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Artforum’s 60th-anniversary issue considers the unique power of criticism today, offering a way of thinking that, as executive editor Elizabeth Schambelan writes, resists “rigidity, conformity, reification, and the kind of cathexis to the status quo that can lead to reactionary politics.”
And so we turn toward love’s work: “the proudly fey, local theorizing cultivated in the space abandoned by the hermeneutics of suspicion,” as editor-in-chief David Velasco puts it in his introductory letter. In this historic issue, dozens of our contributors come together to express the discerning eclecticism that excites the magazine’s heart.
This month in Artforum:
Hal Foster, Antinomies
“Art, in order to be critical, must be immanent to the structures of its world.”
Documenta 15
“Ultimately, what proves ruangrupa’s concept for me is the presence of a set of aesthetic strategies that enable a spectatorship of translation.” —David Joselit
“This Documenta invites visitors not to learn from but to learn with. It remains to be seen what lessons the exhibition will be remembered for.” —Harry Burke
“Lumbung, thought of as method rather than theme, proposes a refreshingly uncynical inquiry into an aesthetics of redistribution.” —Abhijan Toto and Pujita Guha for Forest Curriculum
Olamiju Fajemisin on Arthur Jafa
“Going between ‘speaking in tongues’ and ‘holding your tongue,’ these splayed poles represent the psychological fallout of the attempted merchandising of enslaved Black people.”
Johanna Fateman on the art of Barbara Kruger
“The meaning and social significance of Kruger’s work are enhanced—or constituted, in part—by its widespread metabolization and mutation.”
Bruce Hainley and Wayne Koestenbaum on the film work of Guillaume Dustan
“Dustan argued that an inner revolution must precede an outer revolution.” —Bruce Hainley
“The carnivalesque gave us upside down a long time ago. Today, we want to ride aside a side.” —Wayne Koestenbaum
And: Elizabeth Schambelan on criticism; Graham Bader on portraiture in the age of artificial intelligence; Huey Copeland talks with Janet Dees about “A Site of Struggle”; David Velasco introduces a project by Rachel Rose; and Rosalind E. Krauss, Ralph Lemon, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Amy Taubin, David Rimanelli, Precious Okoyomon, Rachel Kushner, Wolfgang Tillmans, Yvonne Rainer, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Anicka Yi, Martine Gutierrez, Ryan Ponder McNamara, Gary Indiana, and Sarah Nicole Prickett tell us about “the lodestars that radiate even (or especially) when the lights go out.”
Also: Hans Ulrich Obrist talks with Pak, Jacob Hashimoto on “No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration,” Samuel Medina on Zoe Zenghelis, and Ethel Cain shares her top ten.
Plus: More than 35 exhibition reviews from around the globe.
