all-over has been in constant change even though our visual appearance has remained very much the same since our second issue in spring 2012. In the past, we have worked with a lot of different authors and artists. Now, we have slightly altered our concept. We have seen some personnel changes, and almost everyone in our editorial team has moved from Vienna to Basel or vice versa. Also, our environment has shifted, making us not one of only a few online magazines but one of many. In our ninth issue, change is becoming visible. The stable framework of all-over, our layout, has been redesigned to reflect the mentioned changes and to reinforce what – after more than three years of publishing – is still most important to us: in-depth work with texts and authors, re-examination of the standards and borders of our main subjects (art and aesthetics) and last, but not least, to remain independent in working in these domains of publishing.
We sincerely thank our graphic designer Michael Hübner for his dedication to all-over, and warmly welcome Boah Kim to our team!
In the present issue, Alexandra Wolf is taking a close look at Dan Graham’s Homes for America: how it started out as a photo-work, became a text, and then turned into a complex amalgam of images and text that develops over a period of as much as twelve years. By enlarging different versions of the work for us, she elaborates on the various recourses and anticipations that emerge when examining the work from the present.
Hans Haacke’s photograph Star Gazing is Iris Hasler’s subject and she explores the potential of art as a political tool for democracy and a critical public. Photography appears not only as an instrument of documentation but as political force exerted to gain control on one hand and as an instrument to gain political awareness through art on the other.
The potential of critique not in art, but in the exhibition as form, is examined in Barbara Reisinger’s interview with curator Søren Grammel, appointed director of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. The delicate balance between information and interpretation in order to allow for autonomous thinking rather than heteronomous guidance is being raised as one of the key points in contemporary art- and exhibition-making.
Another vivid force of the arts’ impact on the public and its overall information being brought to the viewer is the starting point of Matt Taber’s contribution: desire, the virtual strategies of fetishism and substitute, the impossibility of satisfaction through a single material object. Taber’s work is essentially digital and therefore not only presented on, but more importantly intertwined with our website.
The final contribution to our ninth issue is a review of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks written by Simon Vagts.
We wish you pleasant reading!
Hannah Bruckmüller | Jürgen Buchinger | Barbara Reisinger | Stefanie Reisinger
