345 WINTER 2023-24 FAILURES OF INFLUENCE

Images of incessant and graphic violence are taking over our lives. The violence is real, as well as our impotence to intervene. The title of this Winter issue, Failures of Influence, comes from Uzomaka Maduka’s Critic Dispatch, in which the American author considers the failures of influence in friendship and art. What still influences us today? Can images incite us to action? Are we empathy deficient? Are we living in a time of post-empathy?

We used to feel compassion for those lost in battle. We once found significance in thumbnail-sized images of wars, or even drawings depicting political assassinations or weapons of mass destruction. Now, we are so saturated with tragic, brutal imagery that we are almost numb to it. We are falling out of love with reality. We live in mentally dysfunctional times, when opinions are shaped via social media rather than first-hand experience or objective reasoning. Everyone has something to say about everything and anything.

The artists selected for this issue addresses these failures of influence, particularly our evolving — and devolving — relationship with the image in these troubled political times.

The first Cover Story is dedicated to Heji Shin, who was photographed wearing Givenchy by Richard Kern in his home studio. Shin’s work and world is brilliantly explicated by Dean Kissick, who — writing about the X-ray series — points out how the artist often tries to take us deeper inside her subjects: “Imagination, creativity, expression, freedom, strengths, individual agency, and subconscious streams of desire and association are to be found in the mind.”

Eric N. Mack’s tête à tête with fashion designer Kiko Kostadinov is the second Cover Story of the issue, a striking portrait of both artists. For the occasion, they have been photographed — both wearing Kiko Kostadinov — by Ari Marcopoulos in Mack’s studio during preparations for his solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery, in New York. Here they talk about where they draw inspiration and what they want to give back to their audience.

Hannah Black is the third Cover Story. Black was photographed by Lee Wei Swee at OCT0 — a nonprofit production office based in Marseilles — wearing Ferragamo. In conversation with Estelle Hoy, the artist reflects on work, life, maternity, and responding to systemic injustice. According to Hoy, Black “plays cultural agitator by going beyond the cataclysmic rowdiness of looting and smashing windows.”

The fourth and final cover was produced in posthumous collaboration with one of our era’s most influential American artists, Mike Kelley, to whom we dedicate this issue’s installment of TIME MACHINE. Here we present two conversations from the Flash Art archive, one between Kelley and American filmmaker John Waters, and another with photographer Larry Clark, who has also penned a new introduction reflecting on his relationship with Kelley and on “art as a form of self-therapy.”

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