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.
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 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.
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.
From the editorial of issue no. 90 of Texte zur Kunst (June 2013):
"Using the phrase 'How we aim to work', the June issue of Texte zur Kunst
brings together contributions by authors who have been associated with
the magazine for a long time and who have shaped its debates along the
way. Instead of specifying a thematic focus, we left it to the
contributors to decide which questions relating to their current
research interests they wanted to address. The selected texts are mostly
extracts from long-term research projects and therefore function as 'work samples'. They expand on topics for which, faced with the
deadlines always bearing down on them, the authors usually don’t find
time. Thus, this issue contains drafts of texts – “goodies from the
study”, if you like – that would otherwise remain in the drawer and that
for now avoid the logic of direct exploitation. We invited the authors
to develop these texts without requiring that they align, as is so often
the case, with a designated theme.
"It is precisely the conditions out of which they developed and the
different formats of these contributions – from collaborative
authorship; to narrative, literary essays; all the way to monographic
and performative, artistic treatises – that stand for a different
approach to the fields of university research, project-oriented
collaborations, artistic dealings, and the thematic 'private passions'
of our authors. Such an approach would run counter to the often sobering
coercion of activity and effectiveness that characterizes working
conditions today. The authors’ willingness to share “work samples” from
their ongoing projects can also be understood as a reaction against the
pressure of having to be flexible and active in various ways in both
one’s professional and private life – in order to expand one’s network
through a quick succession of projects and to ensure the existence of
future projects. Especially in the field of immaterial labor, the 'projective city' diagnosed by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in 1999
is more effective than ever."
From my contribution, an essay titled "Research Objectives," in which I discuss my research plans for the post-History in Motion future:
"The art world is often marked by an odd just-in-time
economy: Could you give a talk next Saturday? Could you fly over in ten days to
provide a theoretical framework for our workshop? Could you write an essay for
this artist’s retrospective, ready by
the end of April? Such requests are obviously problematic when the day job is
teaching, holding seminars, discussing theses, grading papers. However, as
deliriously random as some of these requests can be, there is no denying the
gratification of encountering some form of demand. By contrast, the neoliberal
turn of academic funding in Europe takes the seemingly paradoxical form of
neo-Stalinist five-year plans where scholars have to compete by submitting
large, collective research proposals that have to fit a particular ideological
agenda. In Holland, where essentially all research in the humanities has to be
squeezed into the categories of 'creative industries' or 'e-humanities,' this
development takes on traits of auto-parody.
"The bureaucratic longue durée of the academic market is counterbalanced by
ultra-fast personal projects. Philosopher Graham Harman recounts
writing his book The Quadruple Object (2011) in six weeks – and live-blogging
about it, thus pressuring himself to finish on time. The final draft took 86
hours and 34 minutes to complete. Graham lauds the liberating effect imposed by
circumstances: 'Simply by identifying all the operating constraints on a given
project, one’s room for free decision is narrowed and focused to a manageable
range, and the specters of nothingness and infinity soon dissipate in the
rising sun. When that happens, it becomes possible to summarize your life’s
work in a mere six weeks of writing.' Regardless of whether this is truly a
model even within Harman’s field, it is hard to see how such a “summarizing”
approach could be applied to most disciplines in the humanities, such as art
history. In that case, a sweeping synthesis or programmatic statement could certainly
be whipped up in a limited amount of time (after a life’s work of de facto
preparation), but the very existence of the discipline depends on painstaking
and often lengthy historical research.
"The question thus becomes one of
projecting and propelling one’s project(s) outside of the academic Planwirtschaft There clearly is an urgent need to create 'precarious forms of autonomy within the institution,' as Gerald Raunig puts it. This also necessitates moves outside the university: research in the interstices, in the space where
academic and cultural markets intersect and sometimes clash. This means that
one operates in an expanded and diffuse edu-factory that thrives on instability and self-exploitation.
However, the situation faced by scholars
who opt for the more standard approach and have a go at the small amount of big
money available for the humanities is ultimately not much less precarious. The
crucial petite différence is that
the focus on a few large funding bodies tends to create a horizon of thought
that is rarely called into question; the very scarcity of options acts as a
perverse disincentive for scholars to problematize their own research objects
and their mode of production; to think and act in terms of different
intellectual, affective, social, economic constellations."
www.textezurkunst.de
Image: Paul Chan, scene from the Badlands office (2011).
Issue no. 80 of New Left Review (March/April 2013) contains my article "Performance Art After Television," which is part of chapter 3 of History in Motion. In general, that book would hardly have come into being without NLR's receptiveness and support, even when faced with half-baked work-in-progress. The "art" bit was added to my original title "Performance After Television" so as to give a slightly clearer sense of the subject; after all, this is not an art journal. The essay shares the pages of this issue with, for instance, contributions on the Arab uprisings and the Nobel Prize for Literature—not to mention the Decline of the West.
The article is online here, but it's behind a paywall.
Image: Eran Schaerf's 2002 installation version of his Listener's Voice Project.
www.newleftreview.org
This isn't the final cover; the subtitle has changed in the meantime. We're in the proofing stage right now. Getting there one comma at a time. Design by Surface.
Label:
contemporary art,
exhibition,
history in motion
future projects. Especially in the field of immaterial labor, the 'projective city' diagnosed by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in 1999
is more effective than ever." 
