Issue no. 80 of New Left Review (March/April 2013) contains my article "Performance Art After Television," which is part of chapter 3 of History in Motion. In general, that book would hardly have come into being without NLR's receptiveness and support, even when faced with half-baked work-in-progress. The "art" bit was added to my original title "Performance After Television" so as to give a slightly clearer sense of the subject; after all, this is not an art journal. The essay shares the pages of this issue with, for instance, contributions on the Arab uprisings and the Nobel Prize for Literature—not to mention the Decline of the West.
The article is online here, but it's behind a paywall.
Image: Eran Schaerf's 2002 installation version of his Listener's Voice Project.
www.newleftreview.org
This isn't the final cover; the subtitle has changed in the meantime. We're in the proofing stage right now. Getting there one comma at a time. Design by Surface.
Issue no. 89 of Texte zur Kunst (March 2013) is largely dedicated to Mike Kelley. It also contains my review of the Oskar Fischinger retrospective at the EYE in Amsterdam, "Moving in Circles."
I argue that whereas the exhibition desperately wants to demonstrate that Fischinger was a major
artist, a more fruitful approach would be to accept and explore his minor
status. As Branden Joseph puts it, “If ‘minor’
artists retain a place within major history […] it is on account of their
relation to or proximity to the movements and categories engendered by major
history and by the unceasing pressure that they exact on them. […] Appearing on
the fringes of major movements or styles, their relation to them is one of
deterritorialization, opening these categories up to heterological connections
and interactions.” Such an exploration of Fischinger's work would have resulted in a completely different, and potentially much richer, exhibition.
The event that echoes throughout Lidwien van de Ven's new book is the 2002 murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch right-wing populist. As Fortuyn's intellectual heirs, Geert Wilders and Thilo Sarrazin have a spectral presence in this publication, produced by Witte de With (and edited with great acumen and patience by Amira Gad) in the context of a series of artists' books focussing on the institution's local context.
Under the perhaps deliberately anodyne title Rotterdam: Sensitive Times, the photo sequence that runs through the book combines images of manifestations in the immediate aftermath of Fortuyn's death with numerous other events, across Europe and elsewhere, including a number of extreme-right and Muslim demonstrations. I focus on such manufactured or staged events in my short and condensed text in the book, "Lidwien van de Ven: Photo Opportunities."
http://www.wdw.nl/shop/artist-book-2/rotterdam-sensitive-times/
Issue no. 120 of Third Text, edited by T.J. Demos, is dedicated to the politics of ecology. It comes with an open-access online supplement that includes an article that is based on parts of chapter six of my upcoming book, History in Motion. Titled "Mutations and Misunderstandings," this essay can be found here.
The international deadline for applying for VU University's two-year research master's programme VAMA (Visual Arts, Media and Architecture) is April 1, or March 1 if you are also applying for a VU scholarship.
See the announcement here.
Image: Bik Van der Pol, Accumulate, Collect, Show (2011).
Recently it was announced that Open, the journal on art and the public domain that has been axed in its old form due to the Dutch culture wars funding cuts, will continue as an online platform in collaboration with Stroom in The Hague. In a situation in which the chairman of the Dutch section of AICA (the
international art critics' association) prides himself on not knowing the meaning of the word discursive, this is very good news. At least one crucial context in which critical thought is not ostracized will continue to exist, however fragile and underfunded. While much of the content from Open issues published between 2004 and 2010 is online in PDF form, editor Jorinde Seijdel and web designer Niels Schrader are working on a searchable online database—a "living archive" that will the basis of a site that is to include new online editions.
Image: a selection of key texts from Open was recently published by nai010 publishers.
Label:
contemporary art,
essay,
history in motion
