#40 Summer 2014

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Themed "Art under Capitalism", Spike's summer issue includes an acerbic and revealing conversation about the bleak future of art with dealer Gavin Brown, who started his gallery in downtown Manhattan in 1993 and soon became one of the cutting-edge figures of the New York scene. Italian left-wing theorist Tiziana Terranova talks about living in an age of debt, Kolja Reichert reflects on how the ascendance of art is a symptom of the devaluation of money, while writer Jon Leon interviews LA artist Alex Israel about nostalgia, style and taste. The cult curator Bob Nickas thinks back on the career of Laurie Parsons, who quit the art world soon after joining it in the 1990s. In addition, Timo Feldhaus writes about Jordan Wolfson's hugely expensive and notorious dancing robot at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, and curator Michele D'Aurizio pitches Curzio Malaparte's novel The Skin as a lesson in humanity and suffering, while American science-fiction author Mark von Schlegell contributes a new short story about an unstoppable horde of children. And much more besides...

 

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Four-Twenty: Chris Martin's »Cool Drink on a Hot Day«
It’s undeniable that Chris Martin’s paintings resemble »outsider art«. Yet I like them not for being intuitive, or spiritual, or liberated from convention – although they are all these things – but because they are affectionate.
Jordan Wolfson's robot: In the Moment of Terror

For many visitors, Jordan Wolfson’s robot represents a first contact with the most technologically developed and also most disturbing robot they have ever seen. But can the gallery space do justice to the experience? After all, a robot is only as evil as the world into which it is placed.

Artist's Favourites by Metahaven
Curator's Key
Polly Staple, Director of Chisenhale Gallery in London, on A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) by Gustave Courbet
MARIA LASSNIG (1919–2014)
By Peter Pakesch
Neoliberal Entities
The Artist Pension Trust promises artists a land of milk and honey. By Alexander Scrimgeour
KUNSTBETRIEB
People are spending unprecedented sums on art. Buying as a buzz. By Andrew M. Goldstein & Homa Zarghamee
21ST CENTURY THEORY
Tiziana Terranova and Stefan Heidenreich talk about financialisation, workfare and debt
Portrait Laurie Parsons
The American artist spent only a few years in the art world. Bob Nickas thinks back on her work.
Summertime Happiness: L.A. artist Alex Israel
Alex Israel was born in Los Angeles in 1982. His practice is multi-faceted, employing a variety of media to accommodate the many and varied flavors of his particular West Coast aesthetic. His blown-up sun shades, airbrushed self-portraits, and Hollywood props belie a deeply layered set of personal and pop cultural references that expertly reorient their context. His As It LAys series of celebrity interviews reflect the miracle and wonder that is life in L.A. and helped to bring a greater attention to his sun-drenched artworks. Since 2010 he has operated a sunglasses company called Freeway Eyewear that has lately begun collaborating with marquee artists to design new looks. The next collaboration is scheduled for release this holiday season. Israel is an unvaryingly upbeat artist, consistently delivering a cool optimism across his oeuvre. What is his secret? An interview by Jon Leon.
Portrait Rainer Ganahl
Marx, Lenin and Mao. The Austrian artist is passionately attached to left-wing figures and finds ways to bring them into the present. By Adam Kleinman
Suffer the Children
Short story by Mark con Schlegell
EXHIBITION HISTORIES
»All this will one day be yours sweetheart«. Paul Maenz tells of a short evening in Frankfurt in 1967.
Books
Curzio Malaparte wrote his novel The Skin in 1949. A re-reading by Michele D’Aurizio
Berlin
Timo Feldhaus seeks out the nooks and crannies between work, power, and capital at the tenth Gallery Weekend.
Seduction
or the things we like: By Alex Hunter, Chris Sharp, Nina Beier, Ashley Bickerton, Maximilian Geymüller
Reviews
Vienna, Baden, Basel, Bern, Berlin, Munich, Mexicali, New York, London, Eindhoven, Warsaw
THE PFAFF BROTHERS
Random Sequencing
The Mosquito by Nina Beier
The Demise of the Future
The New York-based gallerist Gavin Brown and the Swiss curator Daniel Baumann take a shot at an unromantic view of the art market. It turns out depressing, entertaining, and instructive at once.
Where is the money?
Many people are anxious that the growing class divide in the art world and the succession of record-breaking prices paid for contemporary art endanger the belief system supporting it. But why is nobody worried about money itself? Isn’t what happens at an auction that money celebrates its freedom, its release from the burden of being a means of comparison? Is art the new money? On a currency that lives from the bank of the gaze, into which we all make payments.

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