WE’RE NOW a year into the indisputably disastrous tenure of predator-in-chief Donald J. Trump. While we wait for the #metoo moment to catch up with him, we watch other men fall thanks to their own crimes and misconduct. To picture our current life and imagine possible lives otherwise, and inspired in no small part by events in our own house, Artforum invited seven artists and two writers to consider how we can and should use power. In the pages that follow, NAN GOLDIN details her opioid addiction and points to the Sackler family as culpable authors of our epidemic. ADRIAN PIPER offers us one of her trenchant calling cards, while SABLE ELYSE SMITH, an artist and poet who has been visiting her father in prisons for nineteen years, examines the terms of disciplinary coercion. KIA LABEIJA shares a portfolio of self-portraits chronicling her story as a person born with HIV, and DONALD MOFFETT leaves us a blank space, a moment to consider what might have been with a President Hillary Clinton. The art and life collective HOUSE OF LADOSHA proposes chic, politically conscious designs for the world we want, while K8 HARDY shows stills from an ongoing video project documenting genius mannequins in the wild. Is this a portrait of consumerism after the apocalypse, or of utopia?
To round things out, JOHANNA FATEMAN asks how we can and should figure sexual violence in antirape culture and PAUL B. PRECIADO traces what he terms “baroque technopatriarchy,” suggesting new forms of agency as an epoch comes to an end.