Content area
Full Text
WE'RE NOW a year into the indisputably disastrous tenure of predator-in-chief Donald J. Trump. While we wait for the #metoo moment to catch up with him, we watch other men fall thanks to their own crimes and misconduct. To picture our current life and imagine possible lives otherwise, and inspired in no small part by events in our own house, Artforum invited seven artists and two writers to consider how we can and should use power. In the pages that follow, NAN GOLDIN details her opioid addiction and points to the Sackler family as culpable authors of our epidemic. ADRIAN PIPER offers us one of her trenchant calling cards, while SABLE ELYSE SMITH, an artist and poet who has been visiting her father in prisons for nineteen years, examines the terms of disciplinary coercion. KIA LABEI JA shares a portfolio of self-portraits chronicling her story as a person born with HIV, and DONALD MOFFETT leaves us a blank space, a moment to consider what might have been with a President Hillary Clinton. The art and life collective HOUSE OF LADOSHA proposes chic, politically conscious designs for the world we want, while K8 HARDY shows stills from an ongoing video project documenting genius mannequins in the wild. Is this a portrait of consumerism after the apocalypse, or of utopia?
To round things out, JOHANNA FATEMAN asks how we can and should figure sexual violence in antirape culture and PAUL B. PRECIADO traces what he terms "baroque technopatriarchy," suggesting new forms of agency as an epoch comes to an end.
NAN GOLDIN
Leave the world a better place than when you entered it.
-Arthur Sackler to his children
I SURVIVED THE OPIOID CRISIS. I narrowly escaped. I went from the darkness and ran full speed into The World. I was isolated, but I realized I wasn't alone. When I got out of treatment I became absorbed in reports of addicts dropping dead from my drug, OxyContin.
I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were responsible for the epidemic. This family formulated, marketed, and distributed OxyContin. I decided to make the private public by calling them to task. My first action is to publish personal photographs from my own history.
My...