Collaboration, Critique, and the Creative Time Summit

Another eclectic but focused year began with Rebecca Dimling Cochran’s analysis of the North Carolina collaborative organization and artist residency program Elsewhere. Other articles dealt with Hadassah Emmerich’s postcolonial feminine exoticism, Stelios Faitakis’s recuperation of religious icons, Julika Rudelius’ video explorations of desire and prejudice, and the disturbing realist-object drawings of Manny Prieres, thus taking the reader from Greensboro and Miami to Berlin and Athens, with side trips to spaces with less geographic specificity. In the subsequent issue, Maria Antelman’s space cowgirldom in Athens continued a multi-issue focus on artists in Greece placed in a global context, while Alabama artists Berger + Purath produced billboards of universal compassion in Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans, the curatorial collective WHW pondered the aftermath of their Istanbul Biennial, Walead Beshty proposed new architectural interventions, and the Creative Time Summit tried to make sense of the various forms of public practice. The rest of the year ranged from an interview with Brian Holmes regarding his theoretical approaches to such topics as how “the capitalist imaginary has overcome democratic institutions and reshaped contemporary subjectivity” while art can help produce “some kind of break in our current understandings of what life in society is good for.” Such a break might be implicit in subsequent interviews with Renzo Martens on how documentaries romanticize suffering, Noah Simblist’s essay on how the fetish of (anti-)Nazism domesticates evil, and Zoe Beloff’s artworks purportedly documenting an imaginary working-class psychoanalytic club in the Coney Island of the 1920s, or in Matts Leiderstam’s attempt to insert into Dutch art history his subjectivity as a gay male artist, or in Anthony E. Elms’ critique of Chicago’s failure to comprehend Liam Gillick’s concept-laden art.