Spike Issue #38 – out now
Dear friends,
We are pleased to present our latest issue, Spike #38, which pushes aside the spectacle of the art-industrial complex to make room for Models of Play—the ludic, the low-budget, the participatory and the informal. Curator Vincent Honoré talks to Scottish sculptor Bruce McLean about humour as a strategy for countering the moral high ground of the academic art world. Thomas Edlinger interviews Austrian filmmaker Daniel Hoesl about his low-budget feature-film debut, Soldate Jeannette, whose script is based on the biographies of its cast. And Karen Archey looks at the legacy of Polish artist duo KwieKulik, who developed a meticulous formula to document their political, artistic and domestic activities in communist Poland of the ’70s and ’80s.
Our 21st Century Theory series continues the discussion on the role of objects in contemporary thought with a combination of images and text by French artist Benoît Maire; Ingo Niermann visits the recently established Gallery of the Unbelievers in Dessau-Roßlau, Germany; the curator of the Lithuanian-Cypriot Pavilion in Venice, Raimundas Malašauskas, presents a letter by Argentinian artist Fernanda Laguna; Alexander Scrimgeour plays the defunct online game Cow Clicker and speculates about the meaning of the click; and curator Antony Hudek looks back on Palle Nielsen‘s Model for a Qualitative Society, which transformed Moderna Museet in Stockholm into a playground in 1968.
Then we have Neither/Nor 2013, our response to the end-of-year best/worst lists—curators and critics including Timo Feldhaus, Piper Marshall and Krist Gruijthuijsen recall exhibitions that left them in two minds. New York–based Antoine Catala presents his Artist’s Favourites. Kunstverein Düsseldorf director Hans-Jürgen Hafner sketches out the changing position of the artist assistant; and Christian Egger about three books by Hans-Christian Dany, Tiqqun and Robert Fitterman & Vanessa Place.Reviews include the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh by Joanna Fiduccia, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno in Paris by Dorothée Dupuis, curated by in Vienna by Christian Höller, an exhibition of Alexander Calder’s jewellery creations in New York by Daniel Baumann, Bjarne Melgaard in New York by Tobias Madison, Andrea Bowers in Berlin by Kirsa Geiser, and our columnists the Pfaff Brothers find themselves having an encounter of the third kind in the Arizona desert. And much more…
Have a great start into the new year!
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