Sloth Time

Things will be a bit slow during the first half of 2011, though some publications (most of them having been underway for some time) will see the light of day. Aside from teaching one class this semester, I'm trying to keep my time free for my next book, History in Motion. Like the sloth, that unfairly named and unjustly maligned animal, the book writer needs to exist in a different temporality, a duration without obligations and deadlines, or at least as few as possible - making slow progress that often seems futile to foreign eyes.

History in Motion deals with the impact of time-based media (film, video and television, live performance) on the representation and the production of history. The book will contain the following chapters, most of them radically reworked and expanded articles: 1. "Transforming Time," 2. "Suspense and Shock," 3. "Playtimes," 4. "Performance After Television," 5. "Art After the Event," 6. "Unnatural History."

Meanwhile, I'm engaged in invisible work on the Autonomy Project, which moves on apace with a second summer school and a large public conference in the fall, from 7 till 9 October at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. For more information on the Autonomy Project, see http://platformmodernekunst.blogspot.com/. For the fall semester, Eric de Bruyn and I are also developing a joint academic seminar (both at VU University and at the University of Leiden) on film screenings (or film séances,to use our terminology) from the 1920s to the present, which will hopefully be accompanied by a series of public events, and possibly a small exhibition. The project reflects my growing interest in forging connections between different types of intellectual and educational activity: teaching, writing, curating, and the research they all involve.

Additionally, and connected to this "séance" project, I'll be participating in the "Performance in Residence" programme of the curatorial platform If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. For this programme, a researcher investigates one historical performance during a period of six months, and presents the piece and the research in public. My turn will start in September. Hopefully I'll be able to emerge from sloth time by that point.

Image: Barbara Visser with Veronica Ditting, Slothism (poster), 2008.

How We Spent Our Christmas Vacations

Issue no. 22 of e-flux journal is now online (January/February 2011). Titled "Idiot Wind," this special issue was guest-edited by Paul Chan and and myself. It examines various right-wing populisms in Europe and in the US from the perspectives of contemporary artists, critics and theorists. It contains texts by, among others, Claire Bishop, Gregg Bordowitz, Renée Green, Tom Holert, Brian Holmes, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Hito Steyerl, as well as images provided by a numerous contemporary artists. My own article in this issue, "A Heteronomous Hobby", is a report from the Netherlands.

From the introduction to this issue, written by Paul and myself:

"Populism lays claim to channeling the vox populi; this is its strength against established political orders mired in compromise and careerism. Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin is famous for her public gaffes like “refudiate,” but they only increase her political capital as someone who is “of the people.” And yet, many populists hardly affect a folksy demeanor; the late Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn was a dandy who lived in a villa called “Palazzo di Pietro,” and Thilo Sarrazin in Germany is an establishment figure whose core constituency—as evinced by the audiences at his public appearances—consists of an angry and beleaguered bourgeoisie. However one dresses it, populism is class warfare from above—waged by upper and middle classes, along with a beleaguered white working class, against minorities, immigrants, the poor, and the unemployed. It is telling that populist rage focuses on political and cultural elites, while remaining suspiciously silent on economic and financial elites. In a stagnant economy, the redistribution of wealth from bottom to top comes to function as an alternative to the logic of expansion. Promising to safeguard pensions and tax deductions while bashing welfare and various threats to the nation, populists deflect attention from—or actively collude with—this ongoing redistribution of wealth.

"In addition to class warfare, most populisms are based on a return to national and ideological origins, leading to characteristic uses and abuses of culture, and of art in particular. If the recent battle around the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video from an exhibition in Washington, DC is any indication, art’s main role is that of a convenient target for reactionaries looking to energize their political base. Art is defined as alien to “authentic” culture, since it does not explicitly express and affirm the values that embody the country. In some European countries, art is seen as a heavily subsidized field that steals tax Euros away from “the hard-working citizen,” similar to unemployment benefits and other “left-wing hobbies.” On the other hand, art is implicated in a global speculative economy in which it is one more investment option, and in this respect, it is again vulnerable, coming to function as the concrete manifestation of abstract financial forces that weaken national economic sovereignty; an uncommon luxury lacking in both culture and rootedness."

http://e-flux.com/journal/issue/22

Image: Lidwien van de Ven, Berlin, 02/10/2010 (Die Freiheit)

New Left Review no 66: Playtimes

Issue no. 66 of the New Left Review (November/December 2010)contains my essay "Playtimes" (pp. 125/140). The text grew out of a talk I gave in a seminar on games and play organized by Eric de Bruyn in Groningen, and like many recent texts it is part the work on my book-in-progress History in Motion, on the representation and production of history through moving images in film, video, and performance.

"Playtimes" discusses various moments in history of the theory of play - of play as something opposed to modern capitalist society, as an activity more at home in the distant past or in a possible future. From Schiller to Kaprow and from Huizinga to Debord, play was seen as an anachronistic presence in modernity.

This essay analyses various forms that such theorizing took, from early Romantic-Idealist utopias and their collapse in the later phases of the French Revolution and during the Restoration to Huizinga´s conservative pessimism and neo-avant-garde´s attempts, in the 1950s and 1960s, to unleash a revolution of play unhindered by rules - of play freed from any basis in conventional games.

