Texte zur Kunst 89: Mike and Oskar
Issue no. 89 of Texte zur Kunst (March 2013) is largely dedicated to Mike Kelley. It also contains my review of the Oskar Fischinger retrospective at the EYE in Amsterdam, "Moving in Circles."
I argue that whereas the exhibition desperately wants to demonstrate that Fischinger was a major
artist, a more fruitful approach would be to accept and explore his minor
status. As Branden Joseph puts it, “If ‘minor’
artists retain a place within major history […] it is on account of their
relation to or proximity to the movements and categories engendered by major
history and by the unceasing pressure that they exact on them. […] Appearing on
the fringes of major movements or styles, their relation to them is one of
deterritorialization, opening these categories up to heterological connections
and interactions.” Such an exploration of Fischinger's work would have resulted in a completely different, and potentially much richer, exhibition.