Mono

The books to which I recently contributed more or less monographic essays on Hito Steyerl and Paul Chan could hardly be more different. Too Much World, edited by Nick Aikens, is a handy and afforbable pocket  - the format of which is based on the current aspect ratio of  wide-screen television and video. Accompanying Hito's brilliant show at the Van Abbemuseum, this book is probably the best publication on her work to date - though it is unfortunately marred by the kind of copy-editing bloopers that come with a crazy production schedule. I contributed the essay "Postcinematic Essays After the Future."

Hito's book is lean and light, and seems perfectly adapted to today's mobile reader; it is the paper book rebooted for the age of the tablet. Paul Chan's behemoth, the New New Testament, seemingly goes in the other direction. It is one of three (!) books to be published in conjunction with his exhibition at Schaulager in Basel. The New New Testament collects the (almost) complete series of Volumes Paintings, each one accompanied by a short scrambled text. This publication's monumentality should not be seen as merely symptomatic or regressive; rather, it is part of Chan's extended exploration of the contemporary contradictions of the book, of publishing, and of writing. This is the focus of my short essay "Paul Chan's Book Club," which is the condensed version of a longer text that will hopefully see the light of day someday.

In other monographic news, I just wrote an essay for the book on Eran Schaerf's 2012-2013 series of fm-scenario exhibitions, which is to be published later this year by Walther Koenig. (The fm-scenario online platform is here.) It was good to finally write at somewhat greater length (and, hopefully, in greater depth) on Eran's practice, which so far has not received the critical and theoretical attention it deserves.

Furthermore, the essay I wrote some time ago on Louise Lawler's A Movie Will be Shown Without the Picture will also see the light of day later this year, in a publication on this project dedicated to the project produced by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part of the Revolution. There are, of course, other texts in the works, non-monographic in nature, but those I'll let sneak up on you when they're ready.

Project 1975

 

The book Project 1975: The Postcolonial Unconscious in Contemporary Art documents Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam's two-year research and exhibition project, the title of which references the year in which Surinam gained its independence from Holland. The Dutch cultural and intellectual scene has been marked by a curious dearth of critical engagement with the country's colonial past, and colonial unconscious. Project 1975 was an impressive attempt to remedy this at least to some extent, with a number of group shows, lectures, and a series of commissioned essays in the SMBA newsletter. I don't quite understand why some of the latter have not been reprised here, or some of the design decisions, but it is still a worthwhile documentation of Project 1975 - including a series of interviews, an essay on "Mapping Empire" by Ashley Dawson, and my own "Piet Zwart & Zwarte Piet."

The text revolves around two historical cases: Piet Zwart's original photomontage for the cover of Anton de Kom's anticolonial manifesto Wij slaven van Suriname (1934), which ended up not being used, and Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss's recent project about the tenacious phenomenon of Zwarte Piet or Black Pete, which landed the artists and the Van Abbemuseum in hot water for daring to attack "Dutch culture" and "Dutch identity." And yes, being able to use this punning title was pure gravy.

Images: the final cover design of Wij slaven van Suriname (1934) and Links Richten no. 9 (1933).

Come Spring: Paul Chan & Hito Steyerl

On April 11, Paul Chan's exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel will open; the next day sees the opening of Hito Steyerl's show at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I wrote texts for publications accompanying both shows. More incisively than most, these two artists engage with the mutations and contradictions of contemporary cultural production and circulation. 

For Hito's show, I wrote a catalogue essay "Postcinematic Essays After the Future," a short version of which has has appeared in the museum's newsletter, Radically Yours. The catalogue is to be published by Sternberg Press. My texts deals with the migration of the essay from text to video to live performance, and with Hito's notion of "circulationism" as the digital sequel to productivism. In addition, I engaged in an e-mail conversation with Hito for Metropolis M that has just been published in the April-May issue under the title "Glitches of an Exhibition." (Although the title is still in English, the actual text was translated English, or from International Disco Latin, into Dutch.)

