HORIZON LINES

ON JANUARY 17 of this year, the Palestinian American artist Saj Issa set up an easel on a grassy hill outside Beitin, in the West Bank, where she spent much of her time growing up and now maintains a studio. The resulting painting, which she titled Land Grab 1.17.24, reflects Issa’s attempt to decolonize the Palestinian landscape by framing it through her own perspective. As she recounts in her artist’s portfolio in these pages, after about an hour of painting, she realized that she had drawn the attention of Israelis; fearing for her safety, she quickly packed up and left. The footage of this aborted painting session that she captured on her iPhone became a work called Plein Air Performance, 2024. In the still from the video that appears on the cover of this issue, we see Issa from behind, bundled up against the cold, palette in one hand and paintbrush in the other. A road below leads to the outskirts of Ramallah, which appear hazy in the distant background. 

From its position on the cover, this image asks: What role can—or should—art play in the intense public debates that have unfolded in the wake of Hamas’s brutal attacks on October 7 and Netanyahu’s subsequent genocidal retaliation? What would it accomplish, if anything, to put art and artists at their center? Though priority must be given to ending the ongoing assault on innocent lives, we might also consider the role of artists in focusing our attention on and shaping our understanding of the conflict. As Issa’s performance suggests, artists frame our vision, establishing a perspective that situates us in relation to the world. They thereby articulate a horizon that is both literal and metaphorical: They push against the limits of what is perceivable, or imaginable, across space and over time, in the present and into the future.

It is not the role of Artforum, as a magazine devoted to art and artists, to provide the kind of insight into geopolitical situations that one might expect from a news or foreign affairs publication. But it is our role to provide the kind of insight that they cannot, emerging from a humanistic inquiry based on the distinctive ways that artists—and those who write about them—think with and through form and matter, which is always a matter of both aesthetics and ethics. In moments of crisis, the political stakes of our work may become more explicit, as certain perennial questions gain renewed relevance: How can artists express (or even redress) the generational and immediate traumas of displacement and disenfranchisement? How has visual culture contributed to our political imaginary, and especially to the formation of national identities? What are the paths for conserving a culture’s heritage when the memories stored in its archives and institutions are censored, edited, or annihilated? And what are the frameworks through which we can make sense of images that document apartheid, war, and genocide?¹

My vision for how we might go about answering these questions is not particularly radical: I only hope to continue the magazine’s long-standing commitment to rigorous approaches to art—whether developed through images or words—that emphasize deep research, thinking, or feeling. My idea of what that looks like in practice is both/and, as indicated by the writing that appears in this issue. I want Artforum to expand its coverage both globally (as in the case of Percy Zvomuya’s history of Sylvester Mubayi’s permanent installation in Zimbabwe) and regionally (as in the case of our reviews from Buffalo and Susch). I want it to spend more time looking to and learning from the art of the past (as demonstrated by Bryan Barcena’s report from an exhibition restaging a seventeenth-century Wunderkammer), even as it continues to document the emergence of the contemporary (as performed by Jenny Wu’s profile of artist Hélène Fauquet). I want it to maintain its relationship to theory (as signaled by Charlotte Kent’s analysis of the public sphere), and also to be more responsive, accessible, and relevant to communities outside the academy or even the art world more broadly (as suggested by the attention Leslie Camhi gives to the Broadway production Lempicka). I want it to engage more closely with singular objects (as represented by Eugenio Viola’s reading of Tania Candiani’s Desminar [Demining], 2024), and also to offer more of the indispensable “big picture” analyses that define movements and trends (as appears in Andrew V. Uroskie’s assessment, in relation to this year’s Whitney Biennial, of the role of moving-image art in our larger media ecology). I want it to more consistently highlight the voices of artists, whether they are talking about themselves, other artists, or how they see the world (as Martha Jung­wirth, Bisa Butler, and Clarity Haynes do in this issue, respectively), and also to pay more attention to the practices of critics, curators, and other arts workers (as former Artforum editor Max Kozloff does in his remembrance). I want it to focus on both social and artistic concerns—or even better, to think these terms together. I want it to be more provisional and more definitive; more direct and more nuanced; more technical and more poetic; more timeless and more timely. 

Above all, I want Artforum International to model productive critical engagement by living up to its name as a forum about art on an international scale. This means it must play host to contentious ideas that are articulated by and through art by diverse contributors. In this particular moment, our public discourse is focused on Israel/Palestine, and is defined by both polarization and false equivalences. I condemn anti-Semitism. I also acknowledge that over the past seven months, artists and cultural workers who have expressed their criticisms of Israel and support for Palestine have had their exhibitions and talks canceled, been dropped from their galleries, had collectors sell their works or withdraw their loans, seen patrons step down from their boards, or joined demonstrations met with the brutality of militarized police forces. Especially in light of these recent events, we are honored to highlight in this issue the art of both Saj Issa and another Palestinian American artist, Jordan Nassar, alongside their writing about the relationship between their lived experiences and their creative practices. Needless to say, they are not representatives of an entire community: They speak for themselves, movingly, about their own positions in the world. We hope that sharing their perspectives is a step between the work we have done in the past and the work we hope to do in the future.

