:
Stonewall at 50
Confessions on the Dance Floor: Reveries from the gay bar
June marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings. To celebrate the occasion, Artforum invited 24 gorgeous artists and writers to share an early or particularly vivid memory of a gay bar. Our only proviso: Keep it quick and dirty.
“The gay bar changed my ideas of movement, dance, collaborative ecstasy, connection with those I did not know, anonymous solidarity, all of it happening in an aura of a generalized permission to live, to breathe, to desire, to find ‘your people’ for a time.”
–Judith Butler
“If these people were fucking the pope and dancing on tables, then maybe there was hope for me to have fun someday.”
–Cyrus Dunham
Minor Variations: Chloe Wyma on Lincoln Kirstein and his circle
“Once a thorn in MoMA’s flesh—his balletomania, classicism, and taste for homoerotically inflected figuration repressed as eccentric detours from modernism’s forward progress—Kirstein returns as a champion of ‘an alternative modernism.’”
–Chloe Wyma
Against Nature: William E. Jones on the art of James Bidgood
“Bidgood’s work is so self-contained that it appears to exist outside of time.”
–William E. Jones
Let’s Go, Lesbians: Andrea Long Chu on Jill Johnston’s separatism
“Heterosexual feminists alleged that lesbians were imitating male chauvinism and using the movement as a louche excuse to pick up chicks; the lesbians shot back that heterosexual feminism was plainly a contradiction in terms. (No one liked the bisexuals.)”
–Andrea Long Chu
Artforum invited five friends and colleagues—curator Katy Siegel; Tim Griffin, director of the Kitchen in New York; and artists Adrian Piper, Glenn Ligon, and Steve McQueen—to honor Enwezor and to begin the immense project of fathoming the scope of his unfolding legacy.
“Okwui’s experience, by choice as well as by chance, was profoundly cosmopolitan, reflecting not the frequent-flying liquidity of capital flows, but an intimate acquaintance with a global social reality lived on uneven terrain.”
–Katy Siegel
And: Lloyd Wise on the art of Jacqueline Humphries; Alex Jovanovich introduces a portfolio by Philip Van Aver; Ara Osterweil and A. L. Steiner on Barbara Hammer; Amy Taubin on Agnès Varda; Molly Warnock on Gilles Aillaud’s Rhinocéros, eau et rochers; Michael Ned Holte on the art of Fiona Connor; and Jennifer Krasinski on Paul Swan.
Plus: Bruce Hainley on Cady Noland, Melissa Anderson on Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash, Derek McCormack on Thierry Mugler, Jonah Westerman on Anne Imhof, Mónica de la Torre on Graciela Iturbide, Polly Watson on “Play It Loud” at the Met, Ayodeji Rotinwa on Emika Ogboh, and Anthony Korner shares his Baker’s Dozen.