  

Paul's Schaulager exhibition features Volumes, his installation of 1005 mounted and painted book covers. The show is accompanied by three different publications, published by Paul's Badlands Unlimited. One of these is called the New New Testament - a massive volume collecting all Volumes, with short accompanying texts. I contributed a brief essay on Paul's various book- and font-related works and activities, and with changes in publishing and the status of writing at the far end of the Gutenberg Galaxy. 

Top Image: still from a rough edit of Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc. (2014). Bottom image: detail of Volumes (2012) and the New New Testament cover. 

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.

E-Flux Journal: World History and Earth Art

Issue no. 49 of e-flux journal contains my essay "World History and Earth Art." This text takes as its point of departure Jonas Staal's smartphone app  and web site, The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide 2013.  

I use this interactive work as a conceptual tool to reconsider both big and more modest questions involving the state, its tenuous but destructive grasp on history, and its role in the data-mining operation that our information economy has increasingly become. 

In the process, the various other artworks and cultural phenomena that are being discussed also serve to produce a richer reading and more substantial critique of the Guide - as a concrete and specific intervention in the quantitative turn that culture is undergoing.

Sean Snyder: No Apocalypse, Not Now

Currently the Kunstverein in Cologne is showing Sean Snyder's solo No Apocalypse, Not Now (till December 22). The exhibition could be seen as a counterpart of Snyder's 2009 exhibition Index at the ICA. Index was a project for which Snyder intended to digitize and upload all his works, destroying their old media - analog videos, photo contact sheets, and so on. 

At the ICA and ever since, Index has been represented by black-and-white photographs of media in various states of photographic enlargement and abstraction (and in various phases of destruction). The projected uploading operation was never realized, and between 2009 and 2013 Snyder's practice was on hiatus. In the main space of No Apocalypse, Not Now, Snyder is showing some of the Index photos together a selection of videos that have as it were re-emerged from Index. However, they have been transformed in the process: they're all shown on the same old-school monitors, even those that were originally projections. They have been abstracted and flattened out, and made more fully comparable in the process. New and at times genuinely illuminating interactions and interferences emerge between different pieces; this is such a strong reconfiguration that it is effectively a new work, like Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise. 

In separate spaces, two videos are screened that were made around the same time as Index: Exhibition and Afghanistan. They, too, were included in the 2009 Index show at the ICA. Here, they are set apart from the earlier, "indexed" videos as large projections, suggesting that there is life besides and beyond Index. 

For a small catalogue/brochure that visitors can purchase at the Kunstverein for one euro, I have adapted and updated an unpublished article on Snyder from 2009, "Two or Three Things I Think I Know About Sean Snyder." At the time, I regarded the text as an attempt to state some "basic banalities" about an artist whose reception, I felt, was still in its infancy. While things have not really moved forward in the meantime, the show in Cologne might help change his. It certainly convinced me that one of these days I have to write an entirely new text that more fully reflects my current thoughts on Snyder's practice.

A Guy Called Debord

Issue no. 52 of Grey Room (Summer 2013) is a special issue on Guy Debord's cinema. My text "Guy Debord and The Cultural Revolution" (pp. 108-127) looks at Debord's films as well as other aspects of his practice in the context of fundamental transformations of the cultural sphere in and since the 1960s and 1970s. In order to shift the terms of the debate away from an exclusive focus on cinema I use the notion of cultural revolution, which the Situationists employed in the late 1950s, and which has had a glittering career in other circles. I will investigate this (and argue for the term's relevance) more fully in an essay on which I'm currently working.

Fillip no. 18: Always Working

Fillip no. 18 is out now, and this issue contains a section on art and labour edited by Gabrielle Moser, "Always Working." This section contains my essay "The Making of Labour: The Movie" (a short draft of a longer text to come). 

My text is complemented by a contribution from Natascha Sadr Haghighian. Gabrielle asked me the name of an artist I'd like to share the "Always Working" section with, and Natascha came to mind; her projects are among the most incisive artistic articulations of the antoinomies of contemporary labour, from Solo Show to I Can't Work Like This.

The aim was to have an autonomous contribution that did not run any risk of being taken for an illustration. I do not discuss Natascha's work in this particular text, which focuses on a number of recent film and video projects by artists/filmmakers including Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Zachary Formwalt and the greatly missed Allan Sekula.

Order from Fillip or (in Europe) from Motto.

