Mousse #45 for iPad out now
October–November 2014
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In this issue:
The Authoritative Speech, The Authority of the Readymade, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, The Corporate Aesthetic, Lav Diaz, The End of Art in Public Space, Escaping the Politics of Prediction, The Explosion of the Exhibition Format, Kim Fisher, Robert Gober, Steinar Haga Kristensen, Tamara Henderson, Alice Könitz, Gottfried Lindauer, Mélanie Matranga, Bruce McLean, Minimalism as Pathos, The Post-Digital Condition, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Patrick Staff, Stylometry Part 2, The Theater of Violence, Guan Xiao.
What modes of address dominate the recent histories of authoritative speech in art? Jan Verwoert demonstrates how authority in art no longer comes from a mythical magniloquence of the artist, but from his ability to prompt the concession of authority on the part of the audience.
John Menick continues his investigation into the field of stylometry by looking at science fiction’s influence on activists who promote the spread of cryptography on a wide scale, namely the so-called cypherpunks—including the creators of Tor and Bitcoin. Will the latest exponents of the movement be able to create a more inclusive project than that of its neoliberal roots?
A physician, sociology expert and anarchist activist, Michael Taussig came to anthropology along an atypical, original path. Sladja Blazan spoke with him to retrace the genesis of certain main concepts, and to hear his reflections on the theme of violence.
With From What Is Before, Lav Diaz has assembled a revolutionary and personal vision of the troubled political history of the Philippines. Diaz’s cinema keeps conventions at arm’s length—duration, framing composition—with a temporal character based on the foreboding of violent natural phenomena in Southeast Asia, and themes shaped by the traumas of a people tested by the tyranny of the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Giulio Bursi met with the Filipino director a few days before the assignment of the Pardo d’Oro.
The culture of the colonizer has always produced representation of the colonized that reinforces hierarchies, sanctioning repression. Jens Hoffmann examines the work of Gottfried Lindauer (1839–1926), the portraitist of the Māori, which instead seems radically new.
Andrew Durbin locates alternatives to art practices that merely imitate corporate visual logic, addressing ways some artists’ works—focusing among others on Gretchen Bender, Bernadette Corporation, GCC, and Luther Price—have responded to the breakdown of the Anthropocene.
Omar Kholeif analyzes the post-digital condition, questioning the algorithmic culture that steers taste, the “simulation of environment” of digital sociality and the effective pressure or clout for political change asserted by an activism based only on clicks.
Nowadays a permanent feeling of being under attack is gaining ”authority” over our behavior and mind. But maybe we can find a way to escape from the politics of prediction. Chus Martínez analyzes the possibilities of counter-acting and regaining freedom “on our own terms.”
The works of Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin are based on the assumption and questioning of different professional roles of documentation of war, from photojournalism—done at personal risk in Afghanistan—to a peculiar type of archaeology of modernity, through the study of old settings of combat films. Adam Carr met the artists to talk over the opportunities that have led to many of their works.
On the eve of the major retrospective at MoMA covering his 38 years of activity, Robert Gober—with Hans Ulrich Obrist—retraces his artistic adventure from objects found in New York gutters all the way to curatorial projects that shed light on forgotten or neglected artists.
After starting out as a conceptual artist, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder came to painting in an unexpected way. Massimiliano Gioni offers a profile of this tenacious amateur who through infinite repetitions has cultivated a passion for the apparently irrelevant, cloaking it in fairy-tale enchantment.
Bewildered by the state of contemporary art and its institutions, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy has fallen prey to minor literature. But it is precisely through such digressions (and migrations) that she is able to shed light on how art moves and makes things visible.
Nice to Meet You:
Laura McLean-Ferris joins Mélanie Matranga to talk about how the artist has managed to transform the quotidian into sculpture, and sculpture into a stage activated by visitors.
Nav Haq catches up with Guan Xiao whose sculptures and videos of are able to grasp and convey the connections and flows that permeate the real world.
Minimal Art has systematically purged the work of pathos, but as psychoanalysis teaches us, repressed emotions tend to come roaring back to the fore. Nick Currie analyzes the unexpected potential of Minimalism to shake up sentiment.
Los Angeles:
Andrew Berardini lets himself be guided through Los Angeles by Alice Könitz, the artist of the non-finished and of incessant evolution, and by Kim Fisher, who has gathered the fragments of modern fractals and placed them on a yielding fabric.
Steinar Haga Kristensen sets the rules for a bizarre interview with collaborator Eirik Senje and curator Valentinas Klimašauskas in which all the roles have been swapped, as in one of his performative, grand pastiche-like works.
Tamara Henderson and Bruce McLean have both developed abstract translations of their surroundings keeping “the social” as their core point of interest. The artists met with Krist Gruijthuijsen to discuss their (physical) relationship to objects.
How has public space—and as a consequence the kind of art created for it—changed with the advent of the Web? Jennifer Allen makes some interesting discoveries in the wake of various artists who have created continuity or even fusion between physical and digital space.
London:
Through a wide range of media, Patrick Staff explores the social spaces, representations and self-representations of queer individuality, and the influence of neoliberalism on identity. He illustrates his recent video project—a dialogue with the Tom of Finland Foundation—for Gil Leung.
Filipa Ramos gathered with Eva Franch i Gilabert, Hila Peleg, Kristine Siegel & Rhea Dall, and Tarek Atoui—key figures for the invention of new curatorial and artistic formats—to examine specific cases and ways of going beyond given modes of producing and presenting cultural practices.
The Artist as Curator
Available in the international edition and for subscription only.
Issue #4 an insert in Mousse Magazine #45
Group Material, The AIDS Timeline, 1989
Alice Creisher, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer, The Potosí Principle, 2010
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