“On hot days, cicadas fill the air with the sound of their unending love. Stop the spirited? Trust me, you can’t.” –Jan Verwoert
The 200th issue of frieze is devoted to enthusiasm. We have invited some of our favourite artists and writers to pay tribute to their inspirations since 1991, the year frieze magazine was launched. Celebrating subjects as diverse as the JPEG, George Michael, the Large Hadron Collider, Steve McQueen’s films, Song Dong’s Waste Not and the linguistic abilities of a male bonobo, contributors include: Chloe Aridjis, Thomas Bayrle, Dodie Bellamy, Yasmine El Rashidi, Forrest Gander, Camille Henrot, Wayne Koestenbaum, Chris Kraus, Ben Lerner, Amalia Pica, Adam Phillips, David Shrigley, Abdellah Taïa, Madeleine Thien, Cecilia Vicuña, Marina Warner and more.
Bidayyat
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie pays tribute to Bidayyat, a Beirut-based organization supporting Syrian filmmakers and “an example of the tremendous cultural enrichment that may be one of the only positive consequences of war.”
Amplified Humanism
“We live in an era of chaos: a time of productive whirlwinds that are weakened by their confinement in multiple little boxes.” Nicolas Bourriaud looks at the artist’s role in an increasingly polyvocal world.
Also featuring: fan letters spanning the ’90s through to the present day
Opening with the ’90s: Eugene Tan on Tang Da Wu’s audacious performance with the president of Singapore, Don’t Give Money to the Art (1995); Dodie Bellamy thanks G.B. Jones for her unapologetic depictions of female sexuality; and Lynn Hershman Leeson and Anicka Yi explore innovations in DNA data printing through word and image.
For the ’00s: Shanay Jhaveri delves into the extreme sadness of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2001 film Millennium Mambo; Max Porter remembers his uneasy revelations at an exhibition by Paul McCarthy; and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye pens a verse in homage to Glenn Ligon’s Warm Broad Glow (2005).
Concluding with the present decade, Naomi Beckwith writes a tribute to Adrian Piper’s institutional experiment The Probable Trust Registry (2013–17); Tom McCarthy is inspired by Sondra Perry’s incisive thinking around technology; and Claire Evans pays homage to the future-gazing of IT theorist Theodor Holm Nelson.
Rave Reviews
Plus 30 reviews from 14 countries around the world, including reports on Louise Bourgeois’s large-scale show at Shanghai’s Long Museum and Enrico David’s open-plan survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
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frieze.com: Visit our website for daily updated content, including: exhibition reviews, art-world news and critics’ guides to current art and culture highlights from around the globe. Also, browse our “On View” platform: the definitive guide to exhibitions at leading international galleries and museums.