e-flux journal :: rss

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Editorial

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:09 -0400

What does the democratization of image production really accomplish beyond opening channels of communication? Ironically, the liberation of the voice as a means of announcing oneself and one’s views can be seen as a way of absorbing the brunt of more pressing questions concerning the distribution of actual material resources, as an escape from the pursuit of more equitable relationships with regard not just to representation, but also to the distribution of property and knowledge—the power to determine one’s own circumstances. At stake is really a way of liberating the...

Sherif El-Azma, The Psychogeography of Loose Associations

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:08 -0400

The Cairo Psychogeographical Society was formed in 1989. It is an independent collective of ever changing members. Unlike official scientific or cultural entities, whether governmental or non-governmental, the Cairo Psychogeographical Society is not networked, nor does it communicate with other research centers dealing with architecture, urban planning, or geography at large. Neither it is an organization that receives financial support from development funds, commercial companies, or individuals.

Luis Camnitzer, ALPHABETIZATION, Part Two: Hegemonic Language and Arbitrary Order

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:07 -0400

The use of personal spelling in art would have the learner first sketch an idea in any personal idiosyncratic manner, without considering how it might be understood by other people. This stage is therefore only concerned with the development of mnemonic devices: images that are recognizable and decodable by the author, with greater precision possible at a later stage. Canonic spelling would appear in a second stage. The drawing then becomes the equivalent of a technical drawing delivered to a builder by the architect.

Paul Chan, What Art Is and Where it Belongs

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:06 -0400

Art, by allying itself with contemporary life, has found its purpose as a cunning system of mediation, capable of pulling into its comportment anything that exists in our social and material reality. Art exerts its power by rationalizing the elements into a vivid relationship, and emanates beauty and strength through its semblance of a synthesized whole: art becomes a thing.

Céline Condorelli, Life Always Escapes

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:05 -0400

In reducing or almost eliminating commons, the enclosures did not erase the land, but rather put it away, moved it out of bounds, rendered inaccessible what the land offered in terms of survival, subsistence, surplus. In deleting the rights of common—and any flexible notions of property and sharing of resources they offer—the process of enclosure effectively liberates surplus value by enclosing labor.

Peter Friedl, Secret Modernity

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:04 -0400

Forms can seduce and be seduced. Every detail in Terragni’s style icon, the Casa del Fascio in Como, is saturated with political symbolism. The archeology of modernity believes that with a formalistic analysis, Fascism will disappear. A politics of memory assumes that there were never democratic forms. More than fifteen years passed following Pasolini’s pathetic appeal to UNESCO before the old city of Sana’a in Yemen, where he filmed scenes for Decameron in the autumn of 1970, was declared a world cultural heritage site. For several years now, on the list of candidates is “Africa’s secret modernist city” on the other side of the Red Sea.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ever Spero

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:03 -0400

Beyond a body of pioneering and exceptional work spanning more than half a century of tumultuous social change, this sense of hope will be her legacy. It was an everyday hope that she lived and breathed, and a hope for today rather than tomorrow: “I don’t know about the future yet because everything is subsumed in the present.” She liked to quote Susan B. Anthony in saying, “Failure is impossible.”

Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:02 -0400

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty.

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Editorial

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:09 -0400

The aesthetics of political engagement has become common currency within artistic production and discourse, and the abundance of works and exhibitions now announcing themselves as politically charged are often criticized for their distance from actual social forces outside art. While institutional critique successfully identified certain parallels between these forces and the workings of art institutions, it seems that this has simply given way to a more nuanced (and however richer) discourse for understanding the way power operates within the micro-economy of art itself. Through...

François Bucher, Subjects of the American Moon: From Studio as Reality to Reality as Studio

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:08 -0400

Now for the part about the Pentagon. If the moon production stands at the summit of Hollywood’s camera, then the Pentagon is the cylinder of another lens—one that the world can’t get enough of. If you set out to fake an event in ‘69, then you stage it in the grand old tradition of the studio setup. But if you want to fake an event in 2001, you do it in front of a surveillance camera. This is the space odyssey we’ve travelled through in the last thirty years.