Theory, Culture & Mousse

Two new articles are online (though one is probably behind a paywall), resulting from very different production processes and temporalities. The first, "Liberation Through Laziness," is the result of an invition by Bureau Publik in Denmark to speak on Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy. As I had a request from Mousse magazine to contribute something I decided to turn my Copenhagen lecture into an article for them. The great advantage of art magazines can be their dedication to the moment, and the possibility for producing texts and constellation of texts that articulate that moment, hopefully in a manner that allows one to think a bit beyond it. I'm quite happy with this essay on those terms, though I hope I can return to it at some future point and develop a few aspects a bit further, and more rigorously.

Far removed from the speed of art magazines is the glacier-like pace of academic journals. In the autumn of 2011, after the Autonomy Conference at the Van Abbemuseum, Nikos Papastergiadis asked me to submit an article on autonomy and Rancière to a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society he was editing. Since I was already working on an essay for the Autonomy issue of Open, and didn't feel up to the task of producing something completely different on the same subject right after finishing the Open text, I felt I either had to bow out or develop my Open essay a bit further. I was asked to do the latter. Of course, this text/these texts were also to become (parts of) one chapter of my book History in Motion, which came out in the fall of 2013. This, it turns out, was actually before the publication of my TCS article, "Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice," which has only now been "prepublished" online, ahead of its publication in print. (I'm not sure if this link will lead you to the full article if you're not affiliated with an institution that has a TCS subscription; probably not.)

Between production cycles that take less than two months and those that take more than two years, it can be rather tricky to develop a pace of work that works for you. Of course, all magazines and journals are likewise caught up in the contradictions of our economy of time, and occupy a niche that works for them. What cannot be valued enough are those working relationships with magazines, reviews or journals whose durations and rhythms can be brought in synch with yours, at least intermittently.

Speaking of the Autonomy Project, that loose collaboration between various art schools, universities and the Van Abbemuseum, which straddles different economies (of time): I am currently editing the Art and Autonomy reader, as head of an editorial team that also comprises Autonomy Project colleagues. The reader is to be published by Afterall, which itself is situated in something of an art world/academia nexus. We're trying something rather different from the standard reader format with this one. As a denizen of Old Europe I don't like to show my excitement too much, but the book is taking shape rather beautifully. The aim is to finalize the edit after the summer and have the thing out before the end of the year. We shall see.

Open no. 23: Autonomy

Issue no. 23 of Open is dedicated to autonomy in and between aesthetics and politics. As member of the Autonomy Project, I guest-edited this issue alongside editor in chief Jorinde Seijdel. The issue contains essays—some of them based on talks given at the Autonomy Symposium at the Van Abbemuseum by authors including Joost de Bloois, John Byrne, Andrea Fraser, Peter Osborne, Gerald Raunig, Hito Steyerl and myself, as well as an interview with Franco "Bifo" Berardi by Willem van Weelden and a dialogue between Jacques Rancière and Thomas Hirschhorn. As always, there are a few blemishes, including the inevitable tiny-but-irritating editorial oversights. People were using up their energy reserves, and it shows. I suppose, given the issue's subject, these glitches can be said to posses a certain recursivity.

The same might be said for the issue's horrendous full title, "Autonomy: New Forms of Freedom and Independence in Art and Culture," was in fact imposed by the publisher, as was the questionable cover image. Still, as a rich collection of texts that think through the complex history as well as the potential of the notion of autonomy, this is a good penultimate issue for Open, at turns rigorous and imaginative, and occasionally both at the same time. My own essay, "Autonomy After the Fact," problematizes the relation between aesthetic and political conceptions of autonomy, and discusses Harold Rosenberg's notion of the act as well as Institutional critique and the "performative turn" made by its more recent manifestations, and recent forms of collective action in and beyond art. The essay is also part of my History in Motion project; the book is being readied for publication this autumn.

There will be one more issue in the current form, after which Open will be (as Brian Holmes put it) closed and hopefully reopened. SKOR, the foundation that co-published the journal with NAi publishers, will soon cease to exist as a result of the Dutch funding cuts, and the editor is busy trying to ensure some sort of restart. The new Open will probably be an online platform first and foremost, which would at least mean that the text can be accessed by a potentially wider readership than the  old Open, which suffered from a minimal and shambolic distribution. My essay from the autonomy issue is online here. (Note that the caption on p. 98 incorrectly gives 1952 as the publication year of these images; it is in fact 1960.) The print edition is available at amazon, and even at select bookstores! 

The Autonomy Project has also published a series of "Autonomy Newspapers," mostly written by students; issue no. 3 is online and can be downloaded here. 


Image: A black box, in homage of Hito Steyerl's essay in Open 23.

Autonomy Symposium

On 7, 8 and 9 October the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven hosted the Autonomy Symposium, which was organized in the context of The Autonomy Project, in which I'm involved. The symposium boasted appearances by Franco Berardi, Thomas Hirschhorn, Peter Osborne, Jacques Rancière and Hito Steyerl, among others. The symposium was something of a joint venture between the Autonomy Project and Nikos Papastergiadis, who had proposed a Rancière symposium to the Van Abbe.

For once, a symposium was worthy of the name, as discussions on the ins and outs of aesthetic and/or political autonomy took on a great sense of urgency in the current state of not just this nation. Plenary lectures alternated with smaller workshops and masterclasses in the museum library and various other spaces, though the technocratic term "masterclass" (beloved by funding bodies) seems a complete misnomer for what actually transpired, as the "audience" increasingly emancipated itself and the "masters" took on the role of ignorant schoolmaster. It will no doubt have various and repercussions af in the participants' various practices. A number of publications are being planned; in the meantime, you can find archived videos at http://vanabbemuseum.nl/audio-video.