Texte zur Kunst no. 90: Research Objectives

From the editorial of issue no. 90 of Texte zur Kunst (June 2013):

"Using the phrase 'How we aim to work', the June issue of Texte zur Kunst brings together contributions by authors who have been associated with the magazine for a long time and who have shaped its debates along the way. Instead of specifying a thematic focus, we left it to the contributors to decide which questions relating to their current research interests they wanted to address. The selected texts are mostly extracts from long-term research projects and therefore function as 'work samples'. They expand on topics for which, faced with the deadlines always bearing down on them, the authors usually don’t find time. Thus, this issue contains drafts of texts – “goodies from the study”, if you like – that would otherwise remain in the drawer and that for now avoid the logic of direct exploitation. We invited the authors to develop these texts without requiring that they align, as is so often the case, with a designated theme.

"It is precisely the conditions out of which they developed and the different formats of these contributions – from collaborative authorship; to narrative, literary essays; all the way to monographic and performative, artistic treatises – that stand for a different approach to the fields of university research, project-oriented collaborations, artistic dealings, and the thematic 'private passions' of our authors. Such an approach would run counter to the often sobering coercion of activity and effectiveness that characterizes working conditions today. The authors’ willingness to share “work samples” from their ongoing projects can also be understood as a reaction against the pressure of having to be flexible and active in various ways in both one’s professional and private life – in order to expand one’s network through a quick succession of projects and to ensure the existence of future projects. Especially in the field of immaterial labor, the 'projective city' diagnosed by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in 1999 is more effective than ever." 

From my contribution, an essay titled "Research Objectives," in which I discuss my research plans for the post-History in Motion future:  

"The art world is often marked by an odd just-in-time economy: Could you give a talk next Saturday? Could you fly over in ten days to provide a theoretical framework for our workshop? Could you write an essay for this artist’s retrospective, ready by the end of April? Such requests are obviously problematic when the day job is teaching, holding seminars, discussing theses, grading papers. However, as deliriously random as some of these requests can be, there is no denying the gratification of encountering some form of demand. By contrast, the neoliberal turn of academic funding in Europe takes the seemingly paradoxical form of neo-Stalinist five-year plans where scholars have to compete by submitting large, collective research proposals that have to fit a particular ideological agenda. In Holland, where essentially all research in the humanities has to be squeezed into the categories of 'creative industries' or 'e-humanities,' this development takes on traits of auto-parody. 

"The bureaucratic longue durée of the academic market is counterbalanced by ultra-fast personal projects. Philosopher Graham Harman recounts writing his book The Quadruple Object (2011) in six weeks – and live-blogging about it, thus pressuring himself to finish on time. The final draft took 86 hours and 34 minutes to complete. Graham lauds the liberating effect imposed by circumstances: 'Simply by identifying all the operating constraints on a given project, one’s room for free decision is narrowed and focused to a manageable range, and the specters of nothingness and infinity soon dissipate in the rising sun. When that happens, it becomes possible to summarize your life’s work in a mere six weeks of writing.' Regardless of whether this is truly a model even within Harman’s field, it is hard to see how such a “summarizing” approach could be applied to most disciplines in the humanities, such as art history. In that case, a sweeping synthesis or programmatic statement could certainly be whipped up in a limited amount of time (after a life’s work of de facto preparation), but the very existence of the discipline depends on painstaking and often lengthy historical research. 

"The question thus becomes one of projecting and propelling one’s project(s) outside of the academic Planwirtschaft There clearly is an urgent need to create 'precarious forms of autonomy within the institution,' as Gerald Raunig puts it. This also necessitates moves outside the university: research in the interstices, in the space where academic and cultural markets intersect and sometimes clash. This means that one operates in an expanded and diffuse edu-factory that thrives on instability and self-exploitation. However, the situation faced by scholars who opt for the more standard approach and have a go at the small amount of big money available for the humanities is ultimately not much less precarious. The crucial petite différence is that the focus on a few large funding bodies tends to create a horizon of thought that is rarely called into question; the very scarcity of options acts as a perverse disincentive for scholars to problematize their own research objects and their mode of production; to think and act in terms of different intellectual, affective, social, economic constellations."  

www.textezurkunst.de

Image: Paul Chan, scene from the Badlands office (2011).

