Artforum Magazine

THIS MONTH IN PRINT

Cover: The Otolith Group, Sovereign Sisters, 2014, digital animation, black-and-white, silent, 3 minutes 47 seconds.

Dear readers,

The artists featured in our May issue are all of the Artforum kind: ambitious, unassimilable—the kinds of artists for whom this magazine exists, who inspire the rich writing that is our hallmark. There are new takes on those you thought you knew: Bruce Hainley scores the randy beguilements of André Cadere, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie sheds light on Ruth Asawa, and David Rimanelli brings to view long-overlooked paintings by provocateur Pierre Molinier. There are also thoughtful surveys: Tim Griffin writes on the provisional sculptures of Virginia Overton; Sasha Frere-Jones on the epiphanic music of ninety-year-old auteur Éliane Radigue; and Ed Halter and Tobi Haslett bring their brilliant analytic gifts to bear on the sophisticated cinematic and discursive networks of the Otolith Group, featured on this issue’s cover.

If you don’t already support Artforum, I encourage you to subscribe now and take advantage of our spring rates. You won’t just be getting the magazine (and access to our incomparable sixty-year archive), you’ll be witnessing history in the making.

—David Velasco

ON THE COVER

The Otolith Group, INFINITY Minus Infinity, 2019, 4K video, color, sound, 56 minutes 51 seconds.

Ed Halter and Tobi Haslett on the Otolith Group “In the name of the Otolith Group lie intimations of a sixth sense that may be cinema’s truly primary role, an inner sense of space and time, of forward motion.”
—Ed Halter

“An anticapitalist politics popped from the socket of pessimism will have to plunge into the geological, microbial, perceptual, and somatic, the many delirious layers of what Marxists mean by the word ‘totality.’”
—Tobi Haslett

FEATURES

Virginia Overton, Untitled (tulip), 2022, reinforced concrete, brass, glass. Installation view, Venice. From the 59th Venice Biennale. Photo: Francesco Allegretto.

Tim Griffin on the art of Virginia Overton “Overton recognizes that to give attention to the use of objects or their history is, fundamentally, to consider their place in the hands of people.”

Pierre Molinier, Le temps de la mort n°1 (The Time of Death No. 1), 1962, oil on board, 38 1⁄4 × 51 1⁄8".

David Rimanelli introduces a portfolio of Pierre Molinier’s paintings “One of the works here, unfinished, portrays a gilt seraphim whose bee-stung lips evoke the artist’s rictus. It has never before been shown; this portfolio is its debutante ball.”

Éliane Radigue installing for a performance of Chry-ptus, 1971, New York Cultural Center, New York, April 6, 1971. Photo: Yves Arman. © Fondation A.R.M.A.N.

Sasha Frere-Jones on the art of Éliane Radigue “Radigue made it her mission to find the events that exist below and above music and were there before any composer was born.”

Ruth Asawa, Happy Birthday Adam, 1989, graphite pencil and watercolor on paper, sheet size 18 × 24". © Estate of Ruth Asawa/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on the art of Ruth Asawa “Asawa was ambivalent about craft. Without question, her most important teacher at Black Mountain was Josef Albers, a painter above all, who uttered endless aphorisms such as ‘Art is never wrong.’”

COLUMNS

Ruth Beckermann, MUTZENBACHER, 2022, 2K video, color, sound, 100 minutes.

Erika Balsom on Ruth Beckermann’s MUTZENBACHER “In Beckermann’s hands, Josefine Mutzenbacher ceases to be an escapist romp and becomes a mediator of real sociosexual relations that elicits intense disclosures, voluntary and involuntary, from dozens of men.”

Tony Oursler, Dust, 2006, fiberglass, digital video projection (color, sound, 12 minutes 9 seconds). Installation view, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2022.

Susan L. Aberth on “Supernatural America” “In a country obsessed with the paranormal, one might well wonder why it has taken so long for that fixation to trickle from popular culture into the museum.”

Olivia Mole, The Lowlifes, 2021, digital image, dimensions variable.

Alex Kitnick on “Lifes” “The artist is a processed good, a leftover, passing through the system.”

REVIEWS

Gustave Caillebotte, On the Pont de l’Europe, 1876–77, oil on canvas, 41 5⁄8 × 51 1⁄4".

Peter Lunenfeld on “City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907,” plus more from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, Lima, São Paulo, London, Derry-Londonderry, Paris, Milan, Naples, Zurich, Berlin, Munich, Høvikodden, Warsaw, Jeddah, Kampala, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Manila, and Adelaide

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