A look inside Spike magazine's 50th issue

Spike is a contemporary art magazine with a difference. Founded by artist Rita Vitorelli way back in 2004, the quarterly bilingual German-English magazine is now celebrating the launch of its family-themed 50th issue. Spike describes itself as “both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic”, with a rich pool of critics and curators as contributors.

“Spike 50 is all about the family: as structure, model, metaphor, as place of origin and point of no return,” Spike states. “Do we need to save the family, or to destroy it? Do lines of descent still make sense for artists, or have networks taken their place? From the queer family to the nuclear family, from the commune to neopatriarchy, it lives on in many forms – even in the family of an art magazine.”

Features include a portrait of photographer Nan Goldin by Dean Kissick, a Q&A with American literary theorist and political philosopher Michael Hardt considering “what is wrong with the family?”, Bruce Hainley talks to performance artist Claude Wampler about improvisation, racism and raising kids, while Chiara Bottici and Jamieson Webster compare the Kardashian klan with Freud’s Dora.

And, with Mirko Borsche and Yvonne Zmarsly heading up the magazine’s art direction, fifty issues deep, Spike enters 2017 looking slicker than ever.