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This month in Artforum:
The Politics of Everyday Life
Life today can seem overtaken by powers unseen, impossible to grasp—whether financial, governmental, or environmental—and, indeed, larger than life. But art is uniquely capable of addressing those vast geopolitical systems at the level of perceptual experience, of seeing and listening and being. This special summer issue asks: how does the political reveal itself in quotidian experience—its images, its forms, its events?
Silvia Federici on women
Simon Critchley on activism
Julie Ault on gentrification
Joseph Vogl on money
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young on drugs
Mabel O. Wilson on space
Alan M. Berger on infrastructure
Naeem Mohaiemen on citizenship
Honey Dijon and Taja Cheek on nightlife
Tercerunquinto on graffiti
Andrew Cole on teaching and activism
On the cover: Amy Taubin on Quest, Jonathan Olshefski’s decade-spanning documentary portrait of an American family in Philadelphia:
“In the very ordinary life that the Raineys have so generously shared with us, we are finally able to make out an absolutely extraordinary family: one that, for all our privilege, we’d never before been afforded the privilege of seeing.”
—Amy Taubin
Cultural Appropriation—a roundtable: as we navigate a vastly exploded terrain for the circulation of images and ideas, Artforum invites a distinguished group of artists and scholars—Salome Asega, Homi K. Bhabha, Gregg Bordowitz, Joan Kee, Ajay Kurian, and Jacolby Satterwhite—to join editor Michelle Kuo in examining the urgent and omnipresent politics of representation, appropriation, and power:
“In order to survive, you have to appropriate the signs and the language of people in power.”
—Salome Asega
Mimi Thi Nguyen on the politics of the hijab:
“We are in a prolonged moment in which war is an ordinary presence, weaponizing distinctions—skin, hair, clothes—between friends and enemies among us.”
—Mimi Thi Nguyen
Elizabeth A. Povinelli on ecology and power:
“In this new war of the world, each of us must decide with whom (or what) we are making ties of solidarity.”
—Elizabeth A. Povinelli
“The NEA has consistently had the courage to support controversial works, and it is shameful to see the organization under attack now.”
—Maya Lin
And: Drew Sawyer on Buck Ellison; Mara Hoberman on Jean-Marie Appriou; Luke Skrebowski on Robert Rauschenberg; and Thomas Crow on Virginia Dwan.
Plus: Summer Reading: Glenn Ligon, Asma Naeem, Daniel Birnbaum, Rosalyn Drexler, Gabe Fowler, and John Edgar Wideman share the books they’ll be reading this season; Murtaza Vali on the Sharjah Biennial; Peter Eleey on Trisha Brown; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on Jannis Kounellis; Stephen Willats on Gustav Metzger; Michael Wood on Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime; James Quandt on João Pedro Rodrigues; and musician Terre Thaemlitz shares her Top Ten.
