The art watcher, just as the review reader, is always already indebted, owing their experience to the work of others as well as to their own senses. Constantina Zavitsanos gets in on the ground floor of such dependencies in her recent show, capturing both light and sonic waves through different technologies and thereby editing them for their audience’s perception. Being receptive of the various aids available throughout “fwiw,” Rachel Haidu follows the 1966 song referenced in the show’s title – Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” – to map out what exactly was happening at Artists Space.

With the passing of Gary Indiana, the art world lost one of its most remarkable voices and unfailingly inspiring polymaths last October. In lieu of institutional training, Indiana always pursued his eclectic interests on the basis of personal penchants and in lively exchange with his social environment. The latter included Bruce Hainley, who edited and prefaced Indiana’s Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988. Here, Hainley gives a moving impression of Gary Indiana as a fervent intellectual and interlocutor, mirroring his many passions.

Mit maschinengestützten Malereien, die in den Neunziger- und Nullerjahren auf Basis von TV- und Videostills entstanden, wurde Matthias Groebel in den vergangenen drei Jahren viel Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Nun haben zwei Galerien die ältesten und neuesten Arbeiten des Künstlers gezeigt: Bevor Groebel begann, mit seiner selbst gebauten Maschine und Tools digitaler Bildbearbeitung Stills auf Leinwände zu übertragen, bediente er sich einer Kombination aus fototechnischen und malerischen Verfahren. Inzwischen zeichnet er mit einer neuen, algorithmisch gesteuerten Maschine. Anna Sinofzik nimmt die Einzelausstellungen in Berlin und Köln zum Anlass, um über Groebels späten Karriereschub sowie das Geisterhafte in seinen Bildern nachzudenken.

In the last couple of years, Parisian museums have dedicated monographic shows to the work of women artists working in the city during the long 19th century. One of these artists was the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer, who moved to the city in 1878. As was the case for the exhibition on Sarah Bernhardt at the Petit Palais and the Rosa Bonheur retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay, the latter museum’s current presentation of Harriet Backer’s art has again opted for a rather straight art historical narrative. In his critique of the show’s curatorial approach, Mads Kirks lays out how the exhibition focuses on the network of women Backer worked within – yet the question of queerness is still sidestepped.

Following a short break, Isabelle Graw’s column is back with a special edition from New York. Having seen numerous exhibitions there in recent weeks, our publisher highlights two of them here: Michael Asher at Artists Space, and Matthew Barney/Alex Katz at O’Flaherty’s. She explains the reasons for her selection in the following. In addition to the two exhibition projects, Graw discusses the memoir of Melania Trump, whose mixture of self-righteousness and categorical resistance to reality she sees as symptomatic of the mindset of today’s right-wing spectrum.

The image of the ruin has kept is stronghold as an art historical trope at least since William Gilpin introduced it as an element of the picturesque in the late 18th century. To the modern-day hunter of the picturesque, Glarus, Switzerland, might make for an appealing sight: a city bereft of its former glory as a textile industry center sitting at the foot of a majestic mountain range. John Miller’s “The Ruin of Exchange,” shown at the local Kunsthaus, approached the theme with not only an aesthetic but a deeply material understanding. Value exchanges in the art world have been a core concern of the artist’s oeuvre, and in her review of the decades-spanning show, Sophia Rohwetter homes in on them – not only as they are reflected in the works on view, but also as they are implicated in her own writing.

Das Anliegen unserer Sommerausgabe „Country“, die kulturellen und politischen Konsequenzen der zunehmenden Popularität rechter und rechtsextremer Positionen in den Blick zu nehmen, hat seit ihrem Erscheinen nichts an Aktualität eingebüßt. Um angesichts der nun bevorstehenden Neuwahlen die so offensichtlichen wie komplexen politischen Verschiebungen einzuordnen und zu diskutieren, welche Handlungen jetzt gefordert sind, haben wir mit Max Czollek, Cesy Leonard und Elisa Müller gesprochen. Alle drei beackern das künstlerische Feld zwischen Berlin und ländlichen Regionen und setzen dabei auf unterschiedliche Strategien – von der Lyrik über die Aktionskunst bis hin zur Klärung rechtlicher Rahmenbedingungen. Im von Mine Pleasure Bouvar und Antonia Kölbl moderierten Round Table verhandeln Czollek, Leonard und Müller ihre Begriffe von Hoffnung und Kunst und setzen sie ins Verhältnis zum politischen Handeln gegen rechts.

The media landscape in which commercial messages circulate has changed fundamentally since the 1980s, when Nancy Dwyer began appropriating such language. Over the decades, the artist has remained true to her material. The latter, however, has come to follow different logics and take on new forms. In her review of Dwyer’s recent retrospective in Winterthur, which combined early and new works, Dara Jochum reasons why the artist’s language-based practice strikes a particular chord now – in times when right-wing politics and its corresponding propaganda and communication strategies are all too present.