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Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Editorial

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:09 -0400

The processes of the factory have entered the museum in ways that Warhol and Duchamp could never have dreamed: the amount of art production now by far exceeds what can be processed or understood, and this often creates a degree of mistrust and an absence of common points of reference with which to not only discuss, but also to gain anything from the sheer volume of artworks placed on display today. The time to engage and digest work is often replaced by additional work—it just keeps coming down the line. Hito Steyerl describes how the workers who left the factory...

Michael Baers, Concerning Matters to be Left for a Later Date, Part 4 of 4 (Guest-Starring Annika Eriksson)

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:08 -0400

Boris Groys, Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:07 -0400

While this failure is often interpreted as proof of art’s incapacity to penetrate the political sphere as such, I would argue instead that if the politicization of art is seriously intended and practiced, it mostly succeeds. Art can in fact enter the political sphere and, indeed, art already has entered it many times in the twentieth century. The problem is not art’s incapacity to become truly political. The problem is that today’s political sphere has already become aestheticized. When art becomes political, it is forced to make the unpleasant discovery that politics has already become art—that politics has already situated itself in the aesthetic field.

Raqs Media Collective, Earthworms Dancing: Notes for a Biennial in Slow Motion

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:06 -0400

Space is finite, but time is porous. Only a given number of people and processes can occupy a space at a given moment, but any number of things can happen over time. A process built on the principle of dispersal over time can allow for the unfolding of many more possibilities than one that seeks to cram as many things as possible into a single space.

Omnia El Shakry, Artistic Sovereignty in the Shadow of Post-Socialism: Egypt’s 20th Annual Youth Salon

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:05 -0400

Clearly the Salon and the controversy surrounding it revealed a complex relationship between public and private drives, constituting a specific instance of a counter-public discursive moment. Thus self-preservation on the part of the Ministry, as sole arbiter of artistic value, was justified in the name of the public; just as counter-public gestures (those of the jury) were justified through a complex mix of private intention and public necessity, namely, the creation of an independent contemporary art movement in Egypt.

Hito Steyerl, Is a Museum a Factory?

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:04 -0400

In reality, political films are very often screened in the exact same place as they always were: in former factories, which are today, more often than not, museums. A gallery, an art space, a white cube with abysmal sound isolation. Which will certainly show political films. But which also has become a hotbed of contemporary production. Of images, jargon, lifestyles, and values. Of exhibition value, speculation value, and cult value. Of entertainment plus gravitas. Or of aura minus distance. A flagship store of Cultural Industries, staffed by eager interns who work for free.

Monika Szewczyk, Art of Conversation, Part II

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:03 -0400

To be sure, spies and other lucky listeners had overheard conversations for centuries and used them for political gain, but it was only with the increasingly rampant wiretapping of the Cold War era that words could be spoken “for the record” without the speakers’ knowledge or willingness. Hence everything you said could be used against you. And this has come to beg the question: How do we watch what we say as a result? Have we become more cautious, even paranoid, about how we break a silence, less able to test our radical ideas in the open—all because there is a greater chance of the record of such conversations coming back to haunt us, even once we have changed our minds? If so, the amount of willfully recorded and also scripted conversations—and their recent proliferation in the art world—becomes particularly curious.

Brian Kuan Wood, A Universalism for Everyone

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:02 -0400

What modernism never took into account with its idea of the universal subject was in fact the subject’s own universe. Granted, this is what the slightly paradoxical idea of “open plans” sought to liberate, but more importantly, self-building simultaneously calls out the bluff and the promise of modernism’s surface by replacing the logic of central authority with the development of subjective worlds inside and around the units of the grid.

Pauline J. Yao, A Game Played Without Rules Has No Losers

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:01 -0400

Rather than look to the market as culprit, we might turn instead to factors that sustain rather than misappropriate artistic production. If we recognize the art market as a subset of concerns contained within a larger entity we know as the art world, then what can be said of the concerns of the art world itself? In order to meet the demands of the market, contemporary art in China has witnessed an unprecedented ramping up of production, and this tendency has threatened outlets for critical reflection and thinking, which in turn thwarts long-term sustainability.

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Editorial

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:09 -0400

Projections of the future that were made in the past are often striking in their bold naïvete #8212;didn’t people understand then that future projections always end up looking like caricatures of past concerns? But whereas these projections do little to actually activate the future they foresaw, they do function expressions of pure intention, and in this sense they are probably not so naïve. Rather, they indicate a certain bold willingness on the part of people of a certain time to define in terms exactly how the future should function, and indeed, most of...