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.
Milk as a biocultural substance. In the context of INLAND's Academy at documenta fifteen, Microbiopolitics of Milk presents the grounding basis for a research project around Milk as a biocultural substance, through its implications in the regimes of contemporary biopolitics, economics, and representation. Featuring texts by Heather Paxson, Esther Leslie & Melanie Jackson, Harry G. West, Vinciane Despret, Chris Fite-Wassilak and Richie Nimmo, reflecting the different dimensions of milk in a variety of research fields. ContributorsVinciane Despret, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Fernando GarcÃa-Dory, Melanie Jackson, Esther Leslie, Richie Nimmo, Heather Paxson, Harry G. West Copublished by INLAND-Campo Adentro and documenta fifteen
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.
The use of art and architecture to develop practical solutions to economic and ecological crises. What if art holds the solution to the unfolding ecological and economic crises of our time? For more than forty-five years, Peter Fend has argued that art premonitions material culture, therefore the means of production, ensuing changes in social relations. Hence, in his view, works by Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Beth Edelson, Paul Sharits, and others, can prefigure ecological restoration and cohabitation. In the late 1970s, artists in New York initiated teams--first Colab, The Offices, and later Ocean Earth and Space Force--to move from critique into effecting real-world change. Initiatives came from Jenny Holzer, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Taro Suzuki, Joan Waltemath, and Eve Vaterlaus, among others, who linked up with scientists to produce reports and analyses with satellite imagery for news media. Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic States gathers documents of Peter Fend's efforts through Ocean Earth for a planet organized according to hydrology--water basins--rather than national and colonial borders. It lays out tools and technologies derived from art, architecture, and science to replace fossil fuels, dams, nuclear industry, and industrial farming. The ensuing proposal for governance builds on what is identified as the first school of economic thought: physiocracy. Here, via satellite-aided eco-taxation, governance pursues an increase in the numbers of fish, marine mammals, migratory birds, and insects. For instance, ideas from Earth art are applied to restoring wetlands and flyways in three swaths--the Americas, East Asia, and Eurafrica--converging on the Arctic. This book focuses on the Eurafrica flyway and surveys four decades of work. It asks, "How do we go from visual art to reality?" Fend answers: "Through architecture."
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.
An in-depth focus on artist and filmmaker Emilija Skarnulyte's Sirenomelia, a cosmic portrait of one of mankind's oldest mythic creatures--the mermaid. A mermaid dives through the Cold War ruins of nuclear submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle in this in-depth focus on Sirenomelia by artist and filmmaker Emilija Skarnulyte, a poetic and scientific meditation on the artist's iconic cinematic installation exploring post-human mythologies, future archaeology, and the invisible structures that enfold us, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. With essays, interviews, and excerpts from Andrew Berardini, Roland Penrose, Nadim Samman, and Alison Sperling. Set in far-northern territories where cold, Arctic waters meet rocky escarpments on which radio telescopes record fast-traveling quasar waves, Sirenomelia links humans, nature, and machines and posits possible post-human mythologies. Shot in an abandoned Cold-War submarine base in Olavsvern, Norway, Sirenomelia is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind's oldest mythic creatures--the mermaid. The artist, performing as a siren, swims through the decrepit NATO facility while cosmic signals and white noise traverse the entirety of space, reaching its farthest corners, beyond human impact.
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 survey and exhibition catalog looking at a century of the migrant experience as realized and expressed through art. How have artists over the past 150 years related to migration and exile? And what role can a museum play in times of mass migration? Taking as its starting point the 2019 exhibition Migration: Traces in an Art Collection, which featured more than a hundred works from Malmö Konstmuseum made between 1880 and today, this publication brings to light the radical approach of museum director Ernst Fischer, who in 1945 transformed the museum into a refugee shelter for survivors of German concentration camps. It also highlights the museum's long-forgotten Latvian Collection, comprised of art acquired in solidarity with the young Baltic nation and its exiles. Contrasting works by exiled artists such as Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Lotte Laserstein, Endre Nemes, and Peter Weiss further animate the discussion, as do the geopolitical concerns of Pia Arke, Ãyvind Fahlström, and Charlotte Johannesson. Correspondingly, a conversation with the exhibition's curators foregrounds the ways in which today's artists reflect upon and articulate experiences of migration. Together, these re-readings of the collection and its potential contribute to an urgent debate on the role of museums in our time. Contributors Ernst Fischer, Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen, Maria Lind, Lotte Løvholm, Joanna Warsza, and Cecilia Widenheim
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
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