Editor's Note

Covers of Tate Etc. issue 40: Summer 2017

Welcome to the newly designed Tate Etc. We like it and hope that you will too. Do let us know what you think. As well as introducing you to our new designers Guillaume Chuard and Daniel Nørregaard, we welcome, as always, new voices to these pages, including artists Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, Jack Whitten, Mike Mandel, Celia Hempton and Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson, as well as writers and critics Colm Tóibín, Daljit Nagra, John-Paul Stonard and Patrick Langley.

They are what you might call the visible face of the magazine, but behind the scenes is an array of people across Tate and outside of its walls who help to formulate the look and content of each issue – from curators and archivists to photographers, press officers, marketing teams and many others.

However, there is one person in particular who has provided constant support for Tate Etc. since its launch in 2004, and that is Tate’s outgoing director Nicholas Serota. Nick played a key role in the initial idea of Tate Etc. as a magazine published by an art institution that begins with its programme and its collection, but also lives beyond it. Since then his passion for art and for artists has been a constant underlying force in the shaping of the magazine’s approach. For all this we are immensely appreciative. We wish him well in his new role at the Arts Council, and we would like to say a big ‘thank you’.

Contents

Alberto Giacometti modelling a bust in his studio in Stampa. Switzerland in 1965, photographed by Ernst Scheidegger

Breathing Life into Bronze

Colm Tóibín

Giacometti was an artist both rooted in the exact and transported by the visionary. He was a maker and a seer, a craftsman and an alchemist. In advance of his retrospective at Tate Modern, Tate Etc. explores the life and work of the artist whose sculptures were filled with 'iconic dignity, a stillness, a solitariness, a sense of a dense inner life'

Faith Ringgold

Artists’ Voices

Faith Ringgold, Jack Whitten, Lorraine O’Grady, Betye Saar and Dawoud Bey

Artists in the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power talk about their work

‘We Are More Than This’

Antwaun Sargent

What the activists and artists did ‘out south’

The Two Duchamps

James Hall

James Hall explores the godfather of conceptual art

Maria Batuszová in her studio in Košice, Slovakia, with her sculptures evoking nests, hollowed eggs, shells and other natural forms, c1987

Maria Bartuszová

Gabriela Garlatyová

Introducing the Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová, who created extraordinary, delicate and fragile-looking white plaster abstract sculptures whose biomorphic shapes were influenced by the natural world and the human form

Colour – The Unruly Child

Lynda Nead

The British have long been seduced by the melancholic certainty of grey weather, and it embedded itself in how we imagined ourselves. But after the Second World War a revolution in colour emerged

Sitting for Giacometti

David Sainsbury

One man recalls his teenage experience of sitting for a portrait by Alberto Giacometti in 1955

Inspired by Giacometti

Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler and Jac Leirner

Artists reveal how Alberto Giacometti has inspired their recent work

Artists Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramovic

Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramović in conversation

Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramović

He is the artist who punched a clock every hour for a year starting in 1980, while she undertook a 700-hour performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2010. She calls him 'the master' and he has great respect for her 40-year career as a performance artist. Tate Etc. brought together these two ground-breaking artists to talk about their enduring work

Untitled photograph from Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's Evidence, 1977

Power Games

Mike Mandel

An insight into the making of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's Evidence, a fascinating 1977 photobook of found images gleaned from scientific and corporate archives across America

Seifollah Samadian's photobook 'Narrative of Revolution', published in 1982

Visual Battlefield

Morad Montazami

A selection of rare photobooks on display at Tate Modern documents the revolution in Iran in the late 1970s and the subsequent war with Iraq

John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 1885–6

Elaine Kilmurray

The most ambitious plein-air picture the American artist ever painted was far more complicated than its loose style might suggest

Packaging for Clarke's World-Famed Blood Mixture, c.1920s

Anyone for Clarke's World-Famed Blood Mixture?

Daljit Nagra

During a visit to the Tate Archive, one poet unearths a curious and outlandish medical remedy book from 1909

Paule Vézelay’s Curves and Circles 1930

Celia Hempton

One artist discovers a landscape of indeterminate bodily holes and protrusions in Vézelay’s abstract painting

Henri Chopin

Paul Noble

One artist celebrates a pioneer of sound poetry

Otto Dix, Portrait of Dr Heinrich Stadelmann, 1920

In the Eye of the Storm

Richard Evans

German artists Otto Dix and August Sander chronicled the rise and fall of the inter-war Weimar Republic, but their work would later be banned or labelled as degenerate by the Nazis

Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979 - detail

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter 1979

Lucy Beech & Edward Thomasson

Power and role play in Mapplethorpe’s double portrait

Illustration by France-Lise McGurn

A Tapestry of Invisible Strings

Patrick Langley

The Art Writers Group writer-in-residence for west Cornwall discovers layers of local meaning in a Barbara Hepworth sculpture

Aleksandra Mir celebrates finishing her, Space Tapestry, 2017

Q&A: Aleksandra Mir

Aleksandra Mir

Five questions to the artist about her Space Tapestry

Rose Finn-Kelcey, The Restless Image, 1975

Rose Finn-Kelcey: A Restless Spirit

Lisa Milroy

Ahead of the first posthumous exhibition of works by Rose Finn-Kelcey (1945–2014), artist Lisa Milroy remembers her inspirational friend

People navigate a flooded road by boat as they visit their neighborhood in Sorrento, Louisiana on 16 August 2016

Climate Change – Can artists have any influence?

JM Ledgard and Alastair Smart

As the environment slides down the list of governmental priorities, JM Ledgard and Alastair Smart discuss whether artists can really make a difference

Why we don’t have to like masterpieces

John-Paul Stonard

A response to Cézanne's fiery comments on famous paintings he thought were overrated

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