New Left Review: Performance After Television

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

Lidwien van de Ven

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/

Third Text: Mutations

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. 

Inside Abstraction

Issue no. 38 of e-flux journal (October 2012) is dedicated to the subject of structural violence. It contains my essay "Inside Abstraction," which is part of a personal long-term research project that I hope to focus on — circumstances permitting — when the History in Motion book, which is now scheduled for early 2012, is out of the way.



www.e-flux.com/journals/

No Time

 
Starting on September 20, the 21er Haus in Vienna is hosting an exhibition titled Keine Zeit ("no time") in German and Busy in English. Dealing with the exhaustion of the self — stress, depression, burnout — in the age of cognitive and "creative" capitalism, with its ideology of relentless flexibility and its erosion of old dividing lines between work and leisure. 

The exhibition foregrounds art's implication in this regime, and my catalogue essay "Autonomous Symptoms in a Collapsing Economy of Time" focuses on various forms of performance and of dance in today's "temporal economy." Continuing where my previous text "Unknown Knowns" left off, the essay homes in on the performance of symptoms and its potential and pitfalls for collaborative projects. Artists discussed include Yvonne Rainer, Jérôme Bel, Charles Atlas, Dora Garcia and Lars von Trier.

The catalogue of Keine Zeit/Busy also contains contributions by Bettina Steinbrügge/Alain Ehrenberg, Diedrich Diederichsen, Liam Gillick, and Angela Melitopoulos/Maurizio Lazzarato, among others.

Image: Dora Garcia's Real Artists Don't Have Teeth at the 2011 Venice Biennale. 

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.

Daan van Golden

A master in the art of the delay, Daan van Golden achieved a certain level of success in the Pop decade of the 1960s only to retreat from public activities following the 1968 documenta, using the Dutch subsidy system to make a living rather than a career. Having recommenced exhibiting his art around 1980, Van Golden's renown remained largely confined to the Netherlands until recently, with exhibitions at the Camden Arts Center, Greene Naftali, and now a carefully curated retrospective at Wiels in Brussels. Van Golden's work thus seems poised to arrive in the present, in the present-day culture industry. I was invited to contribute an essay to the catalogue of the Wiels exhibition, and I decided to use this opportunity reflect on the complex role of Van Golden's practice in (and often against) developments in the cultural economy since the 1960s.

From the introduction: "Daan van Golden’s works are marked by precise attention to the properties of the mediums employed by the artist. This would seem to invite a formalist analysis, or rather a structuralist one—for van Golden’s early Pop abstractions, the “handkerchief” and “wrapping paper” paintings, already mock the limitations of formalism, playing off form-as-form against form as a codified, signifying structure. While such works thus make it abundantly clear that they should not be regarded as self-sufficient forms, I want to argue that, since the 1970s in particular, van Golden’s work also frustrates structuralist readings that disparage the social context as extraneous to the production of meaning. What I propose to do here is analyse van Golden’s practice in the context of changing economical and social conditions—globally, but also, and specifically, in the Netherlands. Of course, the aim is not to read art as a mere superstructural or ideological reflection of an economic and social base. If anything, the point should be that the economy’s increasing dependence on intellectual and cultural labour makes the problematic—or dialectic—relation between these two more complicated than ever. Van Golden’s works can be seen as constituting a series of interventions in the changing conditions of cultural production."

The retrospective at Wiels is on view until 29 April; the catalogue will be ready towards the end of the show's run. The image shows an installation view with a dialogue between two exercises in framing and ornithology: an untitled 1965 collage in the foreground and Birds (1986) in the background.

[A note on the name: In Dutch the full name is "Daan van Golden" with a lower-case v, but when only the the last name is used it is "Van Golden" with a capital V. Since this is rather confusing to the majority of the world's population, Wiels consistently uses "van Golden."]

www.wiels.org

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 strand of thought is developed further in the article "General Performance" and in my upcoming book History in Motion. 

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". Overall I'm still quite happy with this text, which was published in Secret Publicity, though I erred by turning Kristine Stiles into some sort of ideological bogeyman on the basis of a few remarks.

