To coincide with the November 2016 issue of Artforum on art and politics, artforum.com invited artists Carrie Mae Weems, Matthew Weinstein, Marilyn Minter, Hans Haacke, Nadia Ayari, Nancy Chunn, and Vitaly Komar to discuss political art.
To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select the single image, exhibition, or event that most memorably captured their eye in 2013.
SERGEJ JENSEN
Two thousand thirteen was a good year for art. Whoever says the opposite is an ignoramus. I like the artist Flame.
PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA
Alighiero Boetti (Museum of Modern Art, New York) I don’t see all that many shows, but I’d bet on MoMA’s recent “Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan” as one of the recent best. Boetti’s work and name are equally memorable, and to think that he was operating like this well before “
The eviction of protesters from New York’s Zuccotti Park last November has done little to diminish the significance of occupation as a mode of political action. Looking back on last year’s many encampments—and their disruptions of urban space—Artforum invited sociologist Saskia Sassen to discuss the relationship of occupation to notions of territory and power, while artist Hans Haacke, whose own work has famously made visible the hidden economies and spatial politics of art, presents a selection of photographs he took at Occupy Wall Street this past fall.
OCCUPYING IS NOT THE SAME as
Willoughby Sharp, a vital force in America’s postwar art world as a writer, curator, publisher, artist, and teacher, died on December 17, aged seventy-two. Artforum asked Liza Béar, who met Sharp in 1968 and shortly thereafter founded the magazine Avalanche with him, and artist Hans Haacke, who participated in several exhibitions Sharp organized, to mark his passing with their thoughts and reminiscences.
LIZA BÉAR
New York, November 8, 1968
Nixon has been elected. The CBS News Election Unit keeps a few of us expats on to do the recounts. Catapulted from London’s 1960s counterculture on my first
“BUSINESS COULD HOLD ART exhibitions to tell its own story.” William B. Renner, president of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), proposed this salutary measure in an address to the American Advertising Federation in June, 1977.1 He was prompted to make this suggestion by the hostility to which he and his peers claim to have been subjected in the post-Watergate period. Don Stroetzel, a public relations officer of Mobil, the second largest U.S. oil company, joined him in 1979, complaining: “No longer is it possible to rely on Washington’s basic sympathy for business as a protection against
Hans Haacke
DURING AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS by Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, Nancy Holt, Laurie James, Brenda Miller, and Mary Obering, October 7–24, 1972, the visitors of the John Weber Gallery were requested by me to complete a questionnaire with 20 questions. Ten of these questions inquired about their demographic background and ten questions related to the visitors’ opinions on sociopolitical issues. They were either multiple choice questions or had to be answered by writing in a figure or a word. The questionnaires were provided, with pencils, in two file trays on either end of a long table in the