The first part of Texte zur Kunst no. 88 (December 2012) is dedicated to "the question of value," and it looks very promising - with contributions by Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, and Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt.
My review of Witte de With's show Surplus Authors, which problematizes the exhibition in order to examines the value(s) of collaboration in contemporary cultural production, should connect quite well with this thematic section. Because I'm a sucker for Michael Fried détournements, the review is titled "Why Collaboration Matters in Art and Elsewhere as Never Before."
Image: Falke Pisano and Ana Roldán, Dynamo, 2008-2012.
www.textezurkunst.de
T.J. Demos and Hilde Van Gelder's project In and Out of Brussels took the form of a series of panel discussions about four films by Brussels-based artists that investigate the status of (post)colonial Africa in the imagery and imaginary of the west. In addition to Renzo Martens's Episode III (Enjoy Poverty) from 2009, which triggered the project, there are three new productions from 2011 and 2012: Sven Augustijnen's Spectres, Herman Asselberghs's Speech Act, and Els Opsomer's Building Stories #001 [That Distant Piece of Mine]. I participated in the discussion on Asselberghs's film. The book of In and Out of Brussels, which documents the debates and contains a DVD with film excerpts, is available now.
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/
Dutch academia is in the process of being transformed into an edu-factory in which research has to suit the ideological agenda of the government or private and corporate sponsors, and either try to squeeze their research interests into whatever mega-programme is on offer or simply allow their agenda to be determine by those programmes.
Meanwhile, there are fortunately some alternative and less market-Stalinist contexts in which scholarship and theory can survive — as forms of praxis that engage with those structures that attempt to make them obsolete.
If I Can't Dance has published an update on our project on Louise Lawler's A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, which includes the introduction to (the rough draft of) my essay and an impression of the Amsterdam "screening" of A Picture by Anik Fournier. We are working on a publication, which will contain my essay, a few shorter texts on specific aspects of the piece, and documentation.
The Autonomy Project
—
an informal, under-funded and highly stimulating initiative by a number of art schools, art history departments and the Van Abbemuseum
—
is also continuing. The autonomy issue of Open contains a number of texts based on last year's Autonomy Symposium, and the recently published issue of the Autonomy Newspaper, which can be downloaded for free here, also reflects (on) this symposium. As usual with the Autonomy Newspaper, there are a number of contributions by students. We're now working on a reader with historical and recent source texts, to be published by Afterall. The Autonomy Project has also has an impact on into my upcoming book History in Motion.
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.
Preparing History in Motion for the press is taking up most of my non-teaching time, but the slightly delayed July-August 2012 issue of New Left Review (no. 76) contains my review of a recent collection of writings by Asger Jorn, Fraternité Avant Tout, which focused on his writings on art and architecture from the late 1930s to the late 1950s. Titled "Dialectic of Dionysus," my review/essay analyses some rather unzeitgemäße aspects of Jorn's materialist critique of functionalism and rationalism: his use of the dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and his rather questionable use of Engels's Origin of the Family. As arcane as some of Jorn's concerns of the 1940s in particular may appear obsolete; however, they not only announce concerns that he would bring into the Situationist International, but also demand attention for the way in which Jorn has worked with his medium as a writer:
"[Many] of the concerns and references dominating the essays
in Fraternité now seem archaic. Furthermore, the artist-author
often engages with other theorists not through a careful parsing of
their arguments, but by mimicking their mode of writing and détourning
their phrases, reworking their language just as he reworked flea-market
paintings. It is here that the problematical nature of these writings
becomes productive, rather than merely symptomatic. Jorn’s materialism
manifests itself in the way he reworks texts as materials, rather than
in a careful deployment of the analytical tools provided by Marxist (or
any other) theory. What is dialectical is not so much his reasoning as
his treatment of text as a kind of texture. His texts are textiles, and
in some ways they find their most perfect expression in what might
appear to be a parergon: the illustrations."
"If the essay ‘Apollo or Dionysus’ is hard to
swallow, a single page in which Jorn uses artworks to develop his take
on the Apollonian and Dionysian, and reads the mythological gigantomachy
as class struggle, prefiguring Peter Weiss, is nothing short of
brilliant. These jump-cuts are not as remote from contemporary viewing
and reading habits as the essays may appear to be; with his montages,
Jorn creates rhythms that seem more compatible with them, while still
posing fundamental challenges to the viewer/reader—as they should. More than anything, the fact that Jorn’s essays are picture essays prevents them from becoming a monde perdu—to invoke the title of his 1960 painting, with its title recalling Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, that supremely Anglo-Saxon imperialist vision of atavistic survivals."
This pseudo-blog is on a bit of a summer-induced hiatus, but I extended the older post "Performance, Live or Dead" with some musings on territorial battles between disciplines and on performing the role of the bogeyman for other scholars.
