VU University Research Master's Programme

A call for applications for VU University's Research Master's Programme Visual Arts, Media and Architecture (VAMA) has gone out on the Art & Education list.

The conditions under which academic teaching and research are taking place are rapidly deteriorating in the Netherlands, and across much of Europe. In his farewell speech for visiting professor Jae Emerling before the holidays, my colleague Wouter Davidts invoked Adorno's short text "IQ" from Minima Moralia,  "about the fate of intellectual labor in an era of an ever-growing technocracy," in which thought is constantly disciplined by being subjected to performance checks. One should not forget that Adorno's stark and total indictments were always coupled with what is fundamentally a labour of optimism: with teaching, and in doing so making the most of the framework, bending it to meet needs unforeseen by politico-economical imperatives. 

All over Europe, faculties are trying to do just that, often against opposition from managers and members of the "support staff." As a two-year programme in which advanced students in art history and related disciplines can develop their intellectual capacities and their research skills and research agenda, I believe that VAMA is doing quite a good job at doing what matters. Due to a bit of classic bureaucratic obstructionism, a link to the blog that gives an impression of VAMA's activities was omitted from the announcement; it can be found here.

An announcement on an international mailing list such as this is itself a symptom of the economistic logic that forces us to grow or perish. But while this may not be the kind of internationalization that we aspire to, it does have good effects on the student population, which has become more diverse and ambitious. The real problem is of course that international students are increasingly seen as cash cows, with manifests itself in rising tuition for students from non-EEA countries in particular. There is, however, the possibility of applying for a VU Fellowship. Information on tuition fees can be found here, and on the fellowship programme here.

The deadline for applications is 1 April, or 1 March if you apply for the fellowship program.

Image: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Supposing I love you. And you also love me, 2001 (production still)

Performance and Action

One year ago, in January 2011, Paul Chan and I edited an issue of e-flux journal on the rise of right-wing populisms. In the absence of immediately successful counter-strategies, this was conceived as a first stock-taking in the form of a series of "reports." The issue's Dylanesque title, "Idiot Wind," was taken by some as a symptom of ill-advised leftist arrogance, as a sign that we foolishly underestimate the intelligence of populist strategies and the need to learn from them. One would have thought that most contributions made it perfectly clear that the desperate logic of right-wing populism will ultimately have disastrous effects even for most of those who at the moment think they stand to gain (and perhaps actually stand to gain, for the time being) from its rise. Of course Geert Wilders and Sarah Palin are smart; they cleverly boost the idiot wind.

In some ways, the outlook is now less bleak, as the second half of 2011 has seen a wave of new protest movements in a number of countries. The December issue of e-flux journal was made under the impact of Occupy Wall Street, and contained brilliant contributions by Bifo Berardi and Hito Steyerl, among others; the current (January) issue continues the analysis of the ongoing social and political upheavals as well as the economical, cultural and technological factors that shape them. It features my essay "General Performance." This text, part of my History in Motion book project, discusses both artistic performance and today's performative economy, which is undergoing a profound crisis at the moment. From the text:

"The term 'performance' is slippery even within relatively well-defined contexts. In today’s economy, it not only refers to the productivity of one’s labor but also to one’s actual, quasi-theatrical self-presentation, one’s self-performance in an economy where work has become more dependent on immaterial factors. As an artist or writer or curator, you perform when you do your job, but your job also includes giving talks, going to openings, being in the right place at the right time. Transcending the limits of the specific domain of performance art, then, is what I would call general performance as the basis of the new labor. The emergence of new forms of performance in art in the 1960s was itself a factor in the emergence of this contemporary form of labor, which is, after all, connected to a culturalization of the economy."

Later on in this essay, I examine how new forms of activism emerge within the performative regime of contemporary capitalism, exploring and exploding the contradictions of contemporary labour. That these collective acts can generate an emancipatory political narrative strong enough to challenge the relentless mythmaking on the other end of the political spectrum remains questionable, but at least there are now partially positive as well as negative examples to scrutinize and learn from.

Performance, Live or Dead

The Fall 2011 edition of the venerable Art Journal (vol. 70, no. 3) contains a round table on performance, registration and reenactment edited by Amelia Jones: "Performance, Live or Dead." This is not the transcription of an actual round table session, but rather a series of short texts by various practitioners of art and theory. In my contribution, "Performing Time" (pp. 41-44), I look back on my 2005 exhibition Life, One More: forms of reenactment in contemporary art, and discuss my shift towards greater interest in the ways in which performances (reenacted or not) function within the current "economy of time." This is something that will be explored in more detail in some upcoming writings.

Together with Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones also edited the anthology Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (published by Intellect Ltd in London; distributed in the US through University of Chicago Press), which will be released in February 2012. The selection of texts looks excellent, and in contrast to some other anthologies out there, the editors strove to present texts in their entirety — which to my mind greatly increases an anthology's use value. However, this does mean that this (massive) volume comes with a hefty price tag. Included is an essay of mine that was part of Secret Publicity: "Progressive Striptease: Performance Ideology Past and Present."

Image: Deborah Hay, No Time to Fly, 2010.

The Future Is Unwritten

Into the unknown... Best wishes for 2012!

Texte zur Kunst no. 84: Melancholia

Make of this constellation what you will: Texte zur Kunst no. 84 (December 2011), the thematic section of which is dedicated to feminism, also contains my review of Lars von Trier's Melancholia — with excursions on iconology and symptomatology, depression and the neo-bourgeoisie ("Worlds in Collision," pp. 138-142). On a related note: My 2004 Artforum review of von Trier's Dogville can be found in various online archives, for instance here.

Visual Postscript

I discuss Agency's Thing 000809 (Sawing a Lady in Half) in my essay "Secrets of the See-Through Factory" in the new issue of Open. This image, or "specimen," wasn't available on time and is therefore not included among the illustrations. I upload it here as a visual postscript.

Design and Transparency

The publication It's Not a Garden Table: Art and Design in the Expanded Field is an initiative of the Migros Museum and the Institute for Critical Theory in Zurich. I contributed the essay "Beyond Sign Design," which develops aspects of an article that Tom Holert commissioned a couple of years ago for Texte zur Kunst's design issue. In conjunction with a number of theoretical approaches to design, objecthood, networks and systems, "Beyond Sign Design" analyses artistic practices ranging from Frank Stella and John Armleder to Hans Haacke and Allan Sekula, and to Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Sean Snyder. As the title suggests, the aim to go beyond an analysis of design in narrowly semiotic terms. 

A related text is "Secrets of the See-Through Factory: Interventions in Opaque Transparency" in the new issue of Open, no. 22 (the next-to-last issue of Open in its current form). Like the design essay, this text examines a number of art projects for their insight in and contribution to a different aesthetic/economic praxis of material things. In response to WikiLeaks, "Open 22 examines transparency as an ideology, the ideal of the free flow of information versus the fight over access to information and the intrinsic connection between publicity and secrecy." In my text, I focus on the structure of the modern work of art as a means of gaining insight into the dialectics of opacity and transparency. Works by Haacke (again), Snyder (again) as well Zachary Formwalt and Agency/Kobe Matthys are discussed in this text—plus Volkswagen's "transparent factory" and Gulf Labor's Guggenheim Boycott.
 
Both assignments allowed me to continue my work still rather embryonic project on objecthood and thingness, which I hope to intensify once the History in Motion book is out of the way. With the intellectual and artistic suicide of the Netherlands in full swing, it will be a bumpy ride.