A diaristic novel on contemporary friendship and its importance. Isabelle Graw's latest book reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus. By focusing on her own social milieu--the art world--Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity--if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe--with it, we are able to fully live.
A critique of the discourse on the Anthropocene and the creative alternatives to it to be found through the arts, sciences, and humanities.Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the new proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations. It analyzes contemporary visual culture—popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects—to consider how the term proposes more than merely a description of objective geological periodization. This book argues that the Anthropocene terminology works ideologically in support of a neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geoengineering as the preferred—but likely disastrous—method of approaching climate change. To democratize decisions about the world''s near future, we urgently need to subject the Anthropocene thesis to critical scrutiny and develop creative alternatives in the present.
On the themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady: Black female subjectivity, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, music, and translation. Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. This fourth issue is informed by themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady, including diaspora, Black female subjectivity, racial hybridity, translation, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, Black representation in the art world, archives, music, Conceptualism, and performance art. ContributorsSelam Bekele, Martin Bernal, Camille Chedda, Gabrielle Civil, Kathleen Collins, Erica Deeman, Jeanne Finley, Jacqueline Francis, Ãdouard Glissant, Rujeko Hockley, Bec Imrich, E. Jane, Charles Lee, Darrell M. Mcneill, Denise Murrell, John Muse, Sawako Nakayasu, Lorraine O'Grady, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Hsu Peng, Lara Putnam, Trina Michelle Robinson, Legacy Russell, David Scott, Peter Simensky, Maud Sulter, Carrie Mae Weems, Judith Wilson, Alisha B. Wormsley, Allison Yasukawa Published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press
The first book-length inquiry into the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency. Titled after Soft Cell's version of the original 1965 Gloria Jones track, Tainted Love is the first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency. Sometimes extreme, this twist to the conventional romantic ballad spans across gender and generational boundaries to subvert our understanding of both the genre's function and its behavior. Each chapter of Tainted Love takes a deep dive into a single twisted ballad, examining both its inner workings--lyrics, melody, and vocal approach--and its broader cultural resonance. Featuring an analysis of songs by Kendrick Lamar, Nina Simone, Roxy Music, Joni Mitchell, The Velvet Underground, Frank Sinatra, Soft Cell, Paul McCartney, Charlotte & Serge Gainsbourg, PJ Harvey & Nick Cave, and Little Simz, this book turns on the question: What compels songwriters to compose--and us to listen to--these warped songs?
A techno-fiction novel on the uneasy desire for anti-rationalist ideas on the internet. Taking off along the grotesque evolutionary curve of the internet, this novel by Mochu brings together Japanese otaku subcultures, Hindu mythology, darknet highways, ultraviolent cyberpunk forums, and renegade university departments to forge a transnational narrative that trips through the incompatible fantasies of rationality and civilization, with wormholes through ancient tales, recent cinema, plain-wrong art histories, and pirated philosophical reflections. The novel opens with a case of abduction in India. The operations of a far-right publishing house are interrupted by extraterrestrial influences with political intent. The attack on a science-fiction writer at a beach in Goa seems connected to a bot-propelled puzzle revolving around the defacement of Medieval temple relics elsewhere. A detective specialized in interstellar sociology finds clues that point to a transgalactic anarchist group with ties to online Posadist forums, while Eurasian political theory circulates as noise-objects in Goa's beachside clubs. Meanwhile, occultist explorers in the sci-fi writer's story find that the legendary homeland for Hinduism in the Arctic has become infested by "Gradients of Hegelian Unhappiness" by way of an invasive subzero entity buried in deep snow. The detective's investigations eventually turn metaphysical, settling on impossible solutions spanning the far reaches of outer space. Reactionary behavior on the internet, having spawned numerous retroactive origin stories for itself, takes on a tentacular presence across diverse political spectrums, time periods, and cultural contexts, giving the impression of a vast and tangled entity with distributed intelligence. Fatally fused by a common hatred for the legacies of the Enlightenment, popular manifestations go by terms like "alt-right" and "neo-reaction," powered by nerdy forums and blog posts across the web. Stationing conspiracy theory itself as the central form of thinking, acting, and concept-making in the twenty-first century, Bezoar Delinqxenz is a mixtape simulation of these entanglements at the borderlands of fiction, insanity, and political emancipation.
The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean. Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean's work across media has long been defined by what she calls a "fixation on the subject and its borders," and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty--from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins--and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived reality: how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille's notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness. Dean's thinking embraces a definition of "Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness," as she writes in this volume, which works to elucidate "Blackness's proclivity for making and unmaking its own rules as it produces objects" of cultural necessity. Originally published in November--of which Dean is a founding editor--as well as in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, and in exhibition contexts, the essays compiled in Bad Infinity were written over a six-year span that charts our rapidly evolving forms of subjectivity and sociality.
