Issue 200
January - February 2019

The 200th issue of frieze is devoted to enthusiasm. Two hundred of our favourite artists and writers pay tribute to their inspirations since 1991, the year frieze magazine was launched.

Divided into three decades, the issue features fan letters and visual responses to subjects as diverse as the JPEG, George Michael, the Large Hadron Collider, Steve McQueen’s films, Song Dong’s Waste Not and the linguistic abilities of a male bonobo. It includes contributions from Olivia Laing, Chris Kraus, David Shrigley, Marina Warner and more.

Plus, 30 rave reviews from around the world, including reports on Louise Bourgeois’s show at Shanghai’s Long Museum and Enrico David’s at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

From this issue

The Brazilian artist brought food, film, art and love to her social project

BY Michelle Sommer |

‘I was 13, with a group of friends, and it was my first time hearing anything so Black and British – and, also, so working class’

BY Kadish Morris |

‘The world certainly wasn’t perfect but that night I didn’t have to contend with an unmadeness’

BY Ima-Abasi Okon |

‘Some have mattered more to the living Jalal, others to the dead one indulging in jouissance

BY Jalal Toufic |

‘I have always chosen to listen to my heart and stick to my convictions, rather than yielding to reality’

BY Zeng Fanzhi |

‘I felt as though I’d walked in on what the future of art-making could be: a curation of time and space between us and the world in which we exist’

BY Rirkrit Tiravanija |

‘When I read that essay, I literally feel some kind of space opening up: I can breathe’

BY Beatrice Gibson |

‘Through the doors of underworld rose a mind structured by languages inherited from the dead’

BY Forrest Gander |

‘It’s a tenacious act of enthusiasm within Europe’s changing political landscape’

BY Krzysztof Kościuczuk |

‘I would like to dedicate this tribute to all of Zidane’s fans (of whom I am one)’

BY Violaine Boutet de Monvel |

‘Never before has a document of an event given such a vivid sense of what things may look like after we are gone’

BY Ned Beauman |

The artist creates a specially commissioned work for frieze in response to Yoko Ono’s legendary 1965 performance ‘Cut Piece’

BY Wangechi Mutu |

‘These are photographs in which moments – and lives – are constantly moving from then to now, bodies finding echoes in the world around them’

BY Caroline Marciniak |

Enemy Kitchen makes Iraqi culture visible in the US beyond war, producing an alternative discourse and social space.’

BY Michael Rakowitz |

‘This is the passing of time visualized through a contrapuntal freezing of it’

BY Harry Thorne |

‘Every Wednesday, we would drink and watch Italian masterpieces – Fellini, Pasolini, Visconti – without subtitles’

BY Sohrab Mohebbi |

‘Burdekin was a feminist, speculative, dystopian writer of essential texts’

‘It would be easy to cry to this tune, but difficult to dance to it’

BY Patrick Langley |

‘Her strange, thinking surfaces have become the artworks I think about the most’

BY Quinn Latimer |

‘At the first site, the freedom of the United States of America is honoured; at the second, the history of its immigrants is conserved’

BY Carina Bukuts |

‘The last time I felt maenadically enthusiastic was during this year’s Pride, marching down the streets of Milan under a scorching sun’

BY Barbara Casavecchia |

‘Enthusiasm leaks out from the possibility of how these things might all be together’

BY Adam Chodzko |

The Psychology of an Art Writer provides a beautiful account of Lee’s looking and feeling and thinking and writing about art’

BY Vivian Sky Rehberg |

‘This performance, exquisite as always, is at once emotional and precise’

BY Sarah McCrory |

A series of specially commissioned drawings for frieze's 200th issue

‘I held (and hold) his ideas and ethics like a compass’

BY Lauren Cornell |

‘Your songs are always full of colour and samples, beats and melodies, dizzying rhythms and more melodies still’

BY Sukhdev Sandhu |

‘A convenient metaphor for emptiness and desolation, the desert is the paradigmatic nowhere’

BY Venus Lau |

‘It reminds me of my formative years and a time of many firsts’

BY Renee So |

‘Hong allows revelations to emerge from the most unassuming descriptions of facts’

BY Carol Yinghua Lu |

‘It offers up a lifetime’s worth of thinking about the incommensurate relationship between filmic time and time as it is lived and experienced’

