Issue 149

In January, Donald Trump will begin his second term as the president of the United States. His first term and his campaigns have been defined by the extreme and effective loosening of the constraints of “reality” on previously unimaginable levels of power. His critics are often hampered by confusion over whether his policies are guided by any intentionality or foresight. His actions mix transactional plays with intoxicating chaos, to an extent that last month multiple former high-ranking US military officials from his previous administration agreed that Trump is “fascist”—a sentiment likely circulating within the world’s most powerful military that he will soon lead again, at least nominally. But Trump’s radicality and pathological intensity in courting chaos threatens more than just military structure or policy, and is not only about the already fragile concepts of “truth” and “facts,” but about a much higher order where reality itself is structured. Developing literacy in this domain will be essential for geopolitics in the difficult years ahead. 

In this issue, Trevor Paglen closes his three-part essay series on the history of psychological warfare as a vast testing ground for cognitive manipulation. These techniques have evolved well beyond military applications, becoming everyday methods for bending reality in any realm defined by the exchange of information. Beyond the use of UFOs and magic tricks to redirect attention and weaponize reality itself, the question remains whether the fluid and plastic power of reality as perception can actually be controlled by anyone—military, magician, or otherwise. 

Sven Lütticken and the late and dearly missed Marina Vishmidt survey why and how the issue of the autonomy of art has been put on the agenda again, from an investigation into its European idealist impulses to how it has been captured by not just neoliberalism but neofascism as well. They discuss how the defense of autonomy by institutional actors often appears as a fetishistic disavowal; how the concept relates to the many enclosures of bodily autonomy underway and intensifying; and how “autonomy’s philosophical aesthetics should be approached in a spirit of genealogical-critical inquiry but also contested.”

Anna Gorskaya’s “Without Claims to Purity: The Great Atomic Bombreflector and Its Designers” takes Kazakhstan—the host and test subject of a forty-year history of Soviet nuclear experiments—as a paradox of state sovereignty and sovereign power that did not end with a transition to denuclearization. Gorskaya analyzes the Kazakhstani artistic collective ORTA, which works at the intersection of theater, engineering, music, and research. ORTA has taken this history of the “atomic steppe” as a challenge to slip from the clutches of bare life and find openings through which “atomic inhumanity” can be used to create new forms of energy and life.

In “The Sun of the Colored Peoples,” André Pitol examines a forgotten figure in Black Brazilian geometric abstraction: artist Edival Ramosa, who relocated to Italy in the 1960s and ’70s and began to experiment with the structural ascendency of abstract forms connected to the neo-avant-gardes, but also to the structural relations of race and diasporic complexity. Attentive to the Maghreb and the Middle East and intervening into debates on geometrical abstraction, Ramosa’s body of work influenced more established artists such as Rubem Valentim. Pitol considers Ramosa’s approach and artistic concepts––particularly “totemic construction”––as a poignant striving for a universality beyond the Western subject.

As part of After Okwui—a series commissioned by contributing editor Serubiri Moses on the resounding presence of Okwui Enwezor—Jason Waite looks at Enwezor’s oft-overlooked return to curating mega-exhibitions after his unforgettable Documenta XI in 2002. It was with the second International Biennial of Contemporary Art Seville (BIASC) in 2006 that Waite finds Enwezor entering a darker, post-9/11 realm that foreclosed the possibilities and naive promises of globality. Though Enwezor’s BIASC elegantly walked the line between immediate locality and regional or historical scope, Waite argues that its ambitions were undermined by the exhibition’s lack of engagement with the local audiences of Seville.

Alan Gilbert considers the work of Berlin-based Korean-American poet and translator Don Mee Choi, whose recent poetry trilogy enters the shifting ground of layered diasporas driven by war and the twisted evolutions of neocolonial nations. Contemporary South Korea may have been carved out of Cold War ideology and US client status, but that neocolonial violence continues by moving into new registers and finer distinctions that Choi finds traceable in language. As the poetry trilogy reveals, beneath language’s failures and taxonomies lie history and personal memories that might hold the key to enlarging the range of what can be expressed beyond the nation-state’s borders.

