On the Cover:
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autorreconstrucción: Social Tissue, 2018. View of installation at Kunsthaus Zürich. Photo: © Nelly Rodriguez, Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Zurich.
Editor’s Letter:
Change, according to the old saw, is the only constant. A concern with change characterizes the artists featured in this issue. Indeed, the title of John Gayer’s essay on Marianne Berenhaut is “To Change Is Human,” and it focuses on how the Belgian artist tweaks and reinterprets her pieces. In a Q&A, the duo Julia Crabtree and William Evans talk about how their “intent oscillates and changes” when making their rather tactile sculptures; interviewer Rajesh Punj notes that in their work, “nothing is stable.” Much of Abraham Cruzvillegas’s recent work results from interdisciplinary—or, as he puts it, “party-like”—collaborations, processes that alter the pieces so much that the final products rarely fail to surprise him. A lack of fixity might be an apt description of the work of Niamh O’Malley, who is currently representing Ireland in the Venice Biennale. She pairs objects with video, for instance, because of the way each changes the duration of the viewer’s gaze, and she works with materials, like oil on glass or colored glass, that modify how we see things, depending on our point of view. Over a storied career, Liz Larner has frequently shifted material and approach. She is also interested in bodies of work, the entirety of an artist’s output over their lifetime, and thus in how each new piece changes all those that preceded it, how it alters and helps construct that body. We hope that all the pieces in this issue help change your understanding of the artists discussed and the world in which we and they live. —Daniel Kunitz