As a leading publication in the arts, Artforum enjoys the privilege and bears the responsibility of helping to define the “Overton Window” for our community—the spectrum of sociopolitical ideas that members of a given population might consider reasonable. Shifting this window is in our DNA: For example, in September 1970, at the height of the tensions over the Vietnam War, then editor in chief Philip Leider published the answers to the question “What is your position regarding the kinds of political action that should be taken by artists?” The answers vary widely, despite the respondents being almost exclusively white men. Then as now, some argue that art must not be instrumentalized and cannot effect meaningful change, while others argue that all art is political. There is no clear consensus on whether the priority should be to vote, to protest, to organize within one’s communities, or to make or view art. I myself am inspired by the throw-everything-at-the wall attitude of artist Rosemarie Castoro: “I have been involved and will still be involved in: peace benefit shows, weekly group encounter Art Workers Coalition meetings, my own studio, and wherever I happen to be.”²

It is also in Artforum’s DNA to confront its own role in these debates. As Max Kozloff—editor from 1975 to 1976—recalls in this issue, “[Editor John] Coplans and I were seen by some of the magazine’s writers as wanting Artforum to be more explicitly concerned with art’s social context, and that was contentious.” The pair’s departure led to an open letter lambasting “the influence of political and commercial pressures” on the magazine.³ If Artforum has remained relevant through such crises, it is because it has a long history of learning from them. It does so by remaining aware that it is answerable to a larger community that will help determine its future. As the new editor, I look forward to finding ways to grow the dialogue between us, even as I recognize the challenges we face. Institutions are not neutral, yet they aim to play neutral host to a pluralist public sphere, as Charlotte Kent points out in her essay on museum protests in this issue. As a result, they are now struggling to reconcile competing demands for partisanship by their diverse constituencies. The stakes are particularly high when it comes to public discourses that can bear the urgency of life and death. I began my tenure here by having conversations with artists and writers about Artforum’s value to them, and also our obligations; I hope that this issue evidences that we are listening. 

Ultimately, these conversations have clarified for me Artforum’s role within the larger arts ecosystem. Like any institution, it necessarily operates under a series of constraints, whether financial, legal, political, or cultural. On the one hand, the staff remains dedicated to preserving the integrity of the magazine by ensuring that these do not unduly influence the work that we publish. On the other, however, Artforum is part of a larger ecology of institutions—including other publications, galleries, auction houses, museums, nonprofit groups, governmental offices, and schools and universities—all of which operate under various constraints, including some that do not apply to Artforum. In other words, Artforum belongs to a robust ecosystem in which different institutional models (which is to say, different business models, governance models, etc.) coexist and complement one another. In the current climate in which we find ourselves here in the United States—one that is deeply anti-intellectual, hostile to progressive values, and skeptical of the arts—I support any institutions that advocate for art, artists, and marginalized people, now more than ever. 

That said, I do understand why many are skeptical of institutions. Regardless of our individual principles—and sometimes because of them—we all must make moral compromises with the systems in which we find ourselves embedded (even as some of us fight to make new ones, or to improve the ones we have). The challenge is to find the line between betraying those principles and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. When do the ends not justify the means? I respect the decisions that others make, as I do not believe that the line is the same for everyone: We each must figure out how to make our own way through the world, determining our own priorities and strategies according to our own abilities and liabilities, even as we endeavor to work with others in common cause. As the poet June Jordan noted, “It’s hard to keep a clean shirt clean.” I appreciate everyone willing to do the messy work with us, and I promise to continue dedicating our platforms and resources to working with artists, writers, and art workers—especially the most vulnerable ones—in good faith. 

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Artforum staff who have kept this magazine operating in the absence of an editor in chief over the past six issues. When we speak of Artforum as an institution, we inevitably obscure the agency of the employees who have dedicated themselves to sustaining it. I have witnessed—first as a freelance writer, and now as a colleague—not only their unparalleled professionalism, but also their unflinching personal commitment to art, artists, and justice. Since last fall, they have worked tirelessly and against difficult headwinds to carry the magazine for the sake of not only the organization, but also the artistic communities to which they belong and for which they have long advocated. The evidence of their values is in the work that we are doing together to stand up for endangered voices, hold ourselves to account, and enact the highest editorial standards. I am honored to labor alongside them to earn both the respect and the trust of our contributors and our readers, with this and every future issue.

—Tina Rivers Ryan

NOTES

1. For examples of answers to this series of questions, see the scholarship of Alessandra Amin on the role of imagination and landscape in Palestinian art from the 1960s to the 1980s; Chelsea Haines on the ideological work of the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; and Nadia Yaqub and Helga Tawil-Souri on the circulation of images of Gaza through film and television.

2. “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” Artforum, September 1970, 36.

3. The open letter was dated January 16, 1977, and directed readers to ask for more information by writing to “Statement,” 97 Wooster Street, New York, NY, 10012. Although the author is uncredited, it bears more than seventy-five signatures.