By now, play seems to have caught up with the present, or vice versa; post-Fordist capitalism seems to have made a "ludic tun" echoing that of the 1960s neo-avant-garde. But if the modern theory of play is itself something of an anachronism in the age of game studies, this text argues that it may be a productive one.

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2873

Image: Rod Dickinson´s version of Debord´s Game of War, made for Class Wargames.

January e-flux journal

The January issue of e-flux journal, edited by Paul Chan and myself, will be a report on the political situation in Europe and the US. Paul and I have been talking on and off since the US midterm elections this past November; it struck us that One of the right-wing movements in the US (the Tea party, for instance) echo in words and in deeds right-wing movements in other Western European states. From Wilders in Holland to Sarrazin in Germany to Sarkozy’s anti-immigration turn to any number of political personalities and groups that have taken the political stage in recent years, in particular after the great global financial collapse of 2007-2009. These politicians and movements seem to profit from widespread unease about globalization and the excesses of financial capitalism, yet their agenda is usually one of market liberalism combined with ideological attacks on convenient, visible scapegoats. We have asked various authors to write from their national/regional context on the rise of these nationalistic, xenophobic, sometimes homophobic, and financially dubious movements and analyse how (if at all) contemporary art and thinking intersect with these movements. The deadlines are insane and no doubt this will ruin the holidays for all involved, but it just had to be done. I will work some of the materials from my lecture on neo-nationalism in the Netherlands, slides of which were posted here for a few weeks, into my own contribution to this collective assessment of the present situation.

Twenty Years of Texte zur Kunst

The new issue of Texte zur Kunst, no. 80, contains my review of Falke Pisano's exhibition at Extra City in Antwerp. In addition, to mark the magazine's twentieth anniversary, two anthologies of writings from the past two decades of Texte zur Kunst will be published (in German) in the Fundus series. The second volume, Erste Wahl: 20 Jahre »Texte zur Kunst«, 2. Dekade, contains my essay "Leben mit Abstraktion."

http://www.textezurkunst.de/

http://www.philo-fine-arts.de/programm/cat/vorschau/buch/erste-wahl-ii.html

Acting on the Omnipresent Frontiers of Autonomy

As one artist told me recently, the Van Abbemuseum is the only Dutch museum that one would even consider criticizing seriously - as an ambitious enterprise worthy of an immanent critique that rather than merely external criticism. In the near future the Van abbe will hopefully get company from the Stedelijk Museum, after years of utter malaise. One symptom of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Dutch museums for 20th- and 21-century art is their chronic inability to develop projects that involve significant and innovative art-historical research and/or a theoretical component. I certainly don't see anything comparable here to a historical investigation such as the MUMOK's Changing Channels, and in a different way the project To the Arts, Citizens! organized by Serralves in Porto (the exhibition opens on 21 November) likewise offers a stark contrast to Dutch business as usual.

There is a historical section with various documents, but this exhibition is mainly a survey of work by youngish contemporary artists (and collectives) focusing "on some of the intersections between art and politics − understood as action, representation or reference − as manifested in our time." The list of artists (which includes Bureau d'Etudes, Chto Delat, Zachary Formwalt, Nicoline van Harskamp and Gert Jan Kocken) looks promising, though it remains to be seen if the project can escape the usual problems of the museification of the political. The point of departure seems somewhat generic - and the title To the Art, Citizens! does not strike one as the best possible choice. However, I am looking forward to the two-part accompanying publication; one volume will be the catalogue while the other contains essays commissioned for the occasion from Peio Aguirre, Federico Ferrari, Brian Holmes, Roberto Merrill, Hito Steyerl and myself.

The authors were contacted well in advance, which suggests an awareness that these things take time - an awareness that is rather rare in my neck of woods. I haven't yet read the other texts yet, but the montage looks like it might be a productive one, and conducive to thinking about and beyond the limits of such museum projects. My text, "Acting on the Omnipresent Frontiers of Autonomy," investigates the use value of the notion of autonomy in these interesting times.

http://www.serralves.pt/actividades/detalhes.php?id=1758/

Image: overgrown rafts by Robert Jasper Grootveld moored next to the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Grey Room no. 41: Transforming Time

Issue no. 41 of Grey Room (Fall 2010) contains my article "Transforming Time," which is based in part on my earlier essay "Liberating Time" in the Art of Projection book. This, whose antecedents reach back much further than the Art of Projection essay "Liberating Time" from the Art of Projection essay, is now a more or less finished part of my History in Motion book project. Other chapters will deal with the dialectic of suspense and shock, with the ideology of play, with television and performance, with unnatural history, and (finally) with revolution and the event.

Transforming Time constitutes a specific take on the rise of film and video art in the last few decades. The focus is on art that I call "cinematic," which is to say that it exists in relation to the history and conventions of the cinema, regardless of whether the artwork in question uses actual film as its material substrate or, for example, video.

Against the background of theoretical analyses of the regimentation of time under capitalism by thinkers such as Debord and Negri (the latter is also interviewed in this issue of Grey Room) Transforming Time explores ways in which various works of cinematic art intervene in the dominant temporal regime, constituting momentary transformations and possibly liberations of time. Artists/directors discussed in the text include Godard, Joseph Cornell, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Stan Douglas,and Günther Förg; the final section focusses on Harun Farocki, Allan Sekula and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, all with works that constitute cinematic reflections on the factory.

The full text can be accessed here: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00009

Image: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Après la reprise, la prise, 2009.