The symposium sold out in no time and we could easily have filled a larger lecture theatre than the Van Abbe's, but the relatively intimate scale was an important factor in the success. It is disconcerting to hear that the Van Abbe is now being attacked by the social democrats (!) in Eindhoven for not following the populist blockbuster approach that has become the sole norm in the dismal Dutch museum landscape. The Autonomy Symposium, which fostered such a sense of agency in those who took part, is just one example of the Van Abbe's attempt to create forms of publicness and collaboration that go beyond an economistic and deeply contemptuous approach to audiences. If I have been critical of some of the Van Abbe's projects, it is because they deserve to be taken seriously—and the same cannot be said of most other museums in this neck of the woods. Get ready to defend the Van Abbe!

Postscript, 18 October: In a kind of practical extension of the Autonomy Project, a lot of letters explaining and defending the value of Charles Esche's programme at the Van Abbemuseum were written in the last few days. The direct or indirect addressee of these epistles was PvdA spokesperson Arnold Raaijmakers. Rather than supporting an institution that offers one of the most convincing counter-models to a post-public sphere dominated by the destructive "creative industries" approach, this pallbearer of Holland's long Dutch social-democratic tradition obviously thinks it more strategic to mimic the populist-neoliberal logic of Halbe Zijlstra and Geert Wilders, proposing drastic budget cuts and effectively demanding that the museum become another generic machine for churning out provincial and culturally meaningless polder blockbusters. Some sent their letters and statements to the museum or to Raaijmakers directly; others to the Eindhovens Dagblad, the local rag. A selection of the latter (some in Dutch, many in English) is here. At today's debate in the culture committee of Eindhoven's city council only the PvdA and the SP supported Raaijmaker's slash-and-burn plan, yet there seems to be broad support for a less radical, watered-down version from 2013 on.

Photo by Emilio Moreno.

Open emergency issue, "On the New Politics of culture"

September 22 sees the publication of an "emergency issue" of Open, the "cahier on art and the public domain" published by SKOR. As a result of the destructive cuts in Dutch arts funding, SKOR has announced that it will stop publishing Open after the May 2012 issue. This special Dutch-language edition is a magazine-style supplement to De Groene Amsterdammer. All subscribers of this weekly will receive it, and while it will be absent from in-store copies of De Groene, it will be available for free in a number of bookstores and art spaces. You can also download it as a PDF (but beware: it's in Dutch). 

Together with Jorinde Seijdel and Merijn Oudenampsen, as well as managing editor Liesbeth Melis, I was part of the editorial team of this noodnummer (a term that can also be translated as "emergency number," as in 911). Its title is  "Over de nieuwe politiek van cultuur," or "On the New Politics of Culture," and it contains a number of incisive analyses of the reconstruction not only of the Dutch art world, but of Dutch society as a whole. For me, it is a local and more action-oriented sequel to the international survey that was the "Idiot Wind" issue of e-flux journal.

Among the contributors are Bik Van der Pol, Charles Esche, Pascal Gielen, Arnoud Holleman and Gert Jan Kocken, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Zihni Özdil, Willem Schinkel and Lidwien van de Ven. My own text, "Autonomie in actie," is connected to my participation in The Autonomy Project, as well as to a chapter of my book-in-progress, History in Motion. On September 23, there will be a public presentation at Plein der Beschaving, Tolhuisweg 2, Amsterdam Noord.

The English Open homepage is here. 

Image: Willem de Rooij, Chick, 2008.

Acting on the Omnipresent Frontiers of Autonomy

As one artist told me recently, the Van Abbemuseum is the only Dutch museum that one would even consider criticizing seriously - as an ambitious enterprise worthy of an immanent critique that rather than merely external criticism. In the near future the Van abbe will hopefully get company from the Stedelijk Museum, after years of utter malaise. One symptom of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Dutch museums for 20th- and 21-century art is their chronic inability to develop projects that involve significant and innovative art-historical research and/or a theoretical component. I certainly don't see anything comparable here to a historical investigation such as the MUMOK's Changing Channels, and in a different way the project To the Arts, Citizens! organized by Serralves in Porto (the exhibition opens on 21 November) likewise offers a stark contrast to Dutch business as usual.

There is a historical section with various documents, but this exhibition is mainly a survey of work by youngish contemporary artists (and collectives) focusing "on some of the intersections between art and politics − understood as action, representation or reference − as manifested in our time." The list of artists (which includes Bureau d'Etudes, Chto Delat, Zachary Formwalt, Nicoline van Harskamp and Gert Jan Kocken) looks promising, though it remains to be seen if the project can escape the usual problems of the museification of the political. The point of departure seems somewhat generic - and the title To the Art, Citizens! does not strike one as the best possible choice. However, I am looking forward to the two-part accompanying publication; one volume will be the catalogue while the other contains essays commissioned for the occasion from Peio Aguirre, Federico Ferrari, Brian Holmes, Roberto Merrill, Hito Steyerl and myself.

The authors were contacted well in advance, which suggests an awareness that these things take time - an awareness that is rather rare in my neck of woods. I haven't yet read the other texts yet, but the montage looks like it might be a productive one, and conducive to thinking about and beyond the limits of such museum projects. My text, "Acting on the Omnipresent Frontiers of Autonomy," investigates the use value of the notion of autonomy in these interesting times.

http://www.serralves.pt/actividades/detalhes.php?id=1758/

Image: overgrown rafts by Robert Jasper Grootveld moored next to the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.