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This month in Artforum:
Venice 2019:
The malediction “May you live in interesting times,” adopted by curator Ralph Rugoff as the title of this year’s Venice Biennale, implies that epochs of strife and catastrophe have one saving grace: They’re never dull. Artforum invited art historians Erika Balsom, Claire Bishop, and Janet Kraynak to reckon with a Biennale whose stealth leitmotif—the drone, a technology whose name connoted monotony before it was associated with ultraviolence—is an eerily fitting Valkyrie for our twilight of the gods.
Gaming the System: Anthony Byrt on the art of Simon Denny
“Denny understands that these technologies are neither practical nor inevitable so much as they are ideological—designed and refined by people who, depending on your political perspective, are either gods or monsters.”
–Anthony Byrt
Claim to Fame: Gary Indiana on the art of Sam McKinniss
“McKinniss is a gleaner of sunspots from the refuse heap of collective memory.”
–Gary Indiana
Far from Home: Zehra Jumabhoy on the art of Zarina
“For Zarina, home is never fixed—it is always on the move. Home retreats into memory; it changes with the cities she inhabits.”
–Zehra Jumabhoy
Take Care: Mimi Zeiger on the architecture of Diébédo Francis Kéré
“Xylem exemplifies the pull between local and global, hinting at a Glissantian possibility of productively blurring distinctions between the two without erasing either.”
–Mimi Zeiger
And: Margaret Kross on the art of ektor garcia, Stefan Kalmár and Lia Gangitano on Lutz Bacher, Melissa Anderson on Lily Tomlin, and J. Hoberman on Hannah Frank’s Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons.
Also: Fall Previews: we look ahead to 40 shows worldwide—Pope.L at the Public Art Fund, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hans Haacke at the New Museum, New York; Eva LeWitt at Aldrich Contemporary, Ridgefield, CT; Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again at the Broad, Los Angeles; Nam Jun Paik: The Future is Now at Tate Modern, London; Soungui Kim: Lazy Clouds at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; and more.
Plus: Chloe Wyma on the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Nell McClister on Sonya Clark, Jessica Baran on Counterpublic and art in Saint Louis, Annie Godfrey Larmon on Beverly Pepper, and the Institute of Queer Ecology share their Top Ten.