BY Aram Moshayedi |

‘With Brexit hanging like a lead weight above the city’s new forest of glass towers, the memory of the Horse Hospital’s stone floor feels grounding’

BY Stuart Comer |

‘He created rhythmic patterns that sounded, in your mind or on his voice, both adamantine and feline at once’

BY Cal Revely-Calder |

‘Despite the efforts of Trump and his ilk to deny it, the truth is out there’

BY Christy Lange |

‘I took his reviews in the Independent to be the baseline; what all art criticism looked like’

BY Tim Smith-Laing |

‘Perhaps the shroud I am looking for is embracing lost souls and helping them to return’

BY Minouk Lim |

‘Majerus was driven by mass – calm and heavy like a smooth car – six cylinder bicycle with no flat tyre’

BY Thomas Bayrle |

‘The poet moves their hips like someone on a tram about to vomit’

BY Rebecca Tamás |

A visual homage to the Netflix documentary

BY Donna Huddleston |

‘No other type of cinema in recent decades has worshipped reality in this intense manner’

 

BY Mark Cousins |

‘It has created a space of inclusion in a patriarchal art scene in which the visibility of female practitioners was minimal’

BY Bisi Silva |

‘Even with the softest breeze, it comes alive and gently plays with the world around’

BY Kulapat Yantrasast |

‘Inside the cemetery, hundreds of names descend in chronological order, but time’s forward motion clearly does not signify progress here’

BY Jennifer Kabat |

‘The way she stumbled on stage, with her smeared lips and perfect legs, appeared at once criminally affected and wildly persuasive’

BY Michelle Orange |

‘Every two minutes, people upload more images to the internet than existed in total just 150 years ago’

BY Orit Gat |

‘In this false universe of positive gloss and shallow passions, where can a real enthusiasm be located?’

BY Darian Leader |

‘I stayed first for an hour, then whole afternoons and, eventually, days’

BY Jonathan P. Watts |

‘Here, the body becomes a ghostly mark in time, a blurring, a phantasm’

BY Christine Tohmé |

‘What triggered the initiation of the Association of Musical Marxists?’

BY Ahmet Öğüt |

‘The wide range of artists presented in this astonishing show was a provocation that will fuel many young curators and scholars in the coming years’

BY Adriano Pedrosa |

‘I don’t know how a poet becomes a poet. And I don’t think anyone else does either’

BY Glen Baxter |

‘Piper reminds me that I must remain committed to both my language and actions’

BY Naomi Beckwith |

With new work on view at Tanya Bonakdar, New York, a look back at the artist’s iconic Venice pavilion

BY Jennifer Egan |

‘In moments of intense friendship, pure enthusiasm is more than anywhere else possible’

BY Andy Holden |

‘It embodies the qualities of enthusiasm, enquiry and toe-curling earnestness that art can’t exist without’

BY Dan Fox |

‘The salient factor wasn’t ever its printedness; Dot Dot Dot just took its own form seriously to think about things we see and how’

BY Pablo Larios |

‘In our current catastrophic political climate, we need Fisher more than ever before’

BY Geeta Dayal |

‘Contemporary art institutions should stop looking to museums or theatres as role models and, instead, learn from nightclubs’

BY Jenny Schlenzka |

‘Nelson is wilful and demanding, forever frustrated by the gap between expression and vision, as are all great artists’

BY Claire L. Evans |

‘Gillen suggests that New York is less a place than it is an open-ended idea’

BY Andrew Durbin |

Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman (1968) invokes a multiplicity of diasporic readings’

BY Rianna Jade Parker |

‘The contemporary global economy is based on flows and conversions of energy into information into capital’

BY Agnieszka Kurant |

‘Appointed by Barack Obama in 2009, Sotomayor is the fourth woman and the first Latina to serve on the nation’s highest court’

BY Evan Moffitt |

‘Through its transformations and multiple languages, the poem becomes a dark mirror that reflects the missing truth’

BY Cecilia Vicuña |

‘Its name tells you everything you really need to know: it’s big, it’s complex and it smashes things together.’

