MOMENT OF RECKONING
THOUGH THE OUTCOME of the 2024 US presidential election has yet to be determined as I write these words, it is hard to imagine any result that does not lead to considerable chaos. It may be useful for those of us who are in America to gain some perspective on our situation by looking beyond our shores. This issue of Artforum provides ample opportunity to do so, beginning with Hung Duong’s feature essay, which describes the “restless volatility” that has enveloped Indonesia in the wake of the February election of Prabowo Subianto. Duong goes on to examine how artists Ade Darmawan and Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are “delving into Indonesian history to shine a light on the manipulation of memory and archives that’s happening before our eyes.” In another feature essay, Percy Zvomuya considers two exhibitions that amount to a “moment of reckoning” for Switzerland: “Remembering: Geneva in the Colonial World,” now on view at the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, and “Colonial – Switzerland’s Global Entanglements,” which presents itself as the “first ever comprehensive and multi-perspectival overview of Switzerland’s colonial past,” and is now on view at the Landesmuseum Zürich.
The longue durée of colonization also appears in Pablo Larios’s interview with artist Lee Ufan. For Lee, even the desire to see the canvas as a blank “territory” relates to imperialism: “In the modern era, artists came to believe that the most important thing was their images, their ideas, their concepts” he argues. His sculpture of a red rock resting on glass, which belongs to the series of installations called “Relatum” that he began in the 1960s, is featured on this issue’s cover. As Larios notes, these works are very much influenced by Lee’s reading of Western philosophers who wrote on the phenomenology of perception, such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and they invite us to slow down our perception enough to appreciate the obdurate materiality of objects and the relations between them—and with us. Given our fragile moment, I find myself particularly drawn to this image of a smooth, transparent pane of glass that appears to have shattered under the weight of a textured, opaque stone. This “relation” gives poetic expression to the drama of extreme contrasts, the shaping of our reality by invisible forces, and the way that a single moment reverberates into the future—while encouraging us, as Lee says, to “stop and think.”
The importance of art as a means of engaging with the world is at the core of Gordon Hughes’s review of the new book Exit Interview (2024), in which Hal Foster interviews Benjamin H. D. Buchloh about the sum of his career as one of the most influential art historians of his generation. By working through Buchloh’s own cataloguing of his intellectual achievements and shortcomings, Hughes offers a reflection on the very premises and value of critique. I myself joined Artforum to support the idea of criticism as an active and even activist practice pitted against historical amnesia, superficial engagement, and ironic detachment (all of which further the most dangerous ideological agendas), and I find Hughes’s thoughtful review to be a model of what it means to think clearly and deeply about things—and to do so as if they truly mattered.
To further make the case for criticism, next month, Artforum’s annual year-in-review issue will introduce a new feature: In addition to the “artists’ artists,” we will now highlight the “critics’ critics” by inviting an array of writers from this and other publications to nominate the best critical writing of the year. In the meantime, we hope you visit our website to peruse our first Artforum Dossier, which focuses on the topic of “Celluloid.” As I explained in my September letter, this new series presents thematic selections of materials from our print, web, and video archives that chart the discourse around key terms in contemporary art, and we hope they will become useful guides for our readers—from the writer trying to orient themselves in unfamiliar terrain to the artist looking for inspiration. We’ve also recently launched a new video series, “Under the Influence,” in which the most significant artists of our time speak about the people, artworks, and ideas that have shaped their practices. The first video features Charles Atlas, who shares his love for the paintings of Édouard Manet, what he learned from Merce Cunningham, and how he understands his own influence on the field, among other topics. Collectively, these videos will trace the constellations and lineages of ideas that are shaping contemporary art and culture—and are another way of underscoring the importance of thinking critically about and through art, even in the direst of times.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