Texts on aspects of performance seem to come with more than the usual share of contentious exchanges — perhaps because performance attracts the attention of several academic disciplines, including art history and, of course, performance studies. Territorial battles often inform writings. This is also apparent from the reception of Life, Once More. In the catalogue essay, I attempted to think with and through a certain critical tradition that problematized the traditional theater and its perceived separation of actors and audience, comparing the “activation” of audience members in historical pageants and in the modern war reenactments that emerged in the early 1960s to the art events and happenings that emerged in the same period, analysing both as (compromised) attempts to rethink and reform performance in a period in which Debord’s “society of the spectacle” was itself undergoing a performative turn. The traditional association of “spectacle” with “passive viewing”, then, became less tenable than before, as did that of performance with liveness and uniqueness and the identification of recordings as weak derivatives of the “orginal.”

Today I would define and qualify my use of terms such “theater” and “spectacle” much more, but to suggest that my essay aligns theater as such with “slavish imitation”, as Rebecca Schneider does in Performing Remains, her bid to become the go-to reenctment scholar (we all need goals in life, I suppose), is to miss the point in a rather spectacular manner. On the basis of my characterization of Jackson Pollock's fear that, in performing for Hans Namuth’s camera, his creative act had “degenerated” into mere play-acting, Schneider proceeds to pathologize me and my supposedly deep-held aversion to the theatre. It seems that performing the part of somebody's bogeyman is part of the game.

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.

Stan Douglas & Gerard Byrne

Summer is taken up not only by work on my book-in-progress, but also by activities triggered by the dismal political situation in Holland. With Jorinde Seijdel and Merijn Oudenampsen, I'm working on an "emergency issue" of the journal Open, whose existence is under threat. This special issue will come out in September and be distributed as a supplement to a Dutch weekly.

Meanwhile, in other news, I have contributed more or less monographic essays to two upcoming publications. I don't write a lot of such texts, and one reason is the insane pace at which many exhibition catalogues and related publications are put together - with the commissioning of essays often being something of an afterthought. In the case of these publications on Stan Douglas and Gerard Byrne, the whole process was fortunately more professional and the time frame more generous. Stan Douglas: Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 is a book that focusses on said photograph by Stan Douglas, and my text "Performing Photography After Film" investigates the interplay of media in Douglas's work and the dialectic of (immaterial) image and its concretization or "performance" in the form of a (material) picture. The book also includes an essay by Serge Guilbaut and a conversation between Stan and Alex Alberro.

Later this month a Gerard Byrne retrospective will open in at the Irish Museum of Modern art, and later it will travel to Lisbon and London. At one point the Kröller-Müller Museum, where part of 1984 and Beyond was shot (see image), seemed to be interested in bringing the show to the Netherlands, but this seems to have fallen through. What a surprise. The Kröller-Müller truly is heaven—if one's definition of heaven is the one given by Talking Heads in their song of that name. The catalogue is titled Images or Shadows. Rather than attempting to represent the work in question in the usual manner,  this publication examines it by deconstructing and rearticulating it in the form of a dense network of texts and images, including many reference images, complete with captions written in a mid-twentieth century magazine style. There is of course the danger of self-congratulatory referentialism, of slyly suggesting "importance by association," but the choices and combinations are sharp enough to generate an interplay, a dialogue, that itself takes on a real critical quality.

As editor Pablo Lafuente puts it in his meta-foreword: "All these works, the texts printed in this book and the images that accompany them present, hopefully, more than a set of intertextual references, quotations and allusions to literary, artistic and intellectual history, but a transtextual range of articulations that show not only how a work can explicitly refer to bother, but how it can also elaborate, expand, modify or transform the grounds where it stands."My essay, "Gerard Byrne's Talking Pictures: Different repetitions in New Sexual Lifestyles and 1984 and Beyond," obviously focusses on these two works and on their intervention in the shifting relation between the printed and the spoken word, as the Gutenberg Galaxy fades and a new orality and performativity gain strength.

A somewhat different version of this essay is included in Witte de With's Cornerstones book, a collection of more or less monographic essays, many of which (though not mine) have been delivered as lectures at Witte de With.