Viscose 05: Retail

The very first issue of Viscose tackles the expansive notion of “style”. Both a noun and a verb, style can be understood as the most basic unit or currency of fashion. Style names the very movement of aesthetics in society, and thus holds an important place in the critique of art and visual culture more broadly.

As a verb, it connotes a tactic: a dynamic tool for persuasion and communication through the bricolage of signifiers. It also relates directly to the contemporary profession of “styling”; a practice native to the fashion industry, but increasingly prevalent across the arts, media, consumerism, and politics. Thiss issue of Viscose sets out to critically gesture to all of these connotations and their potential intermingling through concrete case studies and cross disciplinary philosophical speculation.

with contributions by:
Shanzhai Lyric, David Lieske, Bakri Bakhit, Dena Yago, Matthew Linde, Burke Battelle & Ada O’Higgins, Davide Stucchi, Taylore Scarabelli, Mahoro Seward, Jordan Richman, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, & Milos Trakilović, Laura Gardner, Avena Gallagher, Alex Esculapio, Elise by Olsen and Jeppe Ugelvig

Published in collaboration with Harun Farocki Institut, this book unpacks About Narration [Erzählen], a 1975 essay film directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, this book focuses on About Narration [Erzählen] directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.
It includes the film's script alongside the historical documents related to its making and Farocki's previously unpublished theoretical and programmatic essay on the film. The publication also includes a retrospective essay by Ingemo Engström on the film's political and artistic background.

Volker Pantenburg's detailed elaboration of the conditions of its making, alongside Boynik and Holert's concluding remarks, further contextualizes the film. The interview with Cathy Porter on Larisa Reisner, a heroine of About Narration, gives an overview of the life of a militant writer who inspired Engström and Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert.

For Fall 2025, Spike is getting to the bottom of the vintage aura around contemporary culture: Nostalgia. 

Are we doomed to ever-shorter cycles of cash-cow retromania, until AI memory-wipes us with pure simulation? Or is the root problem of our endless déjà vu actually the expectation that art "make it new," itself just so much nostalgia for a long-gone modernism? We're working out what the present owes to the past, if our goal is to conjure a better culture for tomorrow.

Featuring Jeppe Ugelvig's essay on the art world's uses and misuses of nostalgia; Simon Reynolds and Adina Glickstein talk exhausting the past; e-girl/theorist Alex Quicho critiques the end of newness; filmmaker Johan Grimonprez identifies with the hijacker in his dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997); a portrait of kitsch-savant painter Friedrich Kunath; cultural critic Rosanna McLaughlin on missing the white cube; Artist's Favorites by Diego Marcon; ex-dealers Margaret Lee and Jeff Poe escape the art game; Whitney Mallett on rebranding celebrity through book culture; making analog-ish art "under" the internet with Marc Kokopeli, Bedros Yeretzian, Flora Hauser, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola; Sean Monahan forecasts our old-fashioned future; art historian Lynn Zelevansky on "New York/New Wave" at P.S.1 Contemporary (1981); artist Maja Bajevic's Yugostalgic report from Sarajevo; and Tea Hačić-Vlahović getting dewy-eyed catching up to her mother's age; plus, reviews of exhibitions by Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans, Women's History Museum, and 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.

Issue 2 inverts issue 1’s focus on the immaterial notion of style to instead explore the most material of fashion’s building blocks: clothes Clothes are literally everywhere and cite complicated systems of production, distribution, and exchange on their paths around the world. Still, they never fully reveal their journey or destination, and may often signify little else than their own commodity status, the total genericness of the fashion product.

Bringing together a wide range of artists, thinkers, and writers, the issue sets out to explore clothes as a signifier at once empty and over-burdened: as expressions of desires, people and places, as palimpsests for capitalist production cycles and histories of dressed bodies, and even, as nondescript material debris. While not necessarily foregoing an analysis of the fashion system, we hope to develop a form of fashion criticism that begins – and perhaps ends – with the single garment, that takes the everyday use of clothing objects as an intellectual starting point.

What knowledge can we gather from the studying of fashion objects, be they material or immaterial? What is the difference between clothes and fashion? And to which extent is even “fashion” ever successfully signified by things?

with contributions by:
Shanzhai Lyric, David Lieske, Bakri Bakhit, Dena Yago, Matthew Linde, Burke Battelle & Ada O’Higgins, Davide Stucchi, Taylore Scarabelli, Mahoro Seward, Jordan Richman, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, & Milos Trakilović, Laura Gardner, Avena Gallagher, Alex Esculapio, Elise by Olsen and Jeppe Ugelvig

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.

Do we always have to be nice, kind and communicate respectfully? Wouldn't it sometimes be better to change our tone, to use force or even violence? We often want to act in a spirit of “care” and benevolence, but how do we know if we're really being altruistic and sympathetic? Vol.5 asks the question: Nice?

With contributions from :
Muf architecture/art, Mélanie Mazet, Bui Quy Son, Paul-Antoine Lucas, Armelle Breuil, Annabelle Vaillant, Napsugár Trömböczky, Alessandro Di Egidio,
Elsa Muller, Clara Lenoir, Léo Jacqmin, Clem Koren, Pola Noury, Grève cœur and Cassiane C. Pfund

This publication is edited by the Woman Cave collective founded by Leticia Chanliau and Chloé Macary-Carney.

318 black & white pages, brown cover
Micro edition of 700, printed in Aubervilliers by Isiprint.

The 9th HOOT pops up for the winter 2022-23, but the conception of this issue started well over a year ago at our beloved Plage Avant (Traduttore, traditore’s studio, Marseille). 

We met Sophie T. Lvoff at many openings and art related events in Marseille these last few years, having a practice that appears mainly as photography, Gufo got curious about all the processes that she uses which involve sound, installation, writing… and more. She welcomed us in her studio of the city of Marseille where she recently settled.

We found out about the “trompe-l’œil” of this iconic checkered table, witnessed the installations of translucid and colored objects evolving on the sunny wall, and looked through her photographic chamber it’s called a large-format camera, but this is funny… For this issue, Sophie suggested to interview another artist, Moyra Davey, who also works in photography and writing, and appeared to have shared experiences too.

The topics of everyday life, intimacy that images embody in both their works, take another dimension as soon as their thoughts, voices and writing expand and express the entirety of their gestures.

This issue is the first interview between two native English-speaking artists, who have ties to the French language from childhood.

The penpals are the main characters of that encounter where we are very welcome to join in their very generous conversations. This is only an excerpt of a long and well referenced correspondence.

The occasionally-published broadsheet Civilization was founded in New York in 2018 by Richard Turley,  Lucas Mascatello, and Mia Kerin. Its origin was as a response to New York City life, but has now transformed into an art project that gathers language, overheard conversations, secret recordings transcribed by rapid-capture software to produce a dense, rhythmic assemblage of texts from both public and private spaces alike. As a result, Civilization’s design texture has found fans in the fashion world, leading to collaborations with Calvin Klein and Junya Watanabe. 

The publication has also enjoyed contributions from a wide array of artists, writers and personalities including: Aaron Maine, Alis Atwell, Amos Poe, Amalia Ulman, Aria Dean, Alicia Novella Vasquez, Bill Drummond, Biz Sherbert, Babak Radboy, Carly Busta, Darcie Wilder, Echo Wu, Ella Plevin, Eric Johnson, Honor Levy, Iris Luz, Mel Ottenberg, Isabelle Rea, Joey LaBeija, Jordan Barse, Lovefoxx, Maddie Quinn, Patrick McMullan, Rachel Rabbit White, Sybil Prentice, Thom Bettridge, and Zans Brady Krohn.