Art in an age of crisis
The March issue of frieze looks at art in an age of crisis. How can cultural institutions acknowledge their complicity in growing social and environmental inequalities? How are artists responding to increasingly precarious socioeconomic conditions? We lead with a special section on museum patronage, with contributions from performance artist Andrea Fraser, curator Michelle Millar Fisher, climate activist Mel Evans, curator and editor Priya Khanchandani, novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif, and curator and former Queens Museum director Laura Raicovich. Plus, novelist Hermione Hoby reflects on Lynda Benglis’s exuberant and iconoclastic career
Tipping Points: a section on museum patronage
“I think we are already at a tipping point. The question is which way we’ll tip.” –Andrea Fraser. Following a series of high-profile protests over the funding sources of art institutions, Andrea Fraser and Michelle Millar Fisher ask what it would take for every museum worker to have a voice in administrative decisions.
Lynda Benglis Pours One Out
“It makes sense that childhood should loom large for an artist like Benglis, in all her disinhibited tactility and curiosity.” –Hermione Hoby. As a major exhibitions of Benglis’s work open across the US and Europe, novelist Hermione Hoby meets the 78-year-old artist in her New York studio to discuss the pleasures of viscosity and the power of irreverence.
Also featuring:
Silas Martí on the effects of Jair Bolsonaro’s first year as president of Brazil and the ways artists are fighting back against his crypto-fascism; Jennifer Croft on her experience translating Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk and the relationship between literature and politics in Poland, as the country’s right-wing Law and Justice Party tightens its grip on power; and a roundtable chaired by Hera Chan in which Hong Kong-based activists Clara Cheung, KY Wong and Susi Law consider what happens when artists are elected to local government positions and resist the state from within.
Columns and Reviews:
Rebecca Anne Proctor investigates the charged history of the Palais de Lomé in Togo, a former colonial landmark that now serves as the first publicly funded art centre in Africa. To mark the 70th anniversary of psychoanalytic theorist Karen Horney’s lecture on the relationship between art and neurosis, Rob Sharp asks why we believe psychological turmoil produces better art. Carol Yinghua Lu reports on the closure of the independent art space Arrow Factory in Beijing and its impact on the local art scene. David Birkin pens a picture piece on Hawk fighter jets over Snowdonia in north Wales. Skye Arundhati Thomas recounts her struggles as a freelance art professional battling the UK immigration system. Dana Kopel maps the fight for unionization in the art world, looking specifically at the Marciano Art Foundation, a private museum in Los Angeles that abruptly closed after its staff moved to unionize. And Melissa Gronlund looks at recent exhibitions that have responded to the crisis in the Gulf, from MoMA PS1 in New York to Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai.
Plus, 36 reviews from around the world, including the second Lagos Biennial and the sixth Singapore Biennale.
Answering our questionnaire is Amsterdam-based curator, creative advisor and board member Beatrix Ruf.
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