A richly illustrated volume on the influential textile art of Elisabeth Haarr. For over fifty years Elisabeth Haarr has been one of the most significant artists in Norway. From her early experimentation with tapestry as modern visual art in the 1960s to political works with an activist message in the 1970s, and her later sculptural installations of rugs, banners, figures, and drapes, Haarr's oeuvre has significantly contributed to the consideration of textiles as a material in contemporary art. Today, her work continues to address topics such as feminism, anti-fascism, and environmental protection, and is as relevant as it was forty years ago. Elisabeth Haarr accompanies a monographic presentation by the artist at Bergen Kunsthall. Surprisingly, this is the first extensive career survey of Haarr's work, with the exception of a two-person survey with Hannah Ryggen in 2008. This book aims to provide entry points into Elisabeth Haarr's ongoing practice and is illustrated with a wide-ranging selection of works from throughout her career, as well as new works produced for the exhibition in Bergen. Iconic photos of Haarr's work show banners or other textile pieces hanging in the open, outside of the exhibition space like a flag, or in her garden blowing in the wind. The works are documented with additional material, such as research references and sources of inspiration, as well as images made by the artist during her working process to share her progress with collaborators and friends. These images often show the artist's personal milieu, such as her studio and the garden of her house in Kristiansand. This richly illustrated publication includes new texts by artist Are Blytt, curator Elisabeth Byre, poet, playwright, and novelist Cecilie Løveid, and curator Steinar Sekkingstad, and a conversation between Elisabeth Haarr and artist Eline Mugaas.
An attempt to feel and investigate the quality of time, with references to Jonathan Crary, Paul B. Preciado, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin. "This book could have been called The Contemporary Condition of Sleeping and Reading in the Heart of (and in Spite of) the Logosphere and Various Media Streams, but frankly, I Can't Sleep sounds better, plus it's true."--Lionel Ruffel The diaristic form of I Can't Sleep is an attempt to feel and investigate the quality of time, making reference to Jonathan Crary, Bernard Stiegler, Yves Citton, Paul B. Preciado, Charles Baudelaire, and above all Walter Benjamin. Written in a style that borrows not from classical forms of theory or prose, but operates in between fiction and nonfiction to investigate the very concept of the contemporary, I Can't Sleep uses a quite old but often renewed method--in this sense a very contemporary one--consisting of starting from one's own personal situation.
A hopeful meditation on how periods of inactivity become reimagined as fertile spaces for design and how we might use this strange moment in history. "Hi, everyone. I'm speaking to you from my apartment in Oakland, though I've virtually placed myself in the rose garden nearby." Artist and writer Jenny Odell hadn't originally planned to deliver the Harvard University Graduate School of Design's 2020 Class Day Address from her living room. But on May 25, 2020, there was Jenny, framed by a rose garden in her Zoom background, speaking to an audience she could not see about the role of design in a suspended moment marked by uncertainty in a global pandemic. Odell's message, itself a timely reflection on observation, embraces the standstill and its potential to deepen and expand our individual and collective attention and sensitivity to time, place, and presence--in turn, perhaps, enabling us all, amid our "new" virtual contexts, to better connect with our natural and cultural environments. Odell unspools this hopeful meditation in Inhabiting the Negative Space, where periods of inactivity become reimagined not as wasted time but fertile spaces for a kind of design predicated less on relentless production and more on permitting a deeper, more careful look at what exactly is demanding or tapping our time and attention, and how we might use this strange moment in history to respond.
A conversation about design, filmmaking, Afrofuturism, world-building, and other topics with Hannah Beachler, Academy-Award-winning production designer of Black Panther. Hannah Beachler is known as an award-winning production designer, but she tells an audience that she considers herself to be more of a story designer. As film stills and concept art from a few of those stories--Moonlight, Miles Ahead, Creed, Lemonade, and Black Panther--flash across a screen, Beachler engages in a meandering conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin about set building and curation, urban design, location scouting, Afrofuturism, fictional histories, and Black feminist narratives, and illustrates her role: a designer behind on-screen tableaux that provide not only visual feasts of artistry and imagination, but also intimate spaces of emotion, humanity, and constructed memory.
Pies, pâtés, and pastries are the noblest of foods. Their inner life is always a secret; their outer form, a sculpture. No other dishes are so well suited to surprises and culinary amusements. In her enchanting and historically enlightening little book, Charlotte Birnbaum traces the life of such delicacies through diverse cultures and traditions. Here, wondrous anecdotes of noblemen and farmers alike are woven together, each accompanied by toothsome recipes.
