Introducing a new design and new formats
“We are not meant to touch art. I’m interested in what happens when something can be touched.” –Jimmy Robert
The May/June issue of frieze is Andrew Durbin’s first as editor. As his tenure begins, the magazine has refreshed its design and formats for a new decade.
Matthew McLean visits Jimmy Robert in his Berlin studio where they discuss the complicated politics of touch and visibility, Cindy Sherman answers our questionnaire and Paul Chan asks: is anything in metaphysics worth redeeming?
Profile: Jimmy Robert
“The space of performance is something that has to be won.” Ahead of a survey show at Nottingham Contemporary, Jimmy Robert spoke to Matthew McLean about the relationship between body and image in his performances, sculptures and works on paper.
1500 Words by Paul Chan
“In metaphysics, experience is exploited simply to justify [the ‘timeless’ concept] which transcends it.” Paul Chan critically unpacks the ancient branch of philosophy that demonizes experience and accuses our sensory faculties of failing to grasp “what truly matters.”
Also featuring:
An essay by Francesca Wade on the anarchist, art critic and literary editor Félix Fénéon, who long before Twitter, was turning news stories in fin-de-siècle France into three-line novels, nine of which are have been interpreted in accompanying series of specially commissioned photographs by Polly Brown; an interview by Barbara Casavecchia with Yuri Ancarani ahead of the premiere of his latest film Atlantis (2020), which follows a group of young people in Venice who “seem to be drifting along with no sense of future”; a roundtable where Claire-Louise Bennett, Brian Dillon, Goshka Macuga, Bill Sherman and Carmen Winant consider Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29)—an unfinished attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity”—as it is reconstructed at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and Vanessa Onwuemezi responds to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Prospect West of a Necromancer (2019)
Columns: Comedy
Rea McNamara profiles New York-based comedians Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey, whose gender-fluid fan fiction gives sexually repressed characters the chance to fight and fall in love; Steven Phillips-Horst of Talk Hole offers guidance on how to crash an art-world party; Dan Fox reviews Jerry Saltz’s How to Be an Artist (2020); Rob Horning considers body humour on TikTok; and Mike Pepi scrolls through the meme accounts that lampoon an unequal art world, from @jerrygagosian to @freeze_magazine and @bradtroemel.
Plus, 22 reviews from around the world, including Adam Linder & Shahryar Nashat at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a three-part exhibition by Prem Sahib at Southard Reid, London.
Subscribe now and explore the issue on frieze.com.
