Switching Sites

I'm starting up a new web site here, and will no longer post on this blog. New blog posts will go up on the new site, which will have more features. In particular, I'll be able to create an archive of articles there (as PDF or Word files), which I'm unable to do here.

Texte zur Kunst no. 94: Superflex

Texte zur Kunst no. 94 contains my (slightly belated) review of Superflex's retrospective at Kunsthal Charlottenburg.

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).

Commonist Aesthetics

Open! has launched a new series of essays on "commonist aesthetics" (that's not a typo). I'm on Open's editorial board, which involves meetings at Jorinde Seijdel's kitchen table a couple of times per year, and I wrote a brief introduction. At this stage we don't know exactly how long this series will run, and exactly where it will take us, but we have some excellent authors lined up.

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. 

History in Motion review

History in Motion has been reviewed by Tom Holert on the Open! web site. I won't try to respond to this insightful and incisive review right now, other than to say that his entirely predictable and fully justified point about the dearth of explicit discussion of postcolonial, feminist and queer temporalities in History in Motion is well-taken. Self-imposed limitations are needed to keep things manageable, but they come at a cost - and demand to be negated in the next phase of the ongoing process of self-education and autocritique that any scholarly or theoretical practice should be.

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.

Across the Broad Atlantic

As of January 2014, a mere four months after the fact, the American distributor has actually managed to make History in Motion available on amazon.com. 

There are lots of larger and smaller projects in the works, some of which should see the light of day in 2014. I'll keep you posted. Perhaps this year I'll even get around to switching to a site and software that will allow me to upload more PDFs, which I'd love to do but blogger won't allow.

Texte zur Kunst no. 92: Joseph Beuys

Issue no. 92 of Texte zur Kunst contains my review of H.P. Riegel's biography of Joseph Beuys. The text's punning title, "Cleves and Tartars," was an inspired find by the editors.

I take this German-language biography as an occasion to discuss the reception of Beuys's work in general, which has long been marked by a deadlock between uncritical adoration and complete critical rejection. In recent years, this has started to change somewhat. 

Riegel's biography might spark a throwback, as the author has diligently gathered incriminating evidence that makes it really tempting to dismiss Beuys as an inveterate mythologizer and liar, dabbler in esoteric nonsense, and friend of right-wing creeps. 

While this material obviously needs to be taken into account, I argue that biographical reductionism must be avoided when coming to terms with the remains and the afterlife of Beuys's practice. The review is online here. 



Image: Joseph Beuys, Kitschpostkarte 2, 1980. 

Metropolis M: Ann Goldstein

Metropolis M asked me to comment on the departure of Ann Goldstein from the Stedelijk Museum, and the resulting text has now been published in the December-January print issue (in Dutch; the English version will probably show up online at some point). The text is titled "Not Wanting to Write Anything About Ann,"  which is obviously a play on John Cage's Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel.

Somehow this seemed to fit my reluctance to get into the fray of Dutch art-world politics and let my agenda be determined, even negatively, by Dutch newspapers and their penchant for focusing on museum directors and their alleged character flaws — flaws which, in the eyes of some vocal and vicious hacks, can encompass being foreign, or being a woman. The text thus analyses what has happened to Ann Goldstein, who has left the Stedelijk prematurely, as a disconcerting symptom of a wider and fundamental disfunction of public discourse in the Netherlands.

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.

Slow Motion

Book distribution to and in North America appears to be a sluggish process. While some copies of History in Motion made it to Brooklyn in time for the book launch/screening at Light Industry on October 22 (see photo), the remainder still appears to be stuck in transit. 

If you're American or Canadian and don't want to wait, visiting http://amazon.co.uk or one of the other European amazon branches might be a good idea.

Louise Lawler. Adjusted

From 11 October, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne is showing a major retrospective of Louise Lawler's work, Adjusted. The works are scattered throughout the building, in dialogue with the connection. 

In addition to, among many other things, two new large-format photographs that have been stretched to match the proportions of specific walls, the exhibition also comprises a series of ten "tracings" that recast her photographs in a form that recalls children's colouring book.

The catalog contains texts by curator Philipp Kaiser, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and myself. My essay "'Not Stone'" departs from the notion of arrangement in Lawler's work, but does not focus on the iconic photographs of artworks that have been "arranged by" their owners. 

Rather, I focus on her practice in general as constantly arranging and rearranging objects, subjects, contexts, events. I place particular emphasis on "ephemeral" pieces such as His Gesture Moved Us to Tears (with Sherrie Levine) and An Evening With Julian Schnabel and on various forms of printed matter in her work.
 

Open!

The Dutch magazine Open, which had to cease publication due to the cuts, is now online as Open! under http://www.onlineopen.org/ As before, Open! continues deal critically and theoretically with intersections of art, media and activism as a way of charting the transformations of publicness and the production of commons. In addition to new essays (and links to the old issues), the site is publishing a series of short columns that take stock of the situation and/or propose new projects. I contributed one of these columns, "The Conversation."

This Is Television

Judy Radul's show This Is Television is on view till the 19th of October at the daadgalerie in Berlin. The exhibition encompasses a 16 mm film, video stills and a set-up of monitors and cameras for which I compiled a video programme that contains artistic reflections on the medium as well as direct interventions in broadcast or cable television. The pacing of these videos is used to manipulate a local television feed through the intermediary of two live cameras.

Artists/directors range from Willem de Ridder and Wim T. Schippers to Sean Snyder, from General Idea to Harun Farocki, from Gregg Bordowitz to Alexander Kluge, from Christoph Schlingensief to Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf.

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.

Time Is the Place

Starting in Germany, History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image is now available— for instance from amazon.de, but also from real bookstores that aren't data-guzzling kraken, such as pro qm. 

The rest of the world is to follow very soon.

History in Motion contains 312 action-packed pages, with 82 illustrations in glorious black and white. Very reasonably priced at € 19, so you won't have to sell an organ to buy a copy.