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Cover of Spike #79 – The Pessimist Issue

Spike Magazine

Spike #79 – The Pessimist Issue

Rita Vitorelli ed.

€18.00

How to look at polycrisis without freaking out.

Eco ruin and refugeeism, illiberalization and inequality, hot wars and a New Cold War—the polycrisis hydra is always growing another head. But it's also a state of mind, an identity crisis brought on by paralysis and cognitive shock. Was it always like this, but with less media reach? Or is capitalism really burning itself out, just without any redemptive zest? The arts are expert at thematizing the woes that affect them—hello, Biennale and documenta—but maybe polycrisis is an instructive metaphor for what's breaking creativity: the commercial takeover of discourse, the bureaucratization of curating, and the dopamine highs of self-branding.

Maybe we're at a crossroads between recovery and death. But Spike #79 is clear-eyed about the fact that pessimists are never disappointed.

With Henrike Naumann, Shirin Neshat, Roberto Villanueva, Ben Davis, Mire Lee, Precious Okoyomon, Ivan Cheng, Nil Yalter, Anselm Franke, Anna Jermolaewa, Catherine Liu, Oliver Ressler, Morag Keil, Jeppe Ugelvig and many more.

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike (Spike Art Quarterly) is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art published in English which aims at sustaining a vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism. At the heart of each issue are feature essays by leading critics and curators on artists making work that plays a significant role in current debates. Situated between art theory and practice and ranging far beyond its editorial base in Vienna and Berlin, Spike is both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic. Spike's renowned pool of contributing writers, artists, collectors and gallerists observe and reflect on contemporary art and analyse international developments in contemporary culture, offering its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.

recommendations

Cover of Confidences / Production

After 8 Books

Confidences / Production

Ivan Cheng

Acting like an academic endpoint, cuneiform everything.

Conlan Eliseu is a vampire and an out-of-vogue fashion stylist who takes a job as an advisor at the Gatlin Finishing School, a three-year vocational program for talented teens in a theatre town. Human teen Doeke Schreyer wants to be a star and isn’t afraid of hard work. He just can’t seem to get it. Will his corporeal charms help him exceed the curse on his name, inherited from his adoptive parents?

Confidences / Production deals with the process of keeping the past alive, whether as image or restaging. It is the fourth instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which uses the figure of the vampire as shorthand for cultural movement. Following Confidences / Baseline, Confidences / Majority, and Confidences / Oracle, this new episode contains excerpts or elements from scripts by the artist, as well as documents and reflections on the tradition and transmission of theatre. 

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut. His performances, works and writings have been recently presented at Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; galerie Édouard Montassut, Paris; Villa Imperiale, Pesaro; OCTO, Marseille; Volksbühne Roter Salon, Berlin; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; and Mind Eater Festival, Oslo. In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Production is published in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, in conjunction with the presentation of the project, Ivan Cheng: NP in September 2024.

Cover of Confidences / Oracle

OCT0

Confidences / Oracle

Ivan Cheng

Fiction €13.00

Oracles don’t require belief—they now theatrically suspend disbelief. No longer advisors of world policy, they run Locus Solus, a town that has come to ramble around an eponymous theatre and chocolate factories. Theo, a centuries-old vampire intent on remaining contemporary through performance, visits Locus Solus, which is hosting Praise Estate, an international theatre festival. He uses the festival as an opportunity to stay with Gean, his oracle boyfriend, who is there visiting family. Theo has a fetish for the future, fixated on the one thing he is in no shortage of.

Confidences / Oracle is a lover’s trip to a weeklong theatre festival. A vehicle for recontextualising recent performance scripts and texts, Oracle is the third instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which intertwines vampires and performance as sites for circulation and recognition.

Cover of Ferrara Deux (Faits Divers)

Self-Published

Ferrara Deux (Faits Divers)

Ivan Cheng

Fiction €19.00

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

Cover of GLEAN - Issue 5 (NL edition)

GLEAN

GLEAN - Issue 5 (NL edition)

GLEAN

Periodicals €15.00

De vijde Nederlandstalige GLEAN editie.

Bijdrages over Chantal Akerman, Biënnale van Venetië, Eline de Clercq, Samah Hijawi, Laure Prouvost, Anastasia Bay, Wim Delvoye, Riar Rizaldi, Haegue Yang, Nil Yalter, Anna Maria Mariolino.

Cover of How to Sleep Faster 2

Arcadia Missa

How to Sleep Faster 2

Various

How to Sleep Faster 2 is the second of our biannually published journals that form the backbone of Arcadia Missa’ critical collaborative discourse on participation, post-digital visual-production and institutional subjectivity.This issue explores moments of collapse, shift and potential in a cultural moment framed by economic, political and societal disturbance.

Arcadia Missa Publication; eds Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark et al.

Cover of The My Comrade Anthology

Boo-Hooray

The My Comrade Anthology

Linda Simpson

Periodicals €30.00

The My Comrade Anthology collects pages from past issues of My Comrade selected by Linda Simpson, printed in a substantial 256-page volume on newsprint.

My Comrade was an underground gay culture zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed zines popping up in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through parody of both mainstream tabloid magazines and the self-serious gay press, a campy and ironic sensibility, and radical left sympathies and sloganeering, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Publishing 11 issues between 1987 and 1994, and three issues since, My Comrade documents the last years of underground gay culture before marriage equality and representation at elite levels of American society became the primary drivers of gay politics and aesthetic production. My Comrade was briefly revived from 2004 to 2006, and again on the occasion of the exhibition “My Comrade Magazine: Happy 35th Gay Anniversary” at Howl! in 2022.

Cover of OEI #80/81 The Zero Alternative

OEI editör

OEI #80/81 The Zero Alternative

Tobi Maier, Cecilia Grönberg and 1 more

Periodicals €35.00

OEI #80-81 is not an anthological publication, and has no representative ambition. It is a montage-based publication trying, in as material a way as possible, to register, prolong, transform and reflect upon energies from the work of Portuguese artist Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows (Alberto Carneiro, Túlia Saldanha, Álvaro Lapa, Fernando Calhau, Lourdes Castro, Ana Vieira, Ana Hatherly, E.M. de Melo e Castro, António Barros...).

Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows defined themselves as aesthetic operators and worked as filmmakers, photographers, curators, critics, writers, folk art researchers, multimedia artists... OEI #80-81 also gathers texts on magazines such as Poesia Experimental, Operação, Nova, A Urtiga, and Alternativa; and works by artists from younger generations such as Isabel Carvalho, Paulo Mendes and Mariana Silva, in dialogue with that of de Sousa.

Cover of nnn4. - no no no celestial journal

no more poetry

nnn4. - no no no celestial journal

nmp

Periodicals €10.00

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.