Editor’s Letter
Why should art be in frames? Why can’t it jump out and be on the things you live with and use and sit on?’ So asks Virginia Nicholson in this issue of Tate Etc., reflecting on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s desire to dissolve the boundary between art and life. In the magazine, we invite you to step inside the studio that lay at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group’s most enduring and experimental creative partnership.
Radical experiments in living also run through our cover feature, which revisits the 1990s as a boldly creative decade in which distinctions between artforms were blurred and print media helped to forge new and diverse creative talent. As Edward Enninful, curator of The 90s: Art and Fashion, an exhibition informed by his lived experience, writes: ‘magazines didn’t just document culture; they helped create it’.
First-hand experience shapes many other contributions on these pages, including a reflective essay by novelist Sara Baume, who follows in the footsteps of artist Ana Mendieta to visit the Neolithic tombs of Ireland. It also guides a ‘delicious’ selection of photographic prints presented to us by darkroom doyen, Dr Ajamu X. Speaking of which, turn to the back page to try your hand at our latest Taste Etc. recipe, inspired by an equally tempting picture by Daido Moriyama.
For afters, leaf through a collection of personal tributes to Frida Kahlo or go behind the scenes with Mohammed Z Rahman as he interviews the gallery technicians who installed his current exhibition. You can also tune in to a conversation with artist and composer Tarek Atoui, recorded ahead of his multisensory Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
Thank you for reading,
Enrico Tassi
