ESSAY: EXITS

by Joao Ribas

Some people want to escape into the art world, others want to escape from it. Art offers a refuge from the world as well as a way of engaging with it – politically, socially, aesthetically, philosophically. The challenge is to find a way to escape without escapism. By João Ribas

“Don’t we need a place of refuge from how tragic everything is, a site where we can confront the sinister absurdities and inequalities of the present, including those of the art world itself, while seeking solace from their domination? Contemporary art now suspends two opposing and seemingly contradictory impulses: towards being a refuge from evil and stupidity, and against being a zone for detached representation, for after-images of actual life.”

 

– This text appears in Spike #61. You can buy it in our online shop –

João Ribas
Bas Jan Ader
Ben Kinmont
Laurie Parsons
Adrian Piper
Christian Leigh
On Kawara

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View of Ma Qiusha, “No.52 Liulichang East Street,” Beijing Commune, Beijing, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Beijing Commune

View of Ma Qiusha, “No.52 Liulichang East Street,” Beijing Commune, Beijing, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Beijing Commune

Gallery Weekend Beijing 2023

From wood-grain negatives and make-believe tchotchkes to Wuhan punks and haunted islands, Ophelia Lai highlights the 7 best exhibitions in the Chinese capital.

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Portrait of Vincenzo De Bellis. Courtesy: Art Basel

Portrait of Vincenzo de Bellis. Courtesy: Art Basel

Art Basel’s Fairs Director On the Market for Inner Worlds

Ahead of the Alpine extravaganza, Vincenzo de Bellis talks his Peep-Hole origins, sickness as an artistic thematic, and viewing the fairs as curatorial snapshots of the right now.

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View of “Intertwined,” New Museum, New York, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

View of “Intertwined,” New Museum, New York, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

At the Cost of Ambiguity

The largest-ever retrospective of a living artist at the New Museum, New York charts Wangechi Mutu’s turn from the material resonance of found-object collages to the easy symbolic iterations of bronze sculpture.

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Still from Jeamin Cha, Nameless Syndrome , South Korea, 2022. © Jeamin Cha

Still from Jeamin Cha, Nameless Syndrome, South Korea, 2022. © Jeamin Cha

The machine doesn’t always love you back

The melancholy muse, glitchy machinimas, and plenty of Super 8: The 69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival mined the space between arthouse and art world for new and archival gems.

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Kenneth Anger (left) and Tav Falco (right) in conversation at the 2006 Viennale. Photo: Wolfgang Thaler

Kenneth Anger (left) and Tav Falco (right) in conversation at the 2006 Viennale. Photo: Wolfgang Thaler

The Dark Side of the Moon: Kenneth Anger

In memory of Kenneth Anger (1927–2023), we’re republishing our 2006 interview with the iconoclastic filmmaker on silk flowers, vindictive scientologists, and his refusal to hustle for production money.

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Mak2, Home Sweet Home: Love Pool 6 , 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas in three parts, each: 205 x 122 cm; overall: 205 x 366 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Peres Projects

Mak2, Home Sweet Home: Love Pool 6, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas in three parts, each: 205 x 122 cm; overall: 205 x 366 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Peres Projects

8-Bit Intimacies

In triptychs of hot-and-heavy bodies at Peres Projects, Berlin, Hong-Kong-based artist Mak2 materializes the tensions of synthetic desire and our urges to gawk and look away.

Discourse
North Face x Gucci linen puffer from a campaign shot in Iceland, 2021. Courtesy: Gucci. Photo: Jalan and Jibril Durimel

North Face x Gucci linen puffer from a campaign shot in Iceland, 2021. Courtesy: Gucci. Photo: Jalan and Jibril Durimel

Theory of Style: On Seasonality

“Fashion is the future, clothes are what we already wear.” In her May column, Joanna Walsh ponders how fast fashion’s accelerationism plays with seasons, desire, and the virtual, projecting us into an elsewhere we’ll never venture into.

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Xiyadie, Sorting sweet potatoes (Dad, don't yell, we're in the cellar sorting sweet potatoes), 2019, papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 140 x 140 cm. All images courtesy: the artist

Sorrows and Delights

An exhibition of Xiyadie’s steamy papercuts at The Drawing Center, New York narrates his four-decade usurpation of a traditionalist folk form and a coming-out transition from shame to bliss.

People

The Many Fathers of Success: Ei Arakawa

Ahead of his first-ever pool performance at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, Ei Arakawa walks through the changing infrastructure for artist-parents, the integrality of surprise to humor, and modelling queer fatherhood.

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View of “My eyes like shovels.” Courtesy: the artists and Hua International, Berlin

View of “My eyes like shovels.” Courtesy: the artists and Hua International, Berlin

GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN 2023

Spike editor Isabella Zamboni picks the six most vibrant shows from Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023. Home ghosts, Kurdish ropes, watery half animals, too-blue eyes, Neapolitan satyrs, hysterical bureaucrats: Indulge in the capital’s most spirited visions.

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Artist Talk: Wolfgang Staehle

On Tuesday 16 May at Soho House Berlin, net.art pioneer and The Thing co-founder Wolfgang Staehle maps out the technical and aesthetic ancestries of our contemporary adventures in cyberspace.

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The Downward Spiral: The Figure Cannot Hold