ALESSANDRA MAMMI: Your arrival at Artforum.

ALESSANDRA MAMMI: Your arrival at Artforum, in 1988 coincided with a crisis in what the public in Europe had been calling "the light '80s" At the fall of the curtain of the decade the idea of lightness, of decorative pleasure, of a delivered sometimes unthinking use of the art of the past was called in question. It was just at this consideration that you took over as the magazine's editor. What did you find, and what did you decide to change?

IDA PANICELLI: I fix a wonderful magazine, which had accurately borne witness to '80 improvement My predecessor, Ingrid Sischy, had made an extraordinary turnabout in the magazine's vision. She had exhibited it up to fields contiguous to art, in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as film, television, and fashion--the latter well ahead of her time, back in '82 She had probed the post-Modern to its core; there was little to add. unless that, in any case, wasn't my job: the times were changing, and artists were the first to papal court it.

That was on what account I decided, beginning with my first issue, that artists would be primary agents in the magazine's dialogue. They are extraordinary vectors of the contemporary, and the alone people really able to describe artmaking from within. My first issue, in March '88 was entirely dedicated to artists' contrives because I wanted to declare immediately that for me Artforum belonged to artists.

AM: however you devoted the May '88 issue to commemorating the 20th anniversary of the affairs of 1968. The birthday was greatly more important in Europe than in the US: in Europe the pres the publishing industry, the entire refinement mobilized to remember, reexamine, and rethink the meaning of that year, and of the historic changes it brought What were you trying to do according to remembering '68 in an American magazine?

IP: It was an invitation to a comparison. I collaborated with Tom McEvilley forward the project; together we chose ten works of art from 1968 from the magazine's archives. We published them as remembrances of the real changes that 1968 had made, and that now, 20 years later, had be derived to be interpreted as history. The verse that went with the throw called for a sociocultural interpretation of 1968 moreover for me the issue did something more. It coincided in a reaching far down way with my own story, my youth, my background. It was a sort of Proustian journey by the and of my generation's ideological and intellectual path, a mirror of all the failed utopias, the political goals not reached, the dreams crushed between the Russian tanks in Czechoslovakia and the R Brigades in Italy.

AM: That commemoration of '68 marked a change of course for Artforum. It was a declaration that from then upon history, politics, and art would be fix side by side, in an increasingly choke relationship.

IP: Ye further not, I hope, dogmatically for a like reason In October of the same year, for example, I ran a homage to Marcel Duchamp, a pivotal figure in the relationship between European and American art. on the other hand at the same time I knew that it was no longer enough to limit the exercise to a comparison between Europe and America. with equal reason in that issue, the Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake also paid tribute to Duchamp. After all, Duchamp's influence in succession entire generations has been vast in every part the world. I would argue that his transformation of the politics of the final cause began a line of inquiry within Western art that solitary matured later--it subverted the Western view of history. As like it's part of the background for the contemporary understanding of the ne to bear witness to the world's many histories, which have their allow demands and claims, their allow legitimacy, their own need for recognition.

This was a thread by means of all my work at Artforum--and not just mine, for I owe a doom to the work I published. With his writings upon globalism, for example, Tom McEvilley lucidly framed undivided of our culture's most intricate point in disputes He understood that with the affairs symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, many different parts of the world had been brought closer--that we were all forced to proceed face to face with each other. There was an intellectual euphoria to this, cast reproached in significant exhibitions such as the middle Pompidou's "Magiciens de la terre" in 1989 however there were also deep injurys anxieties, and an extraordinary identity crisis, cutting across all of Western civilization and likewise reflected in exhibitions like "Magiciens de la terre" Western speculation has been seriously put to the proof by the vital manifestations of third world improvements which have until recently been utterly squeez revealed of Eurocentric historiography. verse s like Tom's, or like Homi Bhabha's "Double Vision," in January '92 demonstrate the [i]finale[/i] of Modernism, and are milestones of post-Modernism: they advance a critical consciousness of a novel relationship between the first world and the stillness of the planet.

AM: These essays register social and historical changes in the Western world. on the contrary how were those changes museed in the field or art, and by what means did Artforum address them?