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As ArtReview (quietly) turns 75, it seems that nothing has changed while absolutely everything has changed. Amid the constant of incessant shifting, this issue explores topics of renewal, and how sometimes the past is what we make of it.
Gelare Khoshgozaran delves into the films of Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory, whose work collages and transforms excerpts from Iranian movies of the past four decades. What do we learn from cinema, and can this be reconfigured? Tafakory’s work, Khoshgozaran writes, ‘disembowels the codes and the affect created over decades of cinematic depictions of gendered violence’.
With such disembowelling in mind, the issue also includes the first of a series that seeks to republish (and annotate) key texts that have influenced art and the thinking around art, starting here with E.H. Gombrich’s 1950 essay ‘Norm and Form’. Gombrich explores the influence of the Renaissance on art history, while ArtReview inserts a few thoughts on the influence of Gombrich’s thinking in light of current debates on representation and decolonisation.
The reinterpretation of the (more recent) past continues in a text by Martin Herbert that returns to Mike Kelley on the occasion of a touring retrospective of the artist’s work arriving at Tate Modern in London. From earlier responses to works with themes of repression and ‘victim culture’, to the current show, which highlights spirituality and identity, Herbert examines how each era finds its own version of the confrontational artist. ‘The lesson learned along the way’, Herbert writes, ‘is that “Mike Kelley” was, to some degree, whoever the audience and the cultural moment wanted him to be.’
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have described choirs and singing as one of the earliest forms of human coordination. Their new exhibition at The Serpentine, The Call, makes use of community choirs across the UK to train AI to create new music. Chris Fite-Wassilak explores Herndon and Dryhurst’s shift from experimental music to art installations, and how their work towards an ethical and public AI might be seen in light of earlier strains of Conceptual art.
Also in the magazine, the reopening of the Warburg Institute in London, and reviews of the brutal sculptures of Melvin Edwards at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Javier Téllez’s self-reflexive film in New York and Nina Canell at Simian in Copenhagen, alongside reviews from Singapore, Edinburgh and Paris. In autumn reading, Rosanna McLaughlin reviews Poor Artists, The White Pube’s foray into fiction, finding a gap between what the writing duo preach and how they preach it, while Brian Dillon takes a bite out of Jérémie Koering’s Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images
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