Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present

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. 

Speculative Realities/The Object of Art History

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.

History in Motion

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 play in 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.

Value and Collaboration

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

In and Out of Brussels

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.

Inside Abstraction

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/

Ongoing

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.