Summary
81
Being Thirty
Spring / Summer 2014
For this 30th anniversary issue, we have departed from our usual thematic section to give carte blanche to a number of authors to examine twenty-first-century works or practices that have particularly caught their eye. Rather than merely ranking the best works of the past decade, the essays reveal the plurality of voices and forms of writing on art today—just like the practices that they describe. This issue paints a diverse portrait of art and art criticism as practised in 2014—an adventure in images and words, a brief but exciting voyage into the world of a dozen curators.
Editorial
Feature
Contemporary Art Stars:
Lessons from the Rankings
“That too was”: Darkness in the Work of Nicolas Baier
Staging the Institution and the Politics of the Performative
Performing the Document: New Political Theatricalities
Giving Away Time: On David Claerbout’s Shadow Piece
Historical Time Ecologized
Letter on the Present
Visual Arts and Music in Counterpoint
Heuristic Categorizations: Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Québec
Portfolios
Columns
Reviews
Current Issue
Abstractions
Spring Summer 2025
Yet what about abstraction today? Long confined to formalist and self-referential imperatives, abstraction has gradually freed itself from the modernism yolk to recapture its evocative power. This issue proposes to turn away from the dogma of Abstraction as a historical genre to consider its various plastic and semantic avenues. In this invitation to explore abstractions, we wish to re-establish a dialogue between content and form, between the political and the poetic, by engaging with works that evoke reality differently. Whether they are qualified as abstract, non-figurative, or non-objective, these works certainly tell us stories.