It’s always too late

“It’s always too late, whenever you take a photograph.”

This laconic remark, which I heard during a recent artist’s talk in Berlin, bubbled up from a discussion upon the often-tragic indexicality or nonindexicality of contemporary photographic practice.1 JPEGs taken for wonders. Smoke plumes without embers. Footprints crossing the beaches of abandoned resorts. Hands that point at nothing in particular, and the gullible eyes that follow the lead of pointing index fingers. There is indeed something awkward to the snapshot’s belatedness. Its untimeliness. The ways in which, the second the shutter clicks—or that our thumb melds with the appropriate region of our phone’s liquid plasma displays and the resultant file is uploaded to a distant server—the instant we sought to “capture” has passed by and something else enters the frame. Someone blinks, the rubble dust envelopes the scene, the light changes, the hoodie we saw underground bearing the phrase “THEIR DESTINIES WOULD INTERTWINE” disappears behind an arriving subway’s blur, the wind cajoles a neighboring branch we hadn’t before noticed into the family portrait. Photography then remains, contrary to the terms in which it is sold to us by Silicon Valley manufacturers who stress its total immediacy as an instrument for perceiving the world, a stubbornly untimely pursuit.

Can we not also say, “It’s always too late, whenever you start to index”?

This publication carries on its spine—with a slight nod toward Sol Lewitt’s famous declaration on conceptual art that “irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically”—a commitment to “indexing the arts.”2 This should not, however, be taken as a hubristic drive to simply capture the moment. Instead, in its effort at critically revisiting a two-month period of discourse across the tesselating, alternating intersecting and diverging fields and subfields of contemporary art criticism, architecture theory and critique, social criticism, film, theory, political analysis, polemics, philosophy, and art pedagogy, the e-flux Index likewise situates itself in the gap between the instant and its recording instrument—in this case, language.

The Index is untimely by its very commitment to thematically commingling different publishing temporalities and genres of writing (from long-form essays commissioned years in advance to reviews to open letters). We hope that this very asynchrony is capable of revealing the preoccupations that are threaded through the most insightful current writing on art, but also the many ways in which language and critique can work to evade and resist capture altogether. e-flux’s entrance into the slower-moving world of book publishing began with an anthology of texts addressing the somewhat undertheorized question of “what is contemporary art?” in 2009.3 This interrogation of the stakes of “contemporaneity,” as well as the refusal to leave this question unasked, as though its answer were somehow self-evident, continues to inform the approach taken here by the Index.

This issue features 71 contributions from 74 authors, artists, architects, and educators published by e-flux between February–March 2024. These have been recomposed into eleven different sections. These sections, or snapshots, are titled as follows, A Brand New Day; Bad Circulation; The Traveling of a Concept; The Earth Is an Image; Leaving Without a Suitcase; The Technocapitalist Gentry; The Poetics of Relation; The Fox News Expanded Universe; Transgenerational Witnessing; Anything can come after anything else…; and Only the Sun Works.

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Index#2 dawns with A Brand New Day, in a section that watches the clock to parse the question of temporality in current artistic practice. Beginning with Charles Tonderai Mudede’s interrogation of the “year zero” imagined by an early techno hit, and continuing on through Anna Kornbluh’s trenchant polemic against the ideologies of immediacy in “too-late” capitalism, it draws to a close with Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung’s considered review of a durational performance prematurely drawn to a close by an unforeseen interruption.

Bad Circulation traces the figure of “circulation struggles” in a series of outwardly rippling concentric circles. We have here the seemingly straightforward question of economic circulation, as theorized by Jason Read’s insightful co-reading of Spinoza and Marx, the second part of Evan Calder Williams’ analysis of the various paralytic strategies for interrupting the circulation of commodities, and Anya Sirota’s interrogation of philanthrocapitalist worldbuilding in Detroit. We also encounter the circulation of militant publications in Jamila Squire and Seth Wheeler’s consideration of the role publishing played for the Italian Autonomists, and examine how airflow and ventilation became “thermal conflicts” to be solved by architectural modernism.

Opening a window to ventilate the stale, dead air of the classical classroom, The Traveling of a Concept combines practical and theoretical approaches to radical and expanded pedagogy. These reflections range from Luis Camnitzer’s delightful affirmation of “ignorant generalism” as a mode of creative knowledge work, on through Ecositema Urbano’s presentation of the city itself as a form of “open-air classroom,” to the New Art School Modality’s own concrete attempts to put into action Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey’s idea of an “undercommons.”

