May 2017 in Artforum

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This month in Artforum:

Summer Preview: 45 shows worldwide—the Grand Tour, Florine Stettheimer, Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David Weiss, Lee Lozano, Alberto Giacometti, Seth Price, Pan Yuliang, and more.

Venice Biennale: Christine Macel talks with Michelle Kuo about the 57th edition of the world’s largest show:

“How can we understand individuality and the individual subject now? How can we reinvent a new humanism after its failure?”
—Christine Macel

On the cover: Irene V. Small explores Allora & Calzadilla’s latest project, which places a Dan Flavin light sculpture deep in a cave in Puerto Rico:

“The work’s luminous ribbons of light hold the presence of the cave’s soaring 250-foot height with a profound and generous reciprocity.”
—Irene V. Small 

Art Under Nationalism: Dispatch from Warsaw. Eight distinguished curators, artists, and critics reflect on art in the Polish capital—and on the conditions of culture under right-wing extremism:

“Warsaw, with its chaotic, supercharged mixture of obsolete early-capitalist detritus, starts to look and feel like GeoCities on steroids, fueled by social inequality and capitalism.” 
—Natalia Sielewicz 

Johanna Fateman and Tobi Haslett on the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the violence of cultural representation:

“Here we see, in striking visual terms, the contours of the long game—resistance in registers of anguish, vigilance, and humor.” 
—Johanna Fateman 

Chika Okeke-Agulu and Claire Bishop on the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise:

“In art that is intended to move beyond representation and actually impact a situation, how is efficacy to be measured?” 
—Claire Bishop 

Sons, Mothers, and Lovers: Ara Osterweil on Warhol and Fassbinder:

“Whereas Warhol comically celebrates the symbolic death of patriarchy, Fassbinder excoriates his mother for her inability to imagine a world that transcends the brutal law of the father.”
—Ara Osterweil

Openings: Melissa Gronlund on Lantian Xie:

“Xie uses past histories from Dubai to show the ways in which origins and authenticity prove circumstantial.”
—Melissa Gronlund 

Fashion: David Lieske on the fall/winter 2017 collections:

“Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia lifted the distinctly middle-class look of Bernie Sanders’s campaign headquarters and presented it as a new form of runway social realism.”
—David Lieske

Slant: Eric C. H. de Bruyn on Marcel Broodthaers and artificial intelligence:

“Broodthaers’s work needs to be situated within a genealogy of media, rather than only within a history of art.”
—Eric C. H. de Bruyn

And: Michael Ned Holte on Jimmie Durham, Julia Bryan-Wilson on Merce Cunningham, and Robert Slifkin on Frank Heath.

Plus: Nico Baumbach on Jean Louis Schefer’s Ordinary Man of Cinema, Mia You on Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers, J. Hoberman on Paz Encina, and artist Ivana Bašić shares her Top Ten.