On October 19, 2023, we lost Anthony Violer, a longtime friend of this magazine. A brilliant historian of architecture whose deep scholarship and intellectual curiosity ranged from Ledoux to his own contemporaries, Tony was also an astute reader of art and theory, and he was always alert not only to the historical conditions of a given practice but also to its conceptual implications and political ramifications. In manifold ways Tony instructed us, inspired us, committed us, and delighted us with his theatrical imagination and subversive wit.

Once again it is time for a reckoning about the status of modernist art in Western Europe and North America. However we frame it, it's now perceived, in artist studios and academic programs alike, as just one formation among others, with no special claim on art practice or art history. No longer central, the field is relative not only to other modern arts in other geopolitical regions but also to all other art-historical fields. In short, it is neither the aesthetic epitome nor the historical gateway that most old-school modernists have believed it to be. This isn't news in other fields; that it might be for many modernists is one more sign that we have fallen behind.

In this interview, the late Claes Oldenburg looks back on both the motivations and the modalities of his distinctive practice. Among the topics discussed are his signature “guises,” such as the Ray Guns and the Flags, the performative basis of his early objects, and his sustained commitment to an aesthetic of shape-shifting.

The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world? Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan.

For obvious reasons a number of historians have looked back to Europe in the 1920s to see what lessons can be learned from the rise of fascism during that time. Some, such as Timothy Snyder, have drawn powerful lines of connection to the period, while others, like Enzo Traverso, have cautioned that the two situations are too dissimilar to be productively compared. At issue, fundamentally, is the old principle of historia magistra vitae (history as the teacher of life), which assumes, as Reinhart Koselleck has demonstrated, a basic constancy in human experience over time and across culture—an assumption that is dubious for many of us, to say the least. Already before the rise of fascism one hundred years ago there were intimations of “the fascist personality,” and even though characterological types are subject to the same objections as historical lessons (how can any such transcendental category be valid?), some of these speculations might still be instructive, if for no other reason than they can point to differences in the present. As Koselleck suggests, the recognition of incomparability is a historical lesson in its own right.

A long-time contributor to the Whitney Independent Study Program, Hal Foster discusses how the program has evolved over the years and how his approach to criticism has evolved along with it.

In the face of Trumpism and its peculiar mix of the buffoonish and the lethal, Foster suggests that we “pump up” past theoretical concepts by raising them to a higher degree. Social media, for example, could thereby be considered the “fifth estate,” a force that outdoes the “fourth estate” of journalistic media and thereby evacuates the last residues of the public sphere that, over fifty years ago, Jürgen Habermas associated with the advent of print culture. Peter Sloterdijk's notion of cynical reason, too, must be raised to a higher power in order to comprehend the Trumpist mentality; perhaps in this post-truth era, we should speak instead of “noncynical unreason”? And while the concept of the “primal father” is so outrageous that it cannot be inflated, Foster argues, it is one that we must grapple with in the face of a figure who, like Freud's figure, embodies the law and simultaneously performs its transgression.

Thomas Demand's Dailies (2008–) are visual aperçus, yet often they trigger a sense of déjà vu, and this paradoxical combination of the fresh and the familiar is typical of Demand. “The images that come to me,” he tells Alexander Kluge in an extraordinary conversation, “some are very banal, others greatly laden with meaning, but actually they are all things I know.” And we know them too, or think we do. In part, this is because Demand builds his images from prior representations, such as news photos, postcards, and iPhone snaps. Yet this doubling is not performed in the interest of a postmodernist critique of reality as a construct. Demand treats the photographic mediation of the world as a given, and he assumes that we do as well; his project is less to demystify the real than to remodel and reimage it. His art is indicative of a cultural shift in the perceived relation between representations and referents, one in which the old opposition between the indexical and the constructed becomes less relevant. In a world in which almost every image is both photographic and contrived, the indexical aspect of the medium does not automatically trump its other aspects: We no longer assume the truth-value of the photographic image, and we are alert to its fictive capabilities. In this condition a new realism becomes necessary, one that uses artifice to make reality real again—that is, sensible, credible, or simply effective as such. Demand is a key figure in this new art of artifice in the service of reality.

Yve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Eyal Weizman discuss “forensic architecture,” the practice of treating common elements of our built environment as entry points through which to interrogate the present. Forensic Architecture is also the name of a research agency established by Weizman to undertake independent investigations in the context of armed conflicts, political struggles, and environmental transformation. Participants discuss cases in which the agency acts on commissions from international prosecutors, investigative journalists, the United Nations, human rights organizations, and environmental-justice and media groups. The discussion of this practice is illustrated by brief examples taken from recent investigations in places such as Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, Syria, and Guatemala.