STRANGE DAYS
FAMOUS PEOPLE are always dying, but the number of deaths in the art world over the past few months feels notable, as if we are preparing to close the decades-long chapter of art history that began in 1960s New York. We lost Richard Serra in March; Faith Ringgold (eulogized by Bisa Butler in our Summer issue) in April; Frank Stella in May; Barbara Gladstone in June; and Bill Viola in July, to name only a handful. We also recently lost many prominent figures whose stories began elsewhere, such as Dinh Q. Lê, whom Hung Duong celebrated in our Summer issue, and Blaise Mandefu Ayawo, whose remembrance by Azu Nwagbogu we published online in July. We now honor Stella and Serra in these pages with essays by Sarah K. Rich and Gordon Hughes, respectively, who each wrestle with their subjects’ larger-than-life reputations (and sculptures), rather than taking their relevance for granted.
These deaths cast a shadow over the art world this summer. As our Berlin-based editor Pablo Larios reported in his online Diary from Art Basel in June, one of the major topics of conversation there was the prevailing sense that a generational shift is underway: The founders of today’s leading galleries are preparing or executing their succession plans, while the artists who came to prominence with them are fading into ghostly precedents. In our own ways, we all face the question of how to remember, if not also mourn, the community that defined the art world we have inherited. Perhaps we pay our respects by acknowledging not only their vision but also their limits, building on their legacies by embarking on the paths they led us toward but did not themselves take—a hopeful idea concretized by the passing of the baton from President Joe Biden to presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Over the same funereal summer months, Adriano Pedrosa’s edition of the Venice Biennale, “Stranieri Ovunque”(Foreigners Everywhere), asked us to look to the “foreign,” Indigenous, and queer artists who suggest their own alternative paths forward, including many deceased artists whom the mainstream Western art world hardly noted. As is our tradition, Artforum reviews the Biennale in this, our September issue. While the takes presented here by Manuel Borja-Villel, Simon Njami, and Sara Raza are not the first, we hope they will be among the most definitive. They certainly get to the heart of the debates over Pedrosa’s framework, which has amplified ongoing conversations about the relative merits of expanding or abolishing the canon, the limits of the politics of representation and respectability, and the soft bigotry of low expectations. If nothing else, the Biennale and its varied responses highlight that as we encounter more of these “foreigners” “everywhere” in the exhibitions of the future, the challenge will be to argue the importance of aesthetic judgment and quality while simultaneously looking to critical race, postcolonial, and queer theories to reimagine what these terms might mean and how they might function, and to what ends.
The need for such a nuanced approach is made apparent by the many works in Venice that movingly contend with the political and structural conditions that have produced the category of the “foreigner” in specific contexts. Of these, the most lauded—and popular—might have been Wael Shawky’s video Drama 1882, 2024, which is featured on this issue’s cover. Presented at the Egyptian Pavilion in the Giardini, the work is a mesmerizing, operatic retelling of the Urabi rebellionagainst imperial rule, the failure of which led to the occupation of Egypt by the British until 1956. But Shawky does more than merely draw our attention to this revolution and its echoes in more recent anticolonial uprisings in the Arab world. Most notably, the actors (whom the artist directed to move like the puppets he normally uses) sway like buoys throughout the video, as if every history is the story of actors who are carried by invisible currents, even as they stir the waters. Ultimately, the work refracts the legacy of colonialism through open-ended questions about what roles we are now playing in our own historical dramas; how and why we transform historical facts (and ambiguities or obfuscations) into narratives; and how we determine who counts as “we” when configurations of power and identity keep shifting. These questions are more than academic, as proven this summer by the ongoing crisis in Palestine; but as I observed the rapt audience crammed into the Egyptian Pavilion, it felt as if Shawky’s video was allowing us to not just think but experience our way through them.
Central to Shawky’s work, and to the Biennale more broadly, is the questioning of the value “we” place on a Western model of modernity, which is a recurring theme throughout this issue. In his assessment of Christoph Büchel’s sprawling exhibition “Monte di Pietà” at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, which is on view concurrent to the Biennale, artist Simon Denny—whose own work deals with cultural systems of value, whether monetary or aesthetic—argues that Büchel’s conceptual critique of the schism between different types of value ultimately reaffirms the existing canon, especially in comparison with Pedrosa’s approach. Also relating to the themes of this Biennale is K. L. H. Wells’s examination of the ongoing reappraisal of textiles as an artistic medium, focusing on three major exhibitions that relate it to mainstream modernist abstraction. Our Focus reviews highlight two other historical surveys that aim to expand modernism to include the contributions of African American and Japanese artists, respectively; these raise the question of who gets to count as modern, and who gets to do the counting—looping back to the same questions asked by “Foreigners Everywhere.” But while everyone might be modern, not everyone can be foreign, insofar as “foreign” is a social and legal designation that those in power ascribe to others but not themselves, which prompts another question: To what extent are the conditions of modernity and foreignness mutually constitutive, and what does their future look like?