The first monograph on artist and filmmaker Leslie Thornton: essential, foundational scholarship on her influential work in film and video. Produced on the occasion of a major solo exhibition of Leslie Thornton at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume will be the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, and offers essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative. Copublished with MIT List Visual Arts Center and Kunstverein Nürnberg
An examination of the use of modernism in the twentieth-century battle for US hegemony, through the activities of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom.Parapolitics confronts the contemporary fate of intellectual autonomy and artistic freedom by revisiting the use of modernism in the twentieth-century battle for US hegemony. It builds on a major exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017-18) that took as its starting point the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)--an organization covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency in order to steer the Left away from its remaining commitment to communism. Paying particular attention to CCF activities in the non-European world during a period of decolonization and the Civil Rights Movement, Parapolitics assembles archival documentation from five continents alongside a selection of historical artworks to explore the context in which artists negotiated the framing and meaning of their work. A rich reference book for future researchers and everybody interested in the legacy of modernism, the publication also presents more than thirty newly commissioned contributions by contemporary artists and scholars.
What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end--of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. Drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed--Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist--as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, in this book. T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives, arguing that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance. How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.
Examinations of Francis Ponge's texts on Jean Fautrier's "Hostage Paintings," Jack Whitten's Memorial Paintings, and Banksy's auction stunt Love is in the Bin.This book contains three case studies on very different artists, analyzing their work through their respective historical contexts: the writer Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and his seminal text on Jean Fautrier's "Hostage Paintings" from 1943; visual artist Jack Whitten's (1939-2018) Memorial Paintings and Banksy's notorious auction stunt Love is in the Bin from 2018. Examining all three artistic propositions from a value-theoretical point of view, Graw finds Ponge's text on Fautrier to be "doubly materialist" insofar as it (seemingly) reveals its own material conditions while simultaneously grasping the specific materiality of Fautrier's paintings; suggests that the indications of value in Whitten's painting to be more indirect; and reveals Banksy's value reflections to have a very different generational thrust. Gaw shows that Ponge's text is full of value-reflexive insights but that Ponge himself is an ambivalent figure. She finds that the dedication of Whitten's paintings inscribes them in a system of exchange. And, finally, the deliberate aesthetic meagerness of Banksy's Love Is in the Bin points to an emptiness at the heart of value. Institut für Kunstkritik series
A new vision of the ocean.It was the concept of the ocean as a global commons, free for everyone--first formulated by Hugo Grotius in his 1609 treatise, Mare Liberum--that stimulated a free global market. Today, the free market and the free ocean both suffer from rigorous, exploitive use. A new concept of how to relate to the ocean could transform the global economy and global politics. Solution 295-304: Mare Amoris proposes new practical, technological, and metaphysical scenarios of how to fall in love with the sea, and, eventually, have the sea fall in love with us.Solutions series
How the shift from montage to navigation alters the way images--and art--operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention. Navigation begins where the map becomes indecipherable. Navigation operates on a plane of immanence in constant motion. Instead of framing or representing the world, the art of navigation continuously updates and adjusts multiple frames from viewpoints within and beyond the world. Navigation is thus an operational practice of synthesizing various orders of magnitude. Only a few weeks prior to his untimely death in 2014, Harun Farocki briefly referred to navigation as a contemporary challenge to montage--editing distinct sections of film into a continuous sequence--as the dominant paradigm of techno-political visuality. For Farocki, the computer-animated, navigable images that constitute the twenty-first century's "ruling class of images" call for new tools of analysis, prompting him to ask: How does the shift from montage to navigation alter the way images--and art--operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention? Navigation Beyond Vision originated in a conference organized by the Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) and e-flux at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin in 2019. ContributorsJames Bridle, Kodwo Eshun, Jennifer Gabrys, Tom Holert, Ramon Amaro and Murad Khan, Doreen Mende, Matteo Pasquinelli, Laura Lo Presti, Patricia Reed, Mariana Silva, Nikolay Smirnov, Oraib Toukan, Brian Kuan Wood
On the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy. To impair the racial ordering of the world, The Black Technical Object introduces the history of statistical analysis and "scientific" racism into research on machine learning. Computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning, machine learning offers useful insights into racism and racist behavior, but its connection to the racial history of science and the Black lived experience has yet to be developed. In this book, Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis informs the complex relationship between race and machine learning. He juxtaposes a practical analysis of this type of computerized learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, as well as the deep incursion of racial hierarchies.
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