We started publishing e-flux Notes during the pandemic, when self-isolation produced an urgent need to communicate and spontaneously share ideas and experiences in ways more flexible and timely than periodical formats allow. The pandemic has passed, but wars and other calamities have started… Now in its fourth year, Notes has developed into a multifaceted platform publishing essays, interviews, historical texts, and experimental writing several times each week. Here are the highlights from this fall:
Andrea Fraser elaborates a Bourdieu-inspired sociology of the field of contemporary art, specifying five subfields—art market, exhibitions, academic, community-based, and activist—whose often unacknowledged interdependencies and differing criteria for success define the dynamics of art today. Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist enter into conversation about the legacy of famed curator and museum director Kasper König, who passed away on August 9, an original figure who always “trusted artists,” “invented so many new formats,” and knew how to “break the rules.” And in “A Call for Humane Museums,” Aubrey Knox discusses “museum fatigue” and the need for creating a “new spatial typology” for exhibition spaces.
One of the most consequential Marxist critics of his generation, Fredric Jameson died on September 22. In his tribute “Always Jamesonize!,” Frank Ruda focuses on Jameson’s concept of totality, identifying “three key concepts belonging to the backbone of any contemporary post-Jamesonian form of thought”: rationalism, dialectics, and orientation. Franco “Bifo” Berardi makes an urgent plea for grasping “the new modalities and forms of colonialism in the twenty-first century,” arguing that “prefixes like ‘post-’ aside, resistance movements across the world have shown for many decades that colonial projects never ended, they just changed character.” In “The Genocide in Gaza and Its Consequences for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Étienne Balibar writes that “Israel has delegitimized itself, threatening its own existence,” and calls for an immediate ceasefire, the dismantling of illegal settlements, an interdiction against arms deliveries, and UN recognition of the state of Palestine.
Film Notes, our new intiative, continues its explorations in art and cinema. In “I Make Films to Fill My Time,” Marguerite Duras offers insights into her filmmaking philosophy through a discussion of India Song, reflecting on her use of film style and language to explore themes of colonialism, estrangement, and desire. In an essay from 1926, Virginia Woolf critiques the limitations of cinema’s adaptation of literature and points to the medium’s potential to communicate complex ideas beyond words, independently of human participation. In his conversation with Lukas Brasiskis, Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski discusses Infinity According to Florian, his film about Kyiv architect Florian Yuriev, explaining how the film evolved from a focus on Yuriev’s experimental films to highlight his architectural contributions, and emphasizing Yuriev’s resistance to commercialization and his outsider status within both Soviet and capitalist systems. In “My Universe and Unified Field Theory” (2018), Artavazd Peleshyan applies his theory of “distance montage” to the cosmos, proposing that the interaction between distant shots in cinema parallels the interaction between celestial bodies. Exploring Giuliana Bruno’s book Atmospheres of Projection, Thotti examines how projection as a concept extends beyond film to embody environmental relationships between light, space, and emotion. And Elena Vogman writes on Hubert Fichte and Leonore Mau’s Der Fischmarkt und die Fische (1964), analyzing how the film portrays the sea as a symbol of political repression during Portugal’s Estado Novo regime, using visual fragmentation to evoke hidden political violence and historical trauma.
A group of Cuban artists—Solveig Font, Coco Fusco, Celia Irina González, Hamlet Lavastida, Julio Llópiz Casal, and Yanelys Nuñez Leyva—exposes the hypocrisies of the Havana Biennial. Lauren van Haaften-Schick reviews Colby Chamberlain’s new book Fluxus Administation, delving into Fluxus founder George Maciunas’s aethetics of paperwork. Pietro Bianchi interprets Harmony Korine’s latest film Aggro Dr1ft in light of a forgotten nonnarrative Hollywood tradition, exemplified by D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga examines Daniil Kharms’s brilliantly comedic fragments or “incidences,” published in a recently translated volume of his work. And, visiting Peter Zumthor’s Saint Benedict Chapel, Nathan Brown analyzes the structure of this modernist masterpiece through the verse of Friedrich Hölderlin.
Continuing his regular Notes column, Boris Groys discusses the ironies of the reception of East European art after the end of the Cold War, in “Under the Museum’s Gaze.” And in “History as the ‘Tact of Natality,’” Groys examines the loss of long-term transgenerational projects, like the construction of socialism, in favor of an ever-renewed cultural desire for the new—“every generation presents itself to the next generation as historical garbage that has to be removed to make way for a new desire,” thereby excluding “the possibility of any transgenerational project, beyond the eternal return of the desire for such a project.”
—e-flux Notes Editors