This week, as homes across America begin preparing for their Thanksgiving feasts, Artforum revisits Stuart Morgan’s feature essay “Cold Turkey,” from the magazine’s April 1981 issue, a scathing assessment of the exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, a major survey of neo-expressionist painting that signaled the return of brash figuration in the wake of Minimal and Conceptual art.  
 
“A woman decides to hold a dinner party and hires a maid to wait on the table. All goes well until the servant steps into the room carrying a huge turkey, trips and drops it on the carpet. ‘Blanche,’ says the hostess, her voice quivering, ‘Take that away and bring in the other turkey.’  ‘A New Spirit in Painting’ isn’t just a turkey—it’s the same old turkey dusted off and disguised. Cold, mangled and covered with fluff, it may stick in our throats, but the day is saved—any turkey is better than no turkey at all. Unless of course, you prefer the truth,” begins Morgan’s essay. “The most provocative part of ‘A New Spirit’ is the word ‘new’; every major point in the catalogue text has been made before, and the average age of the artists is 50. . . . Altogether, it is synthetic, symptomatic, even representative. Not ‘new.’”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan