The April issue of frieze is haunted. In this issue’s ‘State of the Art’ editorial, Jennifer Higgie writes that ‘If the Art of the Past is like a ghost – something dead that refuses to die – then it follows that a haunting is the unresolved relationship between influence and action.’
Cyprien Galliard tells Jonathan Griffin that it is the monuments of ancient civilizations that connect with the ruins of Modernist urbanism; as he puts it, ‘I wanted to treat a bunker as a classical ruin, or a temple buried beneath the desert in Egypt; to conduct a modern excavation, using Caterpillar diggers instead of brushes.’
For Brian Dillon it is architectural ruins that provide an ongoing relationship with the past for artists working today; he surveys the history of ruins in art from 18th-century painting to 21st-century film.
Jörg Heiser considers the question from the perspective of what might be an appropriate response to the subject of the Holocaust, and Christy Lange finds in Shannon Ebner‘s work a regeneration of photography’s dying legacy.
