#318 January – February 2018

The cover story of this issue is dedicated to the New York–based fashion label Telfar. Founded in 2005 by Liberian American designer Telfar Clemens, the label is the recipient of the 2017 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund’s prize for emerging talents in the fashion industry. Telfar is plural and genderless. The label’s agenda for a “horizontal” clothing company not only defies the threat of elitism that even the most progressive and experimental fashion labels seem to strengthen; it challenges the very dialectics of top-drawer and fast fashion, street and high: in the words of Kevin McGarry, who profiles Telfar for the issue, Clemens’s clothes “game mass culture to the point of true subversion.”

A call for a society founded on pluralism recurs across many of the stories featured in this issue; here’s hoping that 2018 will be, as Telfar would say, “not for you — for everyone.”

Also in this issue:

Eli Diner on the proleptic videos of Melanie Gilligan

“Witty and knowing, frequently disturbing and at times hilarious, Gilligan’s videos give form to, animate and narrate the operations of capital in the period of the crisis and its aftermath, examining the affective and cognitive consequences of these forces for the subjects of advanced capitalist economies.”

—Eli Diner

Julia Bryan-Wilson on the fleeting-yet-emphatic multimedia art of Cecilia Vicuña

“With her attentions to the tactile valences of texture, with her assertive hands-on making, with her emphases on wombs, blood and guts, Vicuña has produced some of the richest and most useful visualizations of what feminist forms can look like.”

—Julia Bryan-Wilson

Daniel Horn on Emil Michael Klein’s canny abstraction

“Klein checks any thoughts of diligence toward some unencumbered autonomy of modernistic painting, instead inscribing and promoting himself literally into the waves, ebbs and flows of tracked values and signature styles.”

—Daniel Horn

Ronald Rose-Antoinette on the Wood Land School’s yearlong decolonization of SBC Gallery

“Wood Land School unfolded through various incarnations as an ongoing intervention because colonial violence is itself ongoing. It did not, and perhaps could not, stay still.”

—Ronald Rose-Antoinette

Cristina Guadalupe Galván talks to home-based artist Alison Knowles

“I just can’t emphasize enough that something like cooking and eating was definitely outside of the art world, and people could be starving and you’d never know it. I thought it was something I could contribute to.”

—Alison Knowles

Pierre-Alexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou bid adieu to the hyperglycemic concept store colette

“The aesthetics of colette was the disorderly and bumpy realm of the time of equivalence, of the cafeteria, of the incomplete completion (from bottle opener to USB key), the shift from prose to fashion, which is not without conflict but is invisible.”

—Pierre-Alexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou

In Reviews:

Cathy Wilkes at PS1, New York; Aria Dean at American Medium, New York; Tamara Henderson at Oakville Galleries (ON); Andrew Norman Wilson at Human Resources, Los Angeles; Lisa Lapinski at Kristina Kite, Los Angeles; Dara Friedman at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Gianfranco Baruchello at Raven Row, London; “Cultural Capital Cooperative Object #1 & 2” at Rodeo, London; Simon Starling at Neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Olga Chernysheva at Secession, Vienna; Rosemarie Castoro at MACBA, Barcelona; Harmony Korine at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Malick Sidibé at Fondation Cartier, Paris; Mircea Cantor at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Dmitry Venkov at CCA Winzavod, Moscow; “Discordant Harmony” at the Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing; Mika Tajima at Taru Nasu, Tokyo.

#318 January – February 2018

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