In the next section, The Earth Is an Image, we zoom out, and further out still, to examine the Earth as it was once revealed to its inhabitants in the famous “Earth-Rise” image from 1969 (considered here in Antonia Majaca’s essay). The problem of what gets made visible and what is occluded—of moving through “shadows, darkly” as the title of Hallie Ayres’ essay has it—is devastatingly evoked by Oraib Toikan’s text on the “things the eye sees that the mind alone cannot decipher,” within the context of Israel’s genocidal occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Leaving Without a Suitcase draws its title from Arseny Zhilyaev’s description of Ilya Kabakov’s “total installation” The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment, to gather together pieces that approach the im/permeability of nations and their thresholds, as well as the condition of(forced) exile such borders produce. Suzanne Hudson reviews an exhibition of noé olivas’s sculptural work with the material infrastructure of barbed wire along the threshold that cleaves the United States from Mexico, meanwhile Jasmina Cibic and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s contributions each examine how architectural “gifts” can be a burden or an albatross for their national inheritors, and how (or indeed if) such structures can be decolonized.4

In the first quarter of 2024, the AI chip manufacturer Nvidia reported record earnings of 26$ billion, up 262% on the previous year. The Technocapitalist Gentry data-mines the fantasies, extracurricular pursuits, and downstream cultural impact of the capitalist class enriched beyond all hitherto known limits by this tech boom. It begins with Leigh House’s startling examination of the Zuckerberg Chan Foundation’s total remodeling of East Palo Alto, on through Isadora Neves Marques queering of com-sci history (can we gender the human in Turing’s imitation game?), ending with Jonas Staal’s portrait of the technocapitalist archduke himself, Jeff Bezos, returning to Earth from his brief trip into orbit and thanking Amazon workers for having made it all possible.

How to talk about hosting when homes are being devastated? The Poetics of Relation borrows its title from Édouard Glissant’s book, where he wrote of how “our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”5 Such open horizons of intersubjectivity, hybridization, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism appear in this section in Orit Gat’s review of the Condo Biennale (where galleries host other galleries) and Mariana Fernández’s searching approach to the work of Pedro Lasch. They are also present in Boris Groys superb analysis of how the socialist internationalism once underpinned by horizontal, class-based solidarities, has been transfigured by neoliberalism into a liberal “vertical solidarity” whereby “the success of the few begins to be seen as the promise of the success for many.”

We move in the next section from the ideals of universalism into the exclusionary,xenophobic world of America’s Fox News Expanded Universe; in a compact selection of essays and discussions on modern (or, following Alberto Toscano’s recent coinage)6 “late” fascisms and the forms of antifascism that seek to resist them. In his essay, T.J. Demos enriches our understanding of how the arts in particular might constitute a kind of militant anti-fascist research, “something like a counter-counterinsurgency, a desired unfolding of a just future” within an America ever-more beholden to ethnonationalist divisions and Kulturkampf.

Transgenerational Witnessing is the name given to the recognition that our homes are not just places to rest our heads or spaces to securitize against outsiders (as for the denizens of the Fox News Expanded Universe), but often also repositories of family memories which mark the ties that bind generations together. Such reflections on the relation to one’s ancestors and the work of intergenerational memory are present in Jane Jin Kaisen’s video work, according to Dylan Huw, but are also critiqued by Suneil Sanzgiri’s films, where a banner asks what it means for “your history” to “get in the way of my memory.”

Early skeptics of montage as a cinematic technique observed with alarm how, for the filmmaker inducted into its mysterious ways, “Anything can come after anything else … from a horse rider to a girl, a fly to an elephant,the North Pole to the Sahara Desert,”7 as Zairong Xiang reminds us in his essay in this issue. In the section that freeze-frames this remark we encounter many other such paratactic lists and collagist series, from Ben Ware’s wonderful rereading of Kafka’s Hunter Bacchus fragments to a review of the German photo-conceptualist Astrid Klein, whose work plays with a proximity to commercial combinatorial forms like the moodboard or pitch deck. Anton Vidokle also details the montage-inspired approach that informed the curatorial strategy of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, which he curated in 2023–24 alongside Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, Ben Eastham, and Zairong Xiang.

Index #2’s final snapshot turns its lens upward toward the source of life-giving energy itself. Only the Sun Works includes Isabel Jacob’s review of Andrei Platanov’s recently retranslated novel Chevengur, with its dream of a form of solar communism, as well as the other avant-garde utopian solar imaginaries of the Kabakov’s—whose “craving for the cosmos” envisaged harnessing cosmic energy to guarantee immortality. It draws to a close with Oxana Timofeeva squinting into the glare of the apocalypse and asking: “Is another end of the world possible?”

— Berlin, June 2024