As part of contributing editor Evan Calder Williams’s Negative Anthropology series, Sophie Rose looks at voice and vocality as having a mediatic and psychoanalytic valence wholly distinct from visuality and the gaze. The voice is also what swallows language back into the intimacy of the body, back into an accent’s excessive betrayal of origins. Through close consideration of works by artists JJJJJerome Ellis and Nour Mobarak, Rose poses a challenge: to consider vocality beyond the shadow of able-bodied normativity and in the negative, as a voice without body or a body without voice, where language is not immediately available and personhood demands an expanded definition. 

—Editors

Sven Lütticken and Marina Vishmidt—Genealogies of Autonomy
In the current political climate, neither your average plutocrat nor cultural administrator is ready to tolerate the “autonomy” of cultural and educational institutions, whether in the vein of pluralism or partisanship, even when a genocide is unfolding before our eyes. (And forget about enjoining historical and geopolitical context.) This makes it ever more clear that autonomy’s philosophical aesthetics should be approached in a spirit of genealogical-critical inquiry but also contested—not just discursively, as it has been for years, but also practically.

Trevor Paglen—Society of the Psyop, Part 3: Cognition and Chaos 
Our mind makes predictions about what it thinks we will see, and shows us hallucinated projections of the near future. When a baseball batter sees a ball traveling towards them, they’re not seeing the actual ball, but a hallucinated projection of where the mind thinks the ball will travel. The batter swings at the hallucination. If all goes well, the hallucinated ball is temporally synched to where the actual ball should be. When we zoom out from the mechanics of motor function and temporal synchronization, the story of visual perception becomes even more unstable.

André Pitol—The Sun of the Colored Peoples: Edival Ramosa in the Diaspora
It is not by chance that Edival Ramosa’s New Totemic Construction sketch was made during a time of intense debate within the arts about what was considered “constructive” in Brazil and abroad. But Ramosa, with his proposition for a “new totemic construction,” was not trying to join that white lineage of geometric abstraction; he was rather thinking about the racial complexity of abstraction and how race’s structural relations could be expressed in a structurally ascendent—totemic—way.

Jason Waite—Unsettled Ghosts in Ex-Africa: Okwui Enwezor’s Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art Seville
Enwezor’s International Biennial of Contemporary Art Seville dwelled on dark post-9/11 themes of war, terrorism, migration, and the extractivist nature of neoliberal capitalism. As I write, two unjust conflicts rage in Ukraine and Palestine; the second BIASC showed that the effects of such wars on art and exhibition-making can be deep and long-lasting, resurfacing years later. The exhibition participated in the wave of perennialization that took hold in the early twenty-first century, but also tempered the enthusiasm for the new neoliberal world order that was solidifying around the globe.

Anna Gorskaya—Without Claims to Purity: The Great Atomic Bombreflector and Its Designers
In ORTA’s Spectacular Experiments, which are always site-specific, mise-en-scène arises from the unpredictable monologues, sounds, and movements of a wide variety of people on the one hand, and equally surprising, mobile, sometimes exceptionally large-scale trash compositions on the other. One can always sense the endless, un-appropriable movement of thought and matter fluxes that carry, permeate, and reassemble all the moments of the performance, plunging it into a zone of indistinguishability between the imaginary and the real.

Alan Gilbert—Disperse the Nation: Don Mee Choi’s Poetry Trilogy 
For Choi, time becomes fused and stuck around trauma. To experience profound grief is to be taken out of the flow of time, yet “temporal magic” is what allows for an escape from the inexorable and crushing movement of history: grief as resistance and resistance as grief. There are very good reasons to lose one’s narratives, both as individuals and as nations. One of the goals of experimental writing like Choi’s is to disrupt official narratives, histories, and images along with, more importantly, their meanings—although they’re more like presumptions and predispositions—because narrative is a prime vehicle in which to smoothly embed them.

Sophie Rose—The Snag in the Voice
Even within this range of action, liberation and individual rights have been the cornerstones of disability activism from the 1970s onwards, and the academic discipline of disability studies that followed close behind. In the 2000s, however, thinkers such as Robert McRuer and Eli Clare took a more transgressive approach, reappropriating the figure of the “crip” or the “freak,” defying normative categories with a middle finger raised. In refusing assimilation to—or “accessible” amendments of—the status quo, the crip is revolutionary, avant-garde even. The crip wants a total reconfiguration of norms, not just ramps and closed captions.