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This month in Artforum:
Painting, representation, and memory in the art of Michael Williams:
“Williams converts perceptual experience into intimate detail, as if each painterly incident could somehow, in some small way, gesture toward the overwhelming rush of the universe.”
—Dan Nadel
Hal Foster on alternatives to alternative facts:
“A strain of recent fiction deploys great artifice, not to demystify or disrupt the real but to make the real real again, which is to say, effective again, felt again.”
—Hal Foster
Adam Szymczyk talks about Documenta 14 and the crisis of Europe:
“We were told for so many years that physical presence was no longer important in politics, that the body had been fully subsumed by social media. But suddenly, it has become important to put your body forward.”
—Adam Szymczyk
Omar Kholeif on Nil Yalter’s groundbreaking 1978 investigation into transgender identity:
“Yalter’s subject decided to transform himself in front of the camera, in a kind of heightened dramatization of gender transition.”
—Omar Kholeif
“The work operates against disaster capitalism.”
—Maria Eichhorn
“Running Fence was both an autonomous artwork that temporarily marked the California landscape and a dogged campaign that reshaped the political alignments of a region.”
—Colby Chamberlain
“Young used the hybridities and confusions endemic to contemporary art to defamiliarize an established practice of the news media: rendering disaster palatable.”
—Gregor Quack
Margaret Ewing on Hans Haacke in Frankfurt, 1976:
“With this exhibition, Haacke launched what would become a sustained inquiry into the ever-present threats to democratic freedoms, always with an implicit warning about the past.”
—Margaret Ewing
Kerstin Stakemeier on Nairy Baghramian:
“Rather than defying use per se, Baghramian’s works ultimately defy us.”
—Kerstin Stakemeier
Openings: Erika Balsom on Jean-Paul Kelly:
“Instead of the irresponsible giddiness of accelerationism and the cynical proclamation that reality has faded into mere simulation, Kelly offers something else: curiosity, intelligence, tenderness.”
—Erika Balsom
And: Robert Pincus-Witten and David Lewis on Francis Picabia, Alan Licht on Raymond Pettibon, Meera Menezes on Jitish Kallat, Sérgio B. Martins on Ferreira Gullar, and Anne Pontégnie on Daan van Golden.
Plus: Noam M. Elcott on Peter Gidal and the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, Amy Taubin on Jonas Mekas’s Movie Journal, Cynthia Davidson on Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley’s ReActor, Claire Lehmann on the collected essays of Luigi Ghirri, and artist Sol Calero shares her Top Ten.