BY George Pendle |

‘His work resembles a world from which the humans have departed; all that remains are the mute plastic things, marked with purposeless love’

BY Wayne Koestenbaum |

‘The possibility of arriving at insights, even unsettling ones, makes the pursuit of art worthwhile and necessary’

BY June Yap |

‘Take the heat and the breadth and the air and the life and the longing and land it in your own back garden’

BY Lynette Yiadom-Boakye |

‘Even a piece of paper had a trajectory and a life: to be written upon; to be used as a tablecloth or to clean the table; to be burned for heat and to become ashes’

BY Madeleine Thien |

‘When I think about Kutcher and Moore, what comes to my mind is a vision of pure, halcyon happiness’

BY Naomi Fry |

‘This ethereal portrait also miniaturizes Mofokeng’s quest for affinity and understanding in a world dogged by shadow’

BY Sean O'Toole |

‘Since Lucano was elected mayor in 2004, the town of Riace, located in one of the most impoverished regions of Italy, has welcomed thousands of refugees’

BY Alfredo Jaar |

‘It’s a sinewy and organic thing, almost threatening, in an otherwise boring district of embassies and hotels’

BY Sam Thorne |

‘Over the radio, he asked listeners a simple question: what is your favourite sound of Beijing?’

BY Colin Siyuan Chinnery |

‘I have secretly kept two copies of this series for years’

BY Céline Condorelli |

‘It was exactly the right thing at exactly the right time’

BY Jonathan Griffin |

‘The sheer farce of it. Wonderful. That was what made so much sense and felt so good’

BY Max Porter |

‘His work opened a pathway to design for me that no architectural school or practice could’

BY Mae-Ling Jovenes Lokko |

‘His works are imbued with such rare emotional acuity and nuance that it is hard not to be first stunned and, then, deeply moved’

BY Shanay Jhaveri |

‘It’s all there: charm, humour, ethics, friendship’

BY Tom Jeffreys |

‘I found it at my local used bookstore more than a month before its release date, only days after 9/11’

BY Aaron Peck |

‘The show singlehandedly thrust Africa back into the culture of global contemporary art.’

BY Kobena Mercer |

‘I know no more perfect portrait of artist and muse’

BY Negar Azimi |

‘Her work challenges the way 20th-century history has been shaped in our cultural imaginaries’

BY Magalí Arriola |

‘No other installation has come close to the swooning sensation of seeing Bourgeois’s work for the first time’

BY Shahidha Bari |

‘Purifoy conjured life from practically nothing: ten pairs of used trousers, discarded trainers, a few spare planks’

BY Gilda Williams |

‘He wasn’t English, but he was playing an English game, the fag in the Establishment, a light entertainer, undisguised yet somehow unseen, an open secret’

BY Olivia Laing |

We look back on 28 years of publishing by remembering what inspires us

BY Jennifer Higgie |

‘Do you remember what that was like seeing great art and knowing nothing about its maker or context?’

BY Mark Godfrey |

‘These works render the real, estranged personalities of our present perturbing, alluring; exquisite’

BY Gabriella Pounds |

‘The Western that heroized pioneers unsettling the West was moribund. Unforgiven, an anti-Western Western, buried it.’

BY Lynne Tillman |

‘I knew, while trying that chair, that I wanted whatever the future had to offer’

BY Cody Delistraty |

For all the camp and capering, Eddie and Patsy’s antics also have a plaintive, even existential tinge

BY Matthew McLean |

‘After Kurzweil’s book landed with a thud in the centre of our culture, it was impossible not to address its claims’

BY Chris Wiley |

Hall’s understanding of cultural identity allows us to deconstruct and reconstruct who we think we are

BY Osei Bonsu |

‘She introduced me to the borderland of craft, for which I count myself very lucky’

BY Tanya Harrod |

‘The people from whom I learn most are enthusiasts, who take my soul to places I never knew existed.’

BY Jan Verwoert |

Once eclipsed by the men in her life, the architect’s supreme originality and energy are slowly being recognized

BY Marina Warner |

‘Released following the musician’s death in 1993, the album is an extraordinary swan song: morose, comical and utterly preposterous’

BY Max Andrews |

‘To me, it offers a particular emotional experience – something like joyful grief’

BY Laura McLean-Ferris |

‘If criticality indicates a desire for change, then surely the critic is actually an optimist’

BY Jörg Heiser |

‘I started to read Mayröcker’s work obsessively. She became one of the few writers whose every written word I have read’

BY Hans Ulrich Obrist |

‘It was a piece of long-term thinking that put aside political expediency for the future benefit of citizens’

BY Amanda Levete |

‘If anything can be converted to DNA, then this interview could become a DNA portrait of you’

