December 2016 / issue no. 104
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A key protagonist of the modern age, the “individual” is positioned to tell us a lot about our current condition. As Texte zur Kunst’s December cover suggests, there is an inherent tragedy to this figure, this individuated being that cannot escape itself; that, however seemingly autonomous, is nevertheless beholden to a program that it must internalize at the price of suffering enormously. With issue #104, we take up the “individual” not as a fixed category but as a trans-modernist mode of the self, one that shifts according to the form of governance and that certainly has been impacted by the past some-15 years of the “new spirit of capitalism.” As the forces of neoliberal individualization have intensified (not least, that of the attention economy and the dominance of affective speech over rational thought) and success is more and more seldom achieved by being good at what one does than by being good at promoting the fact that one is good regardless of actual quality (i.e., via branding), we check in on 2016’s iteration of the “individual”—as an artist, as an entrepreneur, as a contemporary being—and see how she is faring.
Main section (in English and German):
Wendy Brown x Isabelle Graw
“Invest Yourself!”
Nina Power
“From the One to the Many”
Ulrich Bröckling
“Can the Entrepreneurial Self Tweet?”
“Buffering of the Self: Guising in the Mid-’00s”
Storm van Helsing, André Rottmann, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Reena Spaulings, @LilInternet, i.i.i., and Luther Blissett ON: Luther Blisset, JT Leroy, Reena Spaulings, @lonelygirl15, Claire Fontaine, “An Hero,” Lee Williams, and Storm van Helsing
Sven Lütticken
“Speech Gestures: Notes on the Individual and the Socialization of Language after Gutenberg”
Wolfgang Ruppert
“Producing Individuality: the Artist among his Contemporaries”
Alex Isreal x Texte zur Kunst
“I’m not Punk”
Reviews (partial listing):
Sabeth Buchmann
on Ellen Cantor at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (German)
Rachel Haidu
on Kai Althoff at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (English)
Diedrich Diederichsen
on Michael Buthe at Haus der Kunst, Munich (German)
Steven Warwick
on Morag Keil at Eden Eden, Berlin (English)
Tonio Kröner
on Amelie von Wulffen at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (German)
Anthony Vidler
on Felicity D. Scott’s book Outlaw Territories (English)
Sulgi Lie
on Werner Herzog’s film Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (German)
Esther Buss
on Albert Serras’s film La mort de Louis XIV (German)
Boško Blagojević
on Antek Walczak at Real Fine Arts, New York (English)
Nikola Dietrich
on Karl Holmqvist and Klara Lidén at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (German)
Gaby Tront
on Anne Imhof at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (English)
Mikael Brkic
on Alex Israel at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (English)
Hanna Magauer
on Dana Schutz at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (German)
Obituary:
Frank Wagner (1958–2016) in the words of Julie Ault (English)
Plus artists’ editions by:
Robert Longo
Oscar Murillo
Cosima von Bonin
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