Afterall issue 41 out now

Afterall is pleased to present issue 41, spring/summer 2016, which looks at how technology shapes bodies. Through the work of Stuart Marshall, Ion Grigorescu, Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, Holly Herndon and Cooperativa Cráter Invertido, this issue examines how artists have pitched embodied subjectivity against different forms of scientific, economic and political abstraction.

In the opening essay, Hannah Black traces how the historic reduction of the body to property relations persists in today’s racialised and gendered capitalism. Kathy Acker’s fascination with the body stems from a similar desire to erode abstraction through an insistence on materiality that, as Chris Kraus recounts, accompanied her until the very end of her life—and beyond.

In the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Stuart Marshall’s work focused on undoing the social and political construction of the neoliberal body. In an in-depth study of touch in Marshall’s work, Aimar Arriola examines the politics of intimacy in the 1980s and their purchase on contemporary subjectivity. Essays by Ian White and Alvin Lucier, meanwhile, discuss the artist’s interventions into dominant media flows as a means of building a mediated, collective body.

Holly Herndon’s music extends the problem of corporeality to our present-day, technologically augmented selves. Lina Džuverović locates Herndon’s “voice-body” at the intersection of feminist vocalisation and accelerationist politics, while Travis Jeppesen analyses the political implications of her becoming-machine. Herndon’s and Marshall’s attempts to subvert the media of their time resonate with the polemical exhibition Pictures of Sweden 1969, here excavated by Kim West.

Yet the practice of Ion Grigorescu suggests another strategy: withdrawal. In Grigorescu’s self-portraits of the 1970s, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu finds a vulnerable masculinity wrestling against the modern subject, while Anders Kreuger studies the classical, bucolic and critical tendencies of Grigorescu’s work as it has unfolded over the past half-century. Responding to today’s imperative to be ever visible, Terre Thaemlitz offers a queer manifesto arguing for secrecy and silence as modes of collective resistance.

Other essays in this issue consider forms of social intimacy and embodied collectivity. Sol Henaro situates Mexico City-based group Cooperativa Cráter Invertido alongside contemporary social movements and historical collective practices in the city, and Anne Szefer Karlsen addresses the complicated legacy of a 1958 student occupation in Montevideo in relation to the neoliberal individuation within art education. Nikos Papastergiadis shows that a social impetus can also emerge from the most singular of practices, seeing in On Kawara’s maps a world-making alternative to contemporary globalisation. Finally, David Morris presents the elastic avant-garde networks and the makeshift technologies of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson as a model for intimate and expanded collaboration.

This issue marks the start of a new two-year programme of research in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, who join the journal’s long-standing partner M HKA in Antwerp. 

This summer Afterall Books launches the seventh publication in its “Exhibition Histories” series, Exhibition, Design, Participation: ‘an Exhibit’ 1957, and the “One Work” title Sturtevant: Warhol Marilyn by Patricia Lee. On June 2, Afterall will be holding a benefit dinner and auction, which will include works generously donated by Tomma Abts, Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, Janice Kerbel, Sharon Lockhart, David Maljković, Bruno Pacheco, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler, Wilhelm Sasnal, Do Ho Suh and Jeff Wall. The event will include a performance by Mark Leckey and a limited box set edition of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, a new collaboration between Laura Mulvey and Rachel Rose, who will also appear in conversation. With special thanks to Ilya & Emilia Kabakov and Alex Branczik. Tickets are availble to purchase here.

Afterall journal is published by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in editorial partnership with M HKA, Antwerp; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, and in association with the University of Chicago Press.

Afterall is now available as an e-book edition, free to download for subscribers. Subscribe here.