November–January 2019/20
November 4, 2019
This season has seen a renewed and overwhelming interest in works engaging corporality, gesture, theatricality, or dance—works that in the visual arts we tend to group under the rubric “performance.” When we think of a work of art, we always feel a reflexive need to identify its medium, perhaps due to our ekphrastic or merely logistical nature, or more likely to assure ourselves that we have a label for everything.
Today, much of the legacy under the term performative be it work in the service of an ontological quandary, a dialogue with fashion, a political protest, a spiritual search, or an interrogation of form itself.
This issue of Flash Art, with essays by Dorothea von Hantelmann and Isobel Harbison, dedicates 16-pages dossier to the work of Rebecca Horn, a pivotal figure of performative art, and develops a series of reflections on a younger generation of contemporary artists who are now using their bodies or their personas as agents in an attempt to re-cognize themselves in a present that increasingly rewards the loss of self-consciousness.
Accelerationism, absence, failure, art objects, dance, club culture, protest, are crossed in the conversations with artists such as Aria Dean, Brendan Fernandes and Jimmy Robert. Also in this issue: Anne Bean, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Marta Minujín.
Reviews: 15th Biennale de Lyon, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Nayland Blake, Vincent Fecteau, Kara Walker, Michael E. Smith, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Liz Magor, Len Lye, Marguerite Humeau, Dirk Braeckman, Wu Tsang, Nora Turato, Emily Mae Smith, Luke Ching Chin Wai Liquefied Sunshine / South Ho Siu Nam Force Majeure, FALSE SPACE
Flash Art #328 will be distributed at Performa, New York, Independent Brussels, Art Düsseldorf, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Stage Singapore, artgèneve, Paris Photo.
