He stands before us, large as life, the old artist in his museum. With his right arm he holds up the heavy, purple velvet curtain so that we can cast a first glance at the wonders of the carefully arranged collection in the long, light hall behind. On the left wall begin several rows of showcases: miniature dioramas, all the same size and shape. Exhibited within are stuffed birds of various provenances. Above them, reaching up to just under the ceiling and completing the wall, are a series…
Issue #23
March 2011
With:
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Peter Friedl, Bruno Latour, Mona Mahall, Lívia Páldi, Jon Rich, Suely Rolnik, Martha Rosler, and Joshua Simon
The Gulf War did not take place, as Baudrillard notoriously put it. But now something else has taken place, and it did not happen in the doldrums of virtuality, but in the streets and squares of Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi, and elsewhere. It seems that the prospect of an all-encompassing condition of techno-saturated anorexia, perhaps appropriate for a time when communications networks and the tools for producing reality were situated in the hands of governments and telecommunications tycoons,…
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9 Essays
March 2011
The word “network” has become a ubiquitous designation for technical infrastructures, social relations, geopolitics, mafias, and, of course, our new life online. 1 But networks, in the way they are usually drawn, have the great visual defect of being “anemic” and “anorexic,” in the words of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who has devised a philosophy of spheres and envelopes . 2 Unlike networks, spheres are not anemic, not just points and links, but complex ecosystems in which forms of…
Today, common sense tells us that the border between technology (formerly known as nature) and culture is a fluid one. It is common to describe technology as a cultural practice, or culture as a fabric of interwoven material, intellectual, and social techniques. Of course, there is an obvious interrelation between culture and technology in terms of method, media, and material, and it is not difficult to identify the technical aspects of texts, or the cultural implications of communication…
At present, the descriptive term “Left-liberal” has been dislocated from its complex meaning rooted in a profound European historical tradition and imbued with highly negative connotations. In Hungary, the term now functions as a synonym for those believed to have benefitted under the former Socialist-Liberal coalition of the MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party) and SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats / Hungarian Liberal Party) parties.
On January 8, an editorial in Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian…
When Google enabled access to Twitter services through landlines in Egypt, the American administration erred on the side of caution. Google is the crown jewel of the American empire, but whereas the American administration manages ideas, Google deals in instruments and communication interfaces. During the revolution in Egypt, such tools proved their ability to animate the global public, while politics reasoned by ideas remains, as of yet, incapable of responding to chronic problems. We may…
First scene: 1973. 1 I begin a friendship with Gilles Deleuze, whose seminars I have been attending over the past two years or so. With his mischievous humor, he insists on saying that he, and not Félix Guattari (with whom I am undergoing analysis at the time) is my schizoanalyst. He proposes that we work together, offering me a gift and a theme: an LP with Alban Berg’s opera Lulu and a suggestion to compare the death cries of Lulu, its lead character, with those of Maria, a character in…
→ Continued from “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part I” in issue 21.
PART TWO: CREATIVITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Culture is the commodity that sells all the others.
—Situationist slogan
Soon after the collapse of the millennial New Economy that was supposed to raise all boats, Richard Florida, in his best-selling book The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), instituted a way of talking about the “creative class”—the same class put center…
→ Continued from “Neo-Materialism, Part I: The Commodity and the Exhibition” in issue 20.
Readymade and Unreadymade
Traditionally, by employing a series of strategies incorporating appropriation, composition, abstraction, re-contextualization, and de-contextualization of different commodities, modern art tried to see an entity beyond the ever-present commodity. In an art context, the commodity, this omnipresent “other entity” with which we are engaged in a network of…