IN ADDITION to developing this issue, the Artforum staff has been working hard this summer to refine our editorial agenda, better coordinate our coverage across our various platforms, and make it easier for our readers to find the work we do that is of interest to them. We continue to aim to publish writing that is accessible and relevant to our audiences, as well as rigorous. To that end, we will work harder at explaining references, articulating the critical stakes of arguments, and providing insight into the exhibitions and topics that everyone is talking about, or soon will be. In short, Artforum should continue to be an indispensable resource—the most expert and nuanced guide to the ideas that are shaping contemporary art, whether we are following or leading the conversation.
In our columns (which, like our features and reviews, span both our print edition and our website), we will be focusing on those aspects of cultural production that are not part of contemporary art but are relevant to or intersect with it. These include architecture, books, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, technology, and television—each conceived in the broadest of possible terms and written about by a wide range of authors. Additionally, we will continue publishing our On Site columns, which offer insightful reports from particular sites and events (such as academic conferences or museum openings), and Passages, which note the passing of notable figures in the art world. Each of these columns will not appear in every issue, but they will cycle with increased regularity, allowing us to offer more comprehensive coverage of these topics. These rotating columns are complemented by our regular monthly columns: the Editor’s Letter; the Top Ten, our long-running list of ten things of interest to a person of interest; and a new column called the Checklist, starting with this issue’s Checklist by Vera Mey. This column, which will always close out each issue, will pose the same ten questions to a notable curator working anywhere and in any kind of space; we hope it offers an approachable way to learn from some of the most interesting people who are defining the discourse.
In our features, you will find that Openings—our regular feature profiling artists whose careers are reaching new heights—has been renamed Spotlight, to better reflect our intention to shine a light on this pivotal moment in an artist’s career (despite the name, they were never reports from exhibition openings). We will continue to offer our other regular features, including critical essays; Close-Ups, which are in-depth readings of single artworks that demonstrate the power of close looking; Interviews; Portfolios; and specially-commissioned Artist’s Projects.
In our reviews, we have made only one change: The overall structure of the print reviews—which was loosely designed to move east around the globe by continent, starting from North America—now follows geography more strictly, with Africa appearing between South America and Europe. This shift also acknowledges the alignment between the artists and discourses we find on these continents, solidifying our focus on the Global South.
Across our website, a series of minor tweaks will make it easier to find new and relevant content. Our various columns and features are now listed under the hamburger menu (which looks like three stacked horizontal bars—and yes, that is really its technical name); this clarifies what we publish and also lets you find it all organized in one place. On the navigation bar, next to News you will now find Diary—our web-native column for first-person accounts from events around the world (a kind of successor to the old Scene and Herd). On our Video page, you will now find five playlists highlighting our different video series. While we know there are many places to find videos about art online, ours reflect our critical perspective, emphasizing close looking, analysis, and art-historical connections. For example, our Interpretations videos feature individuals performing a reading of one of their favorite artworks or cultural artifacts, while our upcoming series Under the Influence will feature notable artists guiding us through their inspirations, including their favorite artworks, exhibitions, and texts. In October, our website will launch our new series of Dossiers: thematic collections of materials previously published by Artforum in print and online. We hope these will help readers find more paths into our renowned archive, while making it more useful for those looking to educate themselves (or others) on key topics in contemporary art.
Finally, I want to conclude by reiterating our commitment to Artforum as a forum for productive debate. This season, we plan to bring back our Roundtable discussions, and also to introduce a new feature called Positions, in which three or more authors weigh in on a complex topic and articulate and defend their own stances on it. While Roundtables are collaborative conversations working through an idea in real time, Positions are parallel statements that allow authors to express their differing perspectives outside of an adversarial framework; both are valuable ways of developing discourse. We also are renewing our commitment to publishing Letters to the Editor. To submit one for consideration, please email letters@artforum.com. While subtle in comparison, the design of the spine for this season’s print edition, which features a grouping of three distinct color blocks that will shift in size and together make a whole, emphasizes this commitment to polyvocality. At the end of the season, the central blocks will form a pattern that looks like an arrow or a ziggurat, suggesting movement forward and upward, and also the idea of building and refining something over time—with both the past and the future in mind.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
