Barbara Casavecchia

22/09/11

• 1

  Deep & Low by Stuart Morgan

  Issue 8, January–February 1993

  Madonna's Sex and The Jeff Koons Handbook. ‘In his novella The Day of the Locust (1939) Nathanael West described a bordello in which the girls wore national costumes and entertained clients in bedrooms decorated in the style of each particular nation. Such a brothel really existed.’

• 2

  Wreaking Havoc on the Signified by Coco Fusco and Christian Haye

  Issue 22, May 1995

  On David Hammons. ‘Hammons is a masterful investigator of how an oppositional black cultural identity can be generated through a dialogue with “high” culture, particularly as it is articulated through standard English.’

• 3

  IKEA at the End of Metaphysics by Daniel Birnbaum

  Issue 31, November–December 1996

  ‘In Isn’t it Great to be Swedish (1991), the writer R. Fuchs declared: “Life is like assembling IKEA furniture: it’s hard to understand what the point is; you’re unable to put the pieces together, some essential part is always missing, and the final result is never at all what you’d hoped for.”’

• 4

  Weather Girls by Collier Schorr

  Issue 32, January–February 1997

  An interview with Roni Horn. ‘Horn says: ‘I did a text drawing in 1984 which sums it up. “An old woman who passed her life on a small Scottish cliff island is uncomfortable on the mainland because she cannot see the edge.” I go to Iceland because I can’t see the edge.’’

• 5

  Looking Out by Martin Herbert

  Issue 115, May 2008

  On Rosalind Nashashibi. 'A footnote has an anterior, elective affiliation to a body text.'

• 6

  Is F for Fake? by Brian Dillon

  Issue 118, October 2009

  What exactly do we mean when we call an artist or writer a charlatan? ‘The charlatan is the artist who convinces and infuriates in equal measure, who makes a spectacle of his sincerity, turns authenticity into pure performance.’

• 7

  Alone Again, Or by Jennifer Higgie

  Issue 124, June–August 2009

  The persistent and enigmatic subject of women turning away. ‘A woman looking away is obviously considered worth looking at.’

• 8

  When Italy was Modern by Luca Cerizza

  Issue 129, March 2010

  ‘A beautiful piece on Gianni Colombo and Francesco Lo Savio, in an issue that has Pietro Roccasalva on the cover (and a monograph on him by Jonathan Griffin). Italy on the map, for a change, and not, for once, because of its shameful politics.’

• 9

  Analyze This by Jörg Heiser with Ronald Jones, Nina Power, Seth Price, Sukhdev Sandhu and Hito Steyerl

  Issue 133, September 2010

  A round-table on super-hybridity. ‘Presenting the impure as pure, the plagiarized as genius invention, is also a hallmark of modernism. How can we move beyond it?’

• 10

  Good Intentions by Negar Azimi

  Issue 137, March 2011

  Art has a long history of engagement with politics. Does recent so-called socially engaged or political art really effect change? ‘Instead of marching to war or even marching in a demonstration, we perform our political credentials in a variety of ways: by how we vote (Democrat), what we wear (green ribbons in solidarity with Iranians), how we shop (Fair Trade), the causes we write cheques for (gay rights in Zimbabwe?) – and by the kind of art we consume (‘engaged’).’

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