Last year, Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick was adapted for television by Jill Soloway, and was released as an Amazon Prime show in August. Unevenly updated for 2017, it shows traditional patriarchal power under attack by ‹identity politics›, displaced into the field of art, in a bizarrely conservative imagining of the left in contemporary America.
Someone I met in Berlin a little while ago said he couldn't wait for the Biennale to end so that people could finally start talking about something else. The shock of the summer in this city was that Manifesta 11 wasn't the big talking point after all, but that the excellent retrospective of Francis Picabia at the Kunsthaus Zürich was. In fact, these two exhibitions had more in common than just their dates; while DIS used to concern themselves primarily with visual tropes of 21st century work (the theme Manifesta chose as its subject matter), the Picabia show and the DIS Biennale engage much more with questions of artistic authenticity, sincerity and political responsibility.
