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.
Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present is a collection of essays edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson. Designed as a multifaceted introduction to the field, the book contains contributions by the likes of Ina Blom, Sabeth Buchmann, T.J. Demos, Liam Gillick and Maria Lind, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Julian Stallabrass and Jan Verwoert. The section titled "The Rise of Fundamentalism" contains my article "Monotheism à la Mode." It recapitulates and develops some strands from Idols of the Market.
While it looks like an excellent job editorially, it must be said that the pricing by Wiley-Blackwell is rather obscene. That's the academic textbook market for you: capitalism at its most Stalinist.
V2 in Rotterdam has just published an ebook reader as part of their project Speculative Realities. For this publication, Rachel O'Reilly conducted a brief email interview with me, titled "The Object of Art History." The interview refers to some texts that are early sketches for a book project I will hopefully be able to do some work on the the near future (tentatively titled The Art of Obstruction, formerly known as Art and Thingness). The ebook can be downloaded in various formats here.
The holidays were taken up largely by the effort to get my book History in Motion ready to go into the design phase. History in Motion, which is to be published by Sternberg this spring, is an investigation into the temporalization of history in a media-saturated society, in which "historical events" penetrate daily life in real time. Specifically, I analyse ways in which time-based art (film, video, performance)
continuously re-models and modulates the representation and the production of history within this temporal economy.
The first chapter of this book analyzes the migration
of moving images (film, video) to the exhibition space in the context of various notions of the “liberation of time,” whereas chapter two discusses its dark reverse: the
manipulation of the dialectic of shock and suspense in film, TV, and the Internet.
The third chapter continues the analysis of television with a focus on the
medium’s role in establishing a regime of “general performance,” and chapter
four in turn develops this by tracing the growing importance of playin work since the 1960s. Chapter five takes up the notion of
performance again in relation to that of the event, as well as that of the act,
to discuss possibilities for aesthetic action. Finally, chapter six considers
the ongoing event that is the new “unnatural history” in an age of global
warming and genetic engineering.
The notions used—such as suspense or the
event—are exploited for their potential to problematize disciplinary boundaries
and entrenched methodologies.
I do not propose an abstract negation of my own
discipline, art history, but this is an art history that has undergone
transformation through confrontations with philosophy, cultural theory, and
film and media studies—a dialogue that in turn constitutes interventions in
these disciplinary formations. Artists (or, in more general terms, cultural practitioners) discussed range from Harun Farocki to Eran Schaerf, from Guy Debord to Louise Lawler, from Robert Jasper Grootveld to Hito Steyerl, from Hitchcock to Wendelien van Oldenborgh.
One of the most fun parts of making such a book is making a montage of images that illustrates but also complements and sometimes even heckles one's text. There can be motifs running through image sequence that are hardly addressed in the text, and at times there are odd little resonances that can take on the qualities of a private joke. In the coming weeks we'll see just how many illustrations we can include in the book. I'm not even sure yet if both images I post here (a photo of Neuschwanstein from Guy Debord's In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni and George Maciunas's version of George Brecht's No Smoking event score) will make the cut. Even if they do, they will they will certainly not sit side by side. Still, since somebody pointed out that one could just as well read the the text of the Brecht/Maciunas piece as "NO EMO KING" it is hard for me not to think of these two disparate images in conjunction with each other.
