Join us this month at e-flux for a self-help group featuring Heather Anderson, Fiona Duncan, Anthony Dunne, Chiara Bottici, Tali Keren, Ohad Meromi, Ingo Nierman, Fiona Raby, Joshua Simon, Alexander Tarakhovsky, McKenzie Wark, and Nechama Winston; a book presentation featuring Claire Bishop, Cosmin Costinaș, Adrienne Edwards, Inti Guerrero, Ana Janevski, and André Lepecki; and a lecture featuring Goldin+Senneby and Brian Kuan Wood; and at Bar Laika for a screening featuring Joan Jonas.
Program
Communists Anonymous: First Gathering in New York
Wednesday, November 7, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
The members of Communists Anonymous (COMA) suffer from an incurable belief in communism. They don’t share any particular school, but they do share an extreme sense of empathy and justice, and therefore detest more or less any form of private property. Because there is currently no communist state in existence, acting out their passion would hopelessly distress them, at best curbing and stabilizing the brutalities of capitalist society. COMA is meant to evolve into a worldwide cluster of self-help groups where incurable communists can discuss their recent temptations and relapses in the futile fight against capitalism.
Join us at e-flux for this first gathering of Communists Anonymous in New York, and a celebration of the constitutive book Solution 275–294: Communists Anonymous (Sternberg Press, 2017) with editors Ingo Niermann and Joshua Simon; contributing authors Heather Anderson, Fiona Duncan, Anthony Dunne, and Alexander Tarakhovsky; and guests Chiara Bottici, Tali Keren, Ohad Meromi, Fiona Raby, McKenzie Wark, and Nechama Winston.
Screening of Joan Jonas, Double Lunar Dogs
Thursday, November 8, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Inspired by Robert Heinlein’s 1941 story “Universe,” Double Lunar Dogs (24:04 min, 1984) presents a vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a drifting spaceship whose timeless travellers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. To recapture memory and create a continuum between their unknown origin and uncertain destination, the characters in this disjunctive, philosophical narrative play metaphorical games with words and archetypal objects. But their efforts to restore their collective memories are futile, and they are reprimanded by the “Authority” for their attempts to recapture their past on a now-destroyed planet Earth.
To depict this fantastic voyage, which was originally produced as a performance, Jonas uses sophisticated imaging techniques, special effects, and inserted vignettes created by a stellar group of avant-garde actors, video artists, and musicians including Spalding Gray, the Residents, Steina Vasulka, and Jonas herself.
New York book launch: Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?
Monday, November 12, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
Livestream: e-flux.com/live
Dedicated to the renewed encounter between dance and performance and the institutions of global contemporary art, Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? (Sternberg Press and Para Site, 2018) proposes that a “new performance turn” has emerged in the second decade of the century, and looks at its correlations with other shifts in practices, discourses, and broader society.
The new performance turn is closely related to, on the one hand, the increasing tendency to bring contemporary dance into the museum, with more artists working in and around dance, and more museums, art centers, and biennials striving to deepen their commitment to performance in order to develop new aesthetic forms and new modes of production; on the other hand, this “turn” is also related to specific developments in dance and choreography that took place in the mid-1990s. Given the double meaning of “performance”—as a live element in the arts and as a reference to economic productivity—the economic and political conditions behind this shift are not to be underestimated: the new developments in dance and choreography in the mid-’90s were often caught between apparently resisting the commercialization that was engulfing the object-based art world, and serving as the perfect products of the immaterial experience economy, where memory itself is a prime commodity. The precariousness of working conditions and the devaluation of labor are at stake in both the dance world and neoliberal society today; consequently, they are two important features of the new performance turn. The field covered by performance has also been expanded and blurred by growing discussions on performativity and its implications for language and power within broader areas of artistic and social practice.
Join us with contributing authors Claire Bishop, Adrienne Edwards, Inti Guerrero, and André Lepecki, in discussion with editors Cosmin Costinaș and Ana Janevski.
Lecture: Goldin+Senneby, Eternal Employment
Wednesday, November 14, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
There are some people who own so much that they don’t need to work. But there are many more people who do need to work. They work hard just to survive. Sometimes they think that if they work even harder, they can also own enough to not work. They can just own. You know the owners—they lunch, they shop, they take vacations from their cycles of lunching and shopping. Often they are just like poor people who sleep, eat, and roam the earth searching for meaning in their lives, except they are not poor.
In 2017, the artists Goldin+Senneby entered an international competition set up by Public Art Agency Sweden to develop a public artwork for an underground rail station to be built as part of one of the largest construction projects in Gothenburg’s history. The colossal production budget of SEK 7 million (approximately EUR 700,000) must have appealed to the two artists who have developed numerous works on financial mechanisms. For their public art project, they proposed to invest the entirety of this budget in a foundation, which would generate sufficient capital gains to pay a full-time salary for a single person. This single person would be employed at Korsvägen station, yet the position would hold no specified duties or responsibilities beyond checking in at the beginning of each working day at Korsvägen Station and then checking out at the end of the day. A “working light” installed throughout the station would notify the public when the employee would be at work.
Join us with artists Goldin+Senneby for a presentation of their project Eternal Employment, with a response by e-flux editor and Eternal Employment foundation board member Brian Kuan Wood.
Stay tuned to our upcoming programs by visiting our website; or subscribe to our events mailing lists for e-flux and Bar Laika.
New on e-flux Video & Film
Yuk Hui, “What Begins After the End of Enlightenment?”
Lecture
e-flux journal on feminism(s)
Double issue launch with Martha Rosler, Xin Wang, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk
Allan Sekula, Fish Story
Symposium with Eduardo Cadava, Nadja Millner-Larsen, and Benjamin Young; introduced by Sally Stein
Mirene Arsanios, “Motherless Tongues”
Part one of a joint lecture with Simone White
Simone White, “on being the other woman”
Part two of a joint lecture with Mirene Arsanios
New e-flux podcast episodes; available for listening on e-flux, iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud
Xin Wang on “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other”
Recorded after the publication of e-flux journal issue 81 in April 2017, Xin Wang reads and discusses her text “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” with Stephen Squibb.
The Story of Peter Green Peter Chang
Brian Kuan Wood reads his piece, “The Story of Peter Green Peter Chang,” published in February, 2017 as part of e-flux Architecture’s Superhumanity project at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial.
Yuk Hui, Xiaoyu Weng, and Brian Kuan Wood
Following a symposium titled Technology is History, in association with the exhibition One Hand Clapping at the Guggenheim, curator Xiaoyu Weng and Brian Kuan Wood join Yuk Hui to discuss his work. The conversation was followed by a talk by Yuk Hui at e-flux titled “What Begins After the End of Enlightenment?” Text mentioned in the conversation: 30 Years after Les Immatériaux - Art, Science and Theory.