The fact that Steirischer Herbst is Austria’s oldest and only avant-garde festival is recited with every iteration. As a response to the ongoing political swing to the right in the region this year’s edition, under the banner of the provocative slogan “Nie wieder Friede” (Never Again Peace), aims at a return to the festival’s antifascist roots. Calling on the festival’s mythologized founding year of 1968 and the ensuing history of conservative backlashes in postwar Europe, Steirischer Herbst probes the meaning of artistic and political freedom under the premise that, in the fragmented experience of our present, war and peace are interchangeable. Its self-reflexive curatorial concept allows for different and contradictory answers but, as Cecilia Bien argues in her review, it struggles to find a convincing form of address.

While the relationship between mother and child is often seen as the embodiment of nurturing, loving care, in Freudian thought, the mother’s capacity for desire also makes her explicitly threatening, producing a figure that is inherently ambivalent and potentially monstrous. This duality has often been embraced within gay culture, with older drag queens sometimes taking on the role of mother in both senses – nurturing younger queens while also playing the monster. This constellation was probed in suitably histrionic style in a recent exhibition by David Lieske and Than Hussein Clark, for which Lieske invited Clark to stage a durational play within his own exhibition. A twisted tale of mother and son that interweaved autobiography and fiction, the play mirrored the artists’ close personal relationship while fitting squarely within Lieske’s wider practice, as Tal Sterngast suggests.

Nicht nur in der Forschung war Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat eine Pionierin der feministischen Kunstgeschichte, sondern sie trug ihren Fokus auf Geschlechterverständnisse, wie sie sie beispielsweise in ihrer Dissertation zur Blickstruktur in Werken der frühen Neuzeit entwickelt hat, auch in ihre Lehre und in ihr universitätspolitisches Engagement hinein. Ihr Begriff einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Kunstgeschichte kumulierte schließlich in der Studie „Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare“ zur holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts und beeinflusste mehrere Generationen von Kunsthistoriker*innen, die in Wien bei Hammer-Tugendhat studierten, so auch die Autorin dieses Nachrufs, Karin Gludovatz.

Die Kritik an der vermeintlichen Neutralität, Rationalität und Objektivität, die sich in den Ästhetiken der Bürokratie ebenso niederschlägt wie in denjenigen der Minimal Art, verbindet die postkoloniale und institutionskritische Dimension von Sung Tieus Werk. In ihrer jüngsten Einzelausstellung in der Kunsthalle Bern und zuvor in jenen in Siegen und Mailand thematisiert die Künstlerin unter anderem den kolonialen Ursprung metrischer Systeme. Hierfür verwendet sie glatte Oberflächen und industrielle Materialen – eine abstrakte Formensprache, die von einem als universell gesetzten menschlichen Körper abgeleitet ist und eine Subjekt-Objekt-Hierarchie repräsentiert. Wie Alexandra Karg in ihrer Rezension darlegt, treten in Bern die Produktionsbedingungen von Tieus recherchebasierten und prozessualen Arbeiten in den Vordergrund, die ihr über einzelne ortsspezifische Ausstellungen hinweg ermöglichen, diese selbstreferentiell weiterzuentwickeln.

Mit der Ausstellung „You Again“, die 2018 zeitgleich in sechs verschiedenen Galerien in Nordamerika und Europa stattfand, machte Rochelle Feinstein einen Witz auf eigene Kosten: Wie so oft in ihrem Werk zitierte sie Formen und Stile aus der Malereigeschichte und aus ihren eigenen Arbeiten der letzten 40 Jahre. Auch der Titel von Feinsteins aktueller Ausstellung, „The Today Show“, die nach Stationen in Wien und Glarus nun in Aachen zu sehen ist, spielt mit der Erwartung und der Erfahrung der Betrachter*innen. In seiner Rezension der Ausstellung argumentiert Thorsten Schneider, dass sich Feinsteins Wiederholung der Formkrise der Malerei als eine Darstellungsform für heutige Krisen begreifen lässt, die nicht in Abstraktion oder Repräsentation aufgeht.

When Alissa Bennett told us that, for the next edition of her column Fiction/Nonfiction, she would write about the relationship between celebrity death, mass-market merchandising, and the Werther Effect, we didn’t expect her to explore a scopophilic obsession she fostered with a friend a few years back. But in the end, everything is interwoven, even with the pea-colored mohair fibers of Kurt Cobain’s famous cardigan, which was auctioned for $334,000 some time ago. The scientific validity of the Werther effect, which goes back to the numerous copycat suicides that followed the publication of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s classic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), is controversial: Can heroes with suicidal tendencies, or by extension, the fan items worshipped in their memory, potentially turn daily troubles into deadly tragedies? In any case, the objects of our columnist’s online obsession remind us that many roads lead to Wahlheim (young Werther’s fictional hometown). Last but not least, they enter into an eerie correspondence with the prematurely deceased celebrities from Bennett’s iconic Dead Is Better zines.

The British painter Jenny Saville came to prominence in the early 1990s as a member of the so-called YBA generation and has subsequently devoted herself to exploring one of the most classic genres in the history of art: the female nude. Her monumental early canvases stretch women’s bodies to the point of near unrecognizability, creating vast landscapes of flesh with a hyperreal approach to texture and color. At times, their effect is overwhelming, even disturbing. While Saville’s work is often discussed in terms of its feminist connotations, its focus on distortion and disfigurement also imbues it with a sense of ambiguity: If violence has been enacted on these women, then why and by whom? In his review of Saville’s current retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Daniel Culpan examines the evolution of Saville’s painterly style, questioning whether the powerful presence of her early works has been sustained over the decades.

When conceptualizing our current issue on “Sports,” we substantiated the joint consideration of athletic and artistic disciplines under the notion of ambivalence training: “Located between fulfillment and disillusionment, between recovery and exertion, between the performance principle and the sense of community, sport trains our ambiguity tolerance,” we argued, adding that this was one of many things sport has in common with art. According to Maximiliane Leuschner’s review of Ima-Abasi Okon’s recent exhibition in Eindhoven, the latter serves as a case in point. Taking us through three methodological laps – from orientation to evaluation – Leuschner explains how Okon’s installations both compel and frustrate contemplation, practicing an exercise of withdrawal. In doing so, they also present themselves as the complex set of problems that most good art (much like many sports) fundamentally is.