Portrait: Jon Rafman

by Aaron Moulton
Still from Jon Rafman’s and Daniel Lopatin’s Sticky Drama , 2015 HD video, 10:34 min  Courtesy Jon Rafman Studios and Daniel Lopatin 

Artist Jon Rafman and curator Aaron Moulton, talk about the breakdown of culture as we know it, and the perpetual evolution of the artist’s role as visionary oracle. Weaving together meme culture, conspiracy theories, and critical theory, they discuss the trends, stereotypes, and impulses that made the 2010s a decade of blind repetition as well as burgeoning change.

– This text appears in Spike #62. You can buy it in our online shop –

Jon Rafman
Aaron Moulton

People
Shimabuku, Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere , 1994. Courtesy: the artist and Air de Paris, Romainville. Photo: Photo Marc Domag

Shimabuku, Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere, 1994. Courtesy: the artist and Air de Paris, Romainville. Photo: Photo Marc Domag

Places to Travel Slowly: An Interview with Shimabuku

An artist of chance encounters muses about the intimacy of dirt, world-record mountaineering, and art that opens up the body’s every cell.

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Whitney Claflin, Writer’s Block , 2023, vinyl on plexiglass, stretchfoil; four panels, each 119 x 119 cm. Courtesy: the artist and DREI, Cologne

Whitney Claflin, Writer’s Block, 2023, vinyl on plexiglass and stretchfoil. Installation view, Galerie Layr, Vienna, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Drei, Cologne

Correspondences: Curated by and viennacontemporary 2023

Ringing out the summer, the Viennese art world’s own Philip Marlowe, Max Henry, sleuthed across the hardboiled city, looking for the traces of the evasive Neutral.

Discourse
Photo: Gucci SS 2023

Photo: Gucci “Twinsburg” SS 2023

Theory of Style: On Looking Like

What is it like to “like” in the era of influencer fashion? Does desiring to emulate mean accepting one’s artificial self? In her September column, Joanna Walsh considers the difference between looking and being “like.”

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Dineo Seshee Bopape, I Re-member Mama, 2023. © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Sonja Hyytiäinen

Dineo Seshee Bopape, I Re-member Mama, 2023. © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Sonja Hyytiäinen

Archipelago of Other Knowledges

Spread over a wooded coastal island, the second Helsinki Biennial posits flora and soil as more potent agents of politics than language-based art activists.

Things we like
VALIE EXPORT, Körperkonfiguration , 1982, silver gelatin print, 119.5 × 180 cm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023. Courtesy:the artist and Charim Galerie, Vienna

VALIE EXPORT, Körperkonfiguration, 1982, silver gelatin print, 119.5 × 180 cm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023. Courtesy:the artist and Charim Galerie, Vienna

5 Shows On Our Radar

Spoilt for choice by Berlin Art Week and Gallery Weekend Festival? Spike tabbed through the capital’s stacked exhibition schedule for what to see with fresh eyes in the coming days.

Discourse
Britney Spears objects with an umbrella to a paparazzo’s behavior, 2006

Britney Spears to a paparazzo’s behavior with an umbrella, 2007

The Internet is Forever

In the mistake culture produced by an era of surveillance, our idea of the good isn’t defined by action, but its appearance, and the power to make truth boils down to who keeps the receipts. By Matilda Lin Berke

People
Anna-Sophie Berger,  Untitled, Alexander Berger 1979 , 2023, C-print, 162.6 x 106.6. cm. Courtesy: Anna-Sophie Berger and Emanuel Layr, Vienna. Photo: Kunstdokumentation

Anna-Sophie Berger, Untitled, Alexander Berger 1979, 2023, c-print, 162.5 x 106.5 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Emanuel Layr, Vienna. Photos: Kunstdokumentation

Moral Fables: An Interview with Anna-Sophie Berger

Is legibility in art a violent demand? During her latest solo show at Emanuel Layr, Vienna, Anna-Sophie Berger spoke about bad faith, harmful language, and fashion’s rapport with death.

Things we like
Julia Scher, Greta , 2022, marble 40 x 76 x 30 cm. © Rolf K. Wegst. Courtesy: the artist and Drei, Cologne

Julia Scher, Greta, 2022, marble 40 x 76 x 30 cm. © Rolf K. Wegst. Courtesy: the artist and Drei, Cologne

5 Shows On Our Radar

Phones from a dog’s eyes, knock-off poetry, and archives archives archives: Spike’s editors recommend four shows and one walking tour during Munich’s marquee art event “VARIOUS OTHERS.”

Discourse
#76
Joan Didion’s pair of Celine faux-tortoiseshell sunglasses, which sold at auction in November 2022 for $27,000

Joan Didion’s Celine faux-tortoiseshell sunglasses, which sold at auction in November 2022 for $27,000

Second-Hand Lifestyles

In times of it-girl inflation, everyone wants to live in a celebrity’s skin. Who better than Joan Didion to burst that bubble? Her spirit explains why style survives death and serious (prose-) stylists only buy Kim Kardashian’s shapewear.

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#76
Left: Pablo Picasso, The Sculptor , 1931, oil on plywood, 285 x 96 cm; right: Pablo Picasso, The Supplicant Woman , 1937, gouache on wood, 24 x 18.5 cm. Both: © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy: Musée national Picasso, Paris

Left: Pablo Picasso, The Sculptor, 1931, oil on plywood, 285 x 96 cm; right: Pablo Picasso, The Supplicant Woman, 1937, gouache on wood, 24 x 18.5 cm. Both: © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy: Musée national Picasso, Paris

Sorry Not Sorry

Warming over Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up Picasso takedown from 2018, “It’s Pablo-matic” undermines the Brooklyn Museum’s own staff and even gatekeeps the privileges of non-expertise.

People
#33
Nicole Eisenman, Sloppy Bar Room Kiss , 2011, oil on canvas, 99 x 122 cm. Courtesy:  the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Nicole Eisenman, Sloppy Bar Room Kiss, 2011, oil on canvas, 99 x 122 cm. Courtesy:  the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Heavy Painting

Joanna Fiduccia’s portrait in Spike #33 of Nicole Eisenman, now the subject of a retrospective at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, snapshots her first forays into printmaking and her opening of the body unto intimacy.

"The 80s was the last period when low self-esteem was a normative response to authority"

Essay: The Last Great Era of Low Self-Esteem