DARA BIRNBAUM (A) Turning the Media Against Itself Michelle Kuo, Rahel Aima, and Emmanuel Olunkwa in conversation (B) I Fought Like Fucking Hell to Get Out of the Black Box Dara Birnbaum, Hito Steyerl, and Stuart Comer in conversation
ANDREA BRANZI (A) A Ribbon Running Through Andrea Branzi in conversation with Alessandro Rabottini (B) La Gioconda Sbarbata (The Shaved Mona Lisa, 1972) by Andrea Branzi (from Casabella, no. 363, March 1972)
LALA RUKH (A) Reading Lala Rukh by Saira Ansari (B) Interviews, Past and Present by Mariah Lookman
JULIE BECKER (A) The Delirium of Digression by Sabrina Tarasoff (from Mousse #76, Summer 2021) (B) Outside the Vitrine (Julie Becker, Sparkle Woman) by Mark von Schlegell (from Mousse #76, Summer 2021)
VAGINAL DAVIS (A) Vaginal Davis Troubles the Smile by Dodie Bellamy (from Mousse #79, Spring 2022) (B) The Royal We Vaginal Davis in conversation with Ron Athey (from Mousse #79, Spring 2022) (C) Anarchic Abundance, or The Art of Living by Amelia Jones (from Mousse #79, Spring 2022)
ROSEMARY MAYER (A) Nothing Independent of Its Circumstances by Wendy Vogel (from Mousse #73, Fall 2020) (B) Surroundings by Rosemary Mayer (from Art-Rite, no. 15, April 1977)
JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC SCHNYDER (A) Mister Neutral by Martin Herbert (B) On Schnyderian Art by Patrick Frey (from Parkett, no. 25, 1990)
ANITA STECKEL (A) Reconsidering Anita Steckel in the Age of Heteropessimism Wendy Vogel (B) Anita Being Anita Dodie Bellamy, Rachel Middleman, Betty Tompkins
MANHATTAN MARXIST: I’VE GOT PRINCIPLES, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM, I’VE GOT OTHERS Estelle Hoy
PRIMITIVE MAN Amy Gerstler
TIDBITS (PART I) Jordan/Martin Hell by Alex Bennett Scott Covert by Sabrina Tarasoff Erin Calla Watson by Jennifer Piejko Stéphane Mandelbaum by Krzysztof Kościuczuk
The Margins of Events: Bruno Serralongue Elisa R. Linn, Lennart Wolff
SEYNI AWA CAMARA: Tale of Tales Eva Barois De Caevel
MELIKE KARA: Being without Ego Sohrab Mohebbi
Books Jenna Sutela
TIDBITS (PART II) Abbas Zahedi by Alessandro Rabottini George Tourkovasilis by Nicolas Linnert B. Ingrid Olson by Brit Barton Dala Nasser by Amy Jones
A River “The story here is that nothing happens. There is no resolution. Things disappear. People disappear. The earth changes. I wake up to write.” Lisa Robertson pens a narrative, part of an untitled novel in progress, about decline and invisibility as freedom. It centers on an aesthetics of decay, bodily and urban, through memories of water—specifically the flooding and ebbing of the Bièvre river.
The Depression Artist Through a writing process that offers a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature, K Allado-McDowell and GPT-3—the latter an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text—coauthor a satirical account of an artist who, having abandoned their brushes in favor of NFTs, finds themselves stuck in a reclusive and stale existence until an unidentified, rhythmic pulse rouses them.
Basement Jazz In building an imaginary milieu for Dora Budor’s practice, Marina Vishmidt is drawn to the category of “infrastructure,” in the sense of both artists who poeticize or pattern voids into significant structure, and a transversal way of working that is attentive to the conditions of possibility in exhibition. In architectural, economic, linguistic, and organizational ways, Budor generates a transformation of gaps and absences.
Focus on: Fujiko Nakaya Big Talk Is Talking about the Weather Into Pure White Darkness: The Ecology of Fujiko Nakaya An early member of Experiments in Art and Technology and a crucial figure for Japanese video art, Fujiko Nakaya is mostly known for her sculptural and installation ecosystems using fog. Here, Stuart Comer, Michelle Kuo, Astrida Neimanis, and Sarah Johanna Theurer discuss the artist’s environmental awareness, the poetics of the fog, and what it means to talk about the weather, while Reiko Setsuda retraces Nakaya’s collaborative and networked thinking. Nakaya’s approach does not objectify nature but treats the global environment as an organic ecosystem shaped by social, political, and technological relations.
Object-Oriented: Toward a Regeneration of Art Criticism as Literary Practice Could the key to art criticism’s present-future redemption be found in the past? Travis Jeppesen muses on the origins of critical commentary, guiding our way through the dispute opposing “art criticism” and “art writing.” Via an analysis of different categories, such as meta- and ficto-criticism, Jeppesen debunks how a “poetics of indeterminacy” may grace and empower a form of art writing that is a vanguard practice within the wider genre of art criticism.
The House in Which We Live Seamlessly moving from the page into sculpture, installation, and performance, and often focusing on histories of queer community, Caspar Heinemann responds to a short but significant period in British history with humor and irreverence, and with an intimate and melancholic material sensitivity. Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe reflects on Heinemann’s linguistic play with poetic negations and absences.
A Hypothesis of Resistance In the first of a series of five essays aimed at examining the temporalities of performance, defying and eclipsing the standardization that drives individual and collective bodies to perform toward an entirely metric-oriented future, Cally Spooner intertwines the psoas major muscle; Donald W. Winnicott’s studies on developmental psychology; motherhood; and chrononormativity.
Concrete Poetry Through installations that combine conceptual rigor with revolutionary poetry, Ignacio Gatica investigates the long shadow of neoliberalism in Chile. Harry Burke peruses how the weaknesses and contradictions of Chilean politics’ recent history interweave with Gatica’s practice, pointing to social movements whose demands extend beyond the constitutional forms of liberal democracy.
Tidbits: Céline Mathieu by Leila Peacock; Jerzy Bereś by Krzysztof Kościuczuk; David Moser by Laura McLean-Ferris; Ayo Akingbade by Faridah Folawiyo; Steph Huang by Olivia Aherne; Selma Selman by Arnisa Caterina Zeqo; Simon Lehner by Christina Lehnert; Deborah-Joyce Holman by Olamiju Fajemisin; Francisco Tropa by Simone Menegoi.
