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.
