Spike #76, around the theme of artists' lives and careers.
Spike #76 is dedicated to the artist. From the ultracontemporaries to those whose success came too late to be enjoyed, this issue is about aging, enduring, and surviving death, in their works as much as their stories. How can an artist emerge in our oceanic present, faced with the internet's image infinity, a penetrating market, and ever murkier prospects? And why, having emerged, do some artists fail—what kills their careers?
Barry Schwabsky looks at early periods versus late styles,
Cindy Sherman talks about abstracting getting older, and Lauren Elkin suggests a way out of the snares of biography by re-centering art itself...
Featuring interviews of
Cindy Sherman by Daniel Baumann and
Elizabeth Peyton by Nicholas Cullinan; essays by
Barry Schwabsky, Lauren Elkin, and Travis Diehl on "the four seasons," "badass" woman-artists, and "the ultracontemporaries"; Zully Adler's portrait of Martin Wong; a send-up of
Merlin Carpenter by Hans-Christian Dany; Tom Eccles on why artists fail; Nina Pohl remembrance of
Sigmar Polke; a study of it-girls by Olivia Kan-Sperling; Calla Henkel's farewell to Berlin; Maxi Geymüller on
David Robbins; Kyla McDonald's assessment of dead artists' appeal; Hans-Jürgen Hafner's uncovering of the fictional Angelika Wiesenthal; Nolan Kelly on biopics; a walkthrough of Vienna's offspaces with Leonie Huber; and Tea Hacic-Vlahovic on dying, writing.