BY Lynn Hershman Leeson |

‘Hollis’s great skill is to reconcile frugality with generosity’

BY Emily King |

‘I keep returning to the work – even as it changes’ 

BY Dawn Adès |

‘The bold, deep, shoulder-shaking beats of the new-jack sound era’

BY Ismail Einashe |

An exhibition at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, sheds new light on colonialist patterns and projections 

BY Jonathan Griffin |

‘The acid test of anyone’s enthusiasm is just how boring it is’

BY Kasper König AND Adam Phillips |

A Beirut-based organization supporting Syrian filmmakers captures the response of contemporary art to the wars of our time

BY Kaelen Wilson-Goldie |

The inspirational founder of Germany’s Green Party and her untimely death 

BY Chloe Aridjis |

‘In this era of social violence and the return of the irrational, has the interhuman sphere become, paradoxically, obsolete?’

BY Nicolas Bourriaud |

For her exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, the artist explores the potential of indefinite loops

BY Grace Sparapani |

‘My sense was that a shift had happened in what is only now called fashion exhibition-making’

BY Judith Clark |

‘Chadwick relished combining provocative and problematic materials in order to probe the body and its boundaries’

BY Louisa Buck |

‘Jones co-opts the male-on-male objectifying gaze of gay erotica and converts it to a female-on-female gaze’

BY Dodie Bellamy |

‘It encourages you to ponder its exalted lineage while taking the piss out of you for doing so’

‘By changing oppressive patterns on many levels, the movement has much to say about feminism in the present moment’

BY Brenda Lozano |

‘Each hypnotic frame of No Home Movie lasts just long enough to allow our minds to wander, summoning recollections of domestic spaces’

BY Hedi El Kholti |

‘Light was shone into the darkest corners of the continent to reveal the most wonderful traditions, which had been isolated by cold war ideologies and boundaries’

BY Paul Kildea |

‘Tang’s action took place at a time when performance art was outlawed by the Singaporean authorities’

BY Eugene Tan |

‘You have taught art within a history that is our own, with a language that is our own’

BY Matariki Williams |

‘It’s the way he talks about his own death that amazed then and impresses today’

BY Brian Dillon |

‘It was an architectural death mask of a domestic space and of a century of its inhabitants’

BY Iwona Blazwick |

 ‘He is ruthless in pursuit of his vision as any great director must be; his powerful images are indelible’

BY Amanda Sharp |

‘It is Björk’s ambivalence to human relations that makes her liberality so poignant’

BY Claire-Louise Bennett |

‘This is, perhaps, the best ending of any film, ever’

BY Erika Balsom |

‘Sekula’s sentences have their own nautical rhythm that brings incommensurate scales of experience into sudden relation’

BY Ben Lerner |

‘I first encountered Lialina’s piece in college and, as the years go by, I continue to return to and obsess over it.’

BY Elvia Wilk |

For her show at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, the artist blends identities of religious saviour, politician, celebrity and cheap entertainer

BY Simone Krug |

‘Kanzi is proficient in Yerkish, a keyboard-based language that scientists invented to communicate with great apes’

BY Amalia Pica |

‘The book reads as a collection of photographs captured by a self-recording camera’

BY Iman Issa |

An exhibition at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, transports Sebastián Lelio’s award-winning film Una mujer fantástica into the gallery space

BY Saim Demircan |

‘George Michael has always told the truth. But I don’t believe that truth. Freedom is invisible. It’s just a line in an ad’

BY Abdellah Taïa |

‘Given today’s resurgent far right, Haacke’s exhibition serves as a model for resisting the present’

BY Gregor Muir |

‘A year after its release, it was still a huge dancefloor anthem and I was entering a world that would dismantle what I thought I knew about life up until that point’

BY Melanie Keen |

‘It showed the power of placing something dumb and ugly next to something glorious’

BY Hettie Judah |

‘His complex works embody both figurative social realism and mystic spiritual abstraction’

BY Lisa Brice |

‘This poetic work of propaganda helped to bring about a queer communist comradeship that spanned more than 6,000 kilometres’

BY Juliet Jacques |

‘I first saw it in a private screening room in my college library, deep in the suburbs of New England. It changed my life.’

