editorial

critiques, profiles, interviews, and essays for independent magazines in the arts and culture sphere

WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE WORK: SPIKE MAGAZINE & SALZBURGER KUNSTVEREIN

"...Amid this sprawl of references, Mangione’s presence, still hot in the cycle of TikToks and TV news segments, feels like temporal whiplash. Just weeks earlier, the fashion Instagram account, Diet Prada, made a post to their nearly 3.5 million followers calling his trial outfit, “very Prada Spring 2013–coded!” It referenced his crimson red sweater, slacks, and sockless loafers, which do in fact hold a close resemblance to the Milanese fashion house’s earlier runway look. Through viral posts and online discourse, Mangione’s identity has expanded beyond that of political dissident; he’s become a fashion icon, a meme, a media spectacle. And now here he is, center stage in Sobczak’s painting, in a cape torn from Clark Kent mid-flight, colored in a red recalling his courtroom sweater. Still shackled by chains on wrists and ankles, he somehow defies their restraint – possibly with the bulging muscles that show from under his tattered rags.."

AnOther: On Cinema and Design: Luca Guadagnino & Stefano Baisi in Conversation

In Luca Guadagnino’s cancel-culture drama After the Hunt, Julia Roberts plays an Ivy League professor forced to reckon with secrets from her past when a colleague is accused of sexual assault. “It happened at Yale,” runs the first line from the film, but in reality, Guadagnino staged the action on a meticulously recreated version of New Haven built by his longtime collaborator, Stefano Baisi, at London’s Shepperton Studios. Baisi joined the director’s interior architecture firm, Studio Luca Guadagnino, in 2017 as an architect, and later transitioned into production design when Guadagnino enlisted him for Queer, his first cinematic project.

image credit: Luca Guadagnino and Stefano Baisi on set of After the HuntCourtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

NERO: Big, Green, Inflated: What’s big, green, and incredibly valuable? Alex Da Corte’s Kermit the Frog, Even & Paul McCarthy’s Tree at Place Vendôme

"When the sculpture was installed at nearly 20 meters tall in the Place Vendôme for Art Basel, onlookers quickly noticed what the press shots had discreetly omitted: Da Corte’s Kermit has an asshole, pointed skyward, positioned in one of Paris’s most iconic public squares.

The feature is easily rationalized as an inflation point, though it inevitably evokes Paul McCarthy’s Tree, which appeared in the same plaza nearly a decade earlier in 2014. McCarthy’s controversial anal-plug-as-Christmas-tree was an almost too-perfect counterpoint: big, green, inflated, and defiantly out of place in the Place Vendôme."

designboom: mindy seu explores the web’s ties to the body and intimacy through group incantations

‘Now, with this current version, we’ve learned how to censor the images and the text in a way that doesn’t really trigger these algorithms anymore.’ But even then, Seu, who was previously a fellow at the Internet Archive, emphasizes how duplication is key to keeping something digital alive. As such, A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET is replicated on multiple digital accounts, while the knowledge is crystallized IRL in the ‘little black book’ of the same title.

image credit: front cover, photo by Tim Schutsky, art direction by Laura Coombs

FROM FlashArt