Issue 211
May-June 2020

The May/June issue of frieze is Andrew Durbin’s first as editor. As his tenure begins, the magazine has refreshed its design and formats for a new decade. Matthew McLean visits Jimmy Robert in his Berlin studio where they discuss the complicated politics of touch and visibility, Cindy Sherman answers our questionnaire and Paul Chan asks: is anything in metaphysics worth redeeming?

Also featuring: an essay by Francesca Wade on the anarchist, art critic and literary editor Félix Fénéon, who long before Twitter, was turning news stories in fin-de-siècle France into three-line novels; ; an interview by Barbara Casavecchia with Yuri Ancarani ahead of the premiere of his latest film Atlantis (2020); a roundtable where Claire-Louise Bennett, Brian Dillon, Goshka Macuga, Bill Sherman and Carmen Winant consider Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29) – an unfinished attempt to map the ‘afterlife of antiquity’; and Vanessa Onwuemezi on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Prospect West of a Necromancer (2019).

Plus, a series of columns on comedy – from guidance on how to crash an art-world party to a review of Jerry Saltz’s How to Be an Artist (2020) – and 22 reviews from around the world, including Adam Linder & Shahryar Nashat at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a three-part exhibition by Prem Sahib at Southard Reid, London.

From this issue

Warburg has been credited with both inventing and destroying art history

BY Bill Sherman |

‘There is pain and suffering in these pictures, but also pure possibility’

BY Brian Dillon |

The consolations of ancient philosophy for our dire moment

BY Paul Chan |

The New York-based photographer answers our questionnaire

BY Cindy Sherman |

Before Twitter, Félix Fénéon’s daily ‘novels in three lines’ made a literary art form of current affairs

BY Francesca Wade |

Ahead of his new work, filmed on a boat in Venice, an interview with the Italian auteur

BY Barbara Casavecchia |

The Berlin-based artist works across and between performance, text and image

BY Matthew McLean |

From @jerrygogosian to @bradtroemel, memes have become a primary method of institutional critique

BY Mike Pepi |

On the video-sharing app, laughter lubricates the wheels of the desperation train

BY Rob Horning |

The New York-based comedians give sexually repressed characters, from sci-fi heroes to famous academics, the chance to fight and fall in love

BY Rea McNamara |

Why be part of the art world when you can just crash the party? 

BY Steven Phillips-Horst |

The critic’s folksy guide, How to Be an Artist, includes some valuable insight on the creative process 

BY Dan Fox |

The artist’s installation – based on the interior of a nearby gay cruising bar – invokes a haunted sense of refuge

BY Matthew McLean |

At Museo Jumex, Mexico City, a retrospective of the pioneering architect’s key projects shows how she worked to tear down class and racial barriers in Brazilian society

BY Evan Moffitt |

Through her spatial interventions at Établissement d’en face, Brussels, the artist reflects on the layering between art and politics 

BY Martin Germann |

An exhibition at Jan Kaps, Cologne, stresses the trauma of economic transformations in formerly socialist countries

BY Moritz Scheper |

The artist’s photographs of domestic spaces, souks and bodegas, displayed on 100 bus stops around New York and at Helena Anrather, are ‘altogether unworldly’ 

BY Shiv Kotecha |

Global pandemic may have altered our sense of time but, in the Chinese artist’s work, the present is an illusion anyway

BY Amy Sherlock |

In an exhibition at Kunstverein München, Hill’s work from the 1960s appears prescient in its exploration of female office labour

BY Carina Bukuts |

At Marlborough, New York, the Puerto Rico-based artist builds a new pantheon from the wreckage of colonialism and Hurricane Maria 

BY Joseph R. Wolin |

In an exhibition organized by Studio Voltaire, the artist’s work grows at a pace with which galleries today are often unfamiliar

BY Ella Fleck |

At Tabakalera, San Sebastián, 24 artists reflect on the algorithms that rule the world

BY Ren Ebel |

In her first institutional exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim, the artist combines scientific research with fictional elements to create puzzling audio-visual narratives

BY Zofia Cielatkowska |

Within the chaos murmurs an incoherent hope in this ambitious – and at times baffling – exhibition

BY Jennifer Higgie |

An exhibition at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, explores writing’s role in embodiment and spiritual grounding

BY Harry Burke |

At Lévy Gorvy, New York, the painter reinscribes the female gaze into art history

BY Rainer Diana Hamilton |

With shades of the flâneur, the artist wanders the German philosopher’s rural retreat at Todtnauberg in a new series of short films

BY Tom Morton |

The artist’s exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich, examines empirical uncertainty and political disillusionment 

BY Hanno Hauenstein |

In the artist’s survey exhibition at The Power Plant, Toronto, surreal references to the decades-long conflict blur the lines between bodies and objects, dreams and reality

BY Natalie Haddad |

These unusual and little-known early works from the 1960s revel in flawed functionality

BY Matthew Holman |

‘New Images of Man’, curated by Alison Gingeras at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, is ‘part homage, part radical revision’ of the eponymous exhibition

BY Jonathan Griffin |

In the context of increasingly sadistic attacks on Muslim people, the Glasgow-based artist provides a space for grief and dreaming

BY ​Hussein Mitha |

The artists’ joint presentation at MoMA considers the ways human biology both coexists with – and is subsumed by – modern technology

BY Emma McCormick-Goodhart |

The paintings and woodcuts at Tokyo’s Taka Ishii Gallery miss something in their nostalgia for an older vision of image-making

BY Ella Fleck |