BY Alvin Li |

‘Perry brings seemingly disparate fields into alignment with a precision that is brilliant and devastating’

BY Tom McCarthy |

‘In everything she does, Adele’s honesty is at the core of her vision’

BY Allison Katz |

‘The exhibition was one of the most formative and memorable things I’ve ever seen’

BY Chris Kraus |

How artists use junkyard landscapes to forge an escape from materially saturated culture

BY Kirsty Bell |

‘Namatjira’s political leaders all look frozen, dull behind the eyes, whiter than white, and as if battling an internal war with their fakery and greed’

BY Wes Hill |

‘By its closing scenes, I felt compelled to stand up and clap’

BY Yung Ma |

‘I spend my life as a writer trying (failing) to approximate Oswald’s verbal economy of means’

BY Amy Sherlock |

‘Boom obsesses over every element of design – including the textures and scents of her books, as well as their appearance’

BY Alice Rawsthorn |

‘What our descendants will make of this object depends on what survives of us’

BY Tom Morton |

‘You invite us to forge a ‘we’ with you and your images, to empathize, nodding snorts of identification brimming with tears’

BY Mimi Chu |

‘Its beautiful brutalism suits getting older: an ascetic retreat to watch small things come and go’

BY Declan Long |

A retrospective at S.M.A.K., Ghent, explores the origins of the artist’s reduced visual language

BY Mitch Speed |

A survey at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, views the artist’s oeuvre through the prism of the form he returned to constantly throughout his life

BY Jane Ure-Smith |

The artist's first US survey at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, sheds new light on the relationship between art and design

BY Natalie Haddad |

A rare survey at Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, demonstrates how the overlapping of dream and nightmare is far from exclusive to the US

BY Kito Nedo |

For her very first solo show, the artist brings her own biography onto the walls of Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery

BY Chris Sharratt |

An exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, New York, shows the artist’s attempt to break out of step with time

BY David Geers |

An exhibition at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, reveals how the artist uses the technique of collage to create an aesthetic of ambivalence

BY Kristian Vistrup Madsen |

This year's edition of the FEMSA Biennial takes place in Zacatecas and reflects on the craft and industrial traditions of the Mexican city 

BY Dorothée Dupuis |

The artist’s first large-scale exhibition in China at the Long Museum, Shanghai, sheds new light on the sublimation of personal history in her work

BY Arthur Solway |

The artist’s exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, ‘If and Only If’, inserts ‘an act of magic’ into the assembly line

BY Sabine Mirlesse |

Relics from the Valley of the Kings – by way of Hollywood – come to Solstice Arts Centre, Navan

BY Anya Harrison |

The artist's first solo show at Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, uses mirroring and multiplication to explore perspectives of his hometown 

BY Daniel Berndt |

An exhibition at Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, raises questions about the photographic proof of events happening in the Middle East

BY Aoife Rosenmeyer |

For an exhibition at O-Town House, Los Angeles, the artist and filmmaker invited 31 friends to photograph artworks he gave to them

BY Corina Copp |

Two exhibitions in Barcelona and Sabadell explore the artist’s ever-changing styles and painterly references

BY Max Andrews |

An exhibition at Greene Naftali, New York, sees the artist prod at our ideas of ease, humour and convenience

BY Olivia Rodrigues |

Exploring the political importance of the human body at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

BY Viktoria Draganova |

An exhibition at Auto Italia, London, shows the artist group's belief in the potential of visual language to infiltrate public discourse

BY Eliel Jones |

An exhibition at LC Queisser, Tbilisi, highlights how the artist invents new forms of touching a canvas

BY Moritz Scheper |

A survey at Moderna Museet Mälmo shows how the artist has insistently challenged notions surrounding authenticity, identity and selfhood

BY Matthew Rana |

An exhibition at Maureen Paley, London, explores the artist collective's well-known wallpaper 'Imagevirus' and its relevance today

BY Ellen Mara De Wachter |

An exhibition at Essex Street, New York, shows how closely Hill’s literary and artistic work is linked to her critique of domesticity

BY Rainer Diana Hamilton |

The artist’s first UK institutional exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, London, showcases the singularity of her oeuvre

BY Nicholas Hatfull |

An exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York, sees the artist explore the artistic potential in objects of everyday life

BY Shiv Kotecha |

The ecstatic silliness of breaking the rules is evidenced in this show about the dancers, composers and artists who reshaped American art

BY Russell Janzen |