Summary
75
Living Things
Spring / Summer 2012
What strategies are contemporary artists using to “animate the inanimate?” To better understand the complexities of our rapport with things, this issue casts a critical eye on contemporary artistic practices that challenge our common perceptions of the “object” and that invite us to reconsider its nature, status, and various functions. This number takes stock of a current phenomenon that resists the dematerialization of art heralded by new media, a phenomenon that manifests itself in a “return to the object” and in the avid interest of the social sciences in material culture.
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Current Issue
Crip
Spring Summer 2026
While “handi” (short for the term “handicapé” in French) and “crip” (derived from “cripple,” meaning “disabled”) are diminutive forms of stigmatizing terms, the meaning we ascribe to them is by no means reductive. On the contrary, they carry a political weight that provides those who embrace them with a powerful tool for empowerment, offering disabled artists non-normative ways for articulating the strange temporalities of disabled experience and alternative ways for navigating an ableist art world. In this issue, we are interested precisely in this work of social, political, and cultural transformation, and we focus on the ways in which crip authors and artists address the different challenges they face.
Cover: Hac Vinent
Accident, exhibition view, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2024.
Photo: Roberto Ruiz, courtesy of the artist & ADN Galeria, Barcelona