Thorstein Veblen, “The Beginnings of Ownership,” The American Journal of Sociology Vol. 4, No. 3 (Nov. 1898), 355-356.
Ibid., 365.
Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 41–89. A recent addition to Kiaer’s pivotal book is Kibbutz: Architecture Without Precedents, which was published as part of the exhibition at the Israeli Pavilion for the 12th International Architecture exhibition at the Venice Biennial, 2010 (curated by Yuval Yasky and Galia Bar Or). In it, special mention is given to the material culture of the Kibbutz and the junkyard playground as a Socialist educational project. See also Ohad Meromi and Joshua Simon, “Repurposing The Kibbutz,” in Solution 196-213: United States of Palestine Israel, ed. Joshua Simon (Sternberg Press, 2011), 117–121. In the second part of his “Art and Thingness,” titled “Thingification,” Sven Lütticken gives a series of references from Aleksander Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno, all concerned with Marxian attempts at redefining the role of objecthood and thingness beyond the distortion of the commodity character. Rodchenko is quoted writing in Paris in 1925: “Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades, and not these black and mournful slaves, as they are here.” And Brecht is quoted paraphrasing Hegel: “things are occurrences.” See e-flux journal no. 15 (April 2010), →.
Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question),” trans. Christiba Kiaer, October no. 81 (Summer 1997), 124.
Dziga Vertov, “We: A Version of a Manifesto,” in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 69–72.
See also Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979).
See →.
See →. This logic resembles the 1904 satire “The Sale of an Appetite” by Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law and an original Marxist in his own right, in which a poor man sells his appetite to a rich man who does not want to be limited by his own capacity for appetite—a kind of a mirror story to Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” I thank Max Lomberg for introducing me to this beautiful tale.
For now it has shown January through May 2010 in Antwerp at Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), and a second part opened this September in Vienna at the Generali Foundation. See also Animism, Volume I, ed. Anselm Franke (Sternberg Press, 2010).
Boris Groys, “Art and Money,” e-flux journal no. 24 (April 2011).
This brings to mind a comment Hito Steyerl made in a lecture at the post-graduate program at Hamidrasha Art School in Tel Aviv in February 2011. Steyerl proposed that the iPhone asks to be caressed in the way it is handled and operated by a tender touch-screen, because it is traumatized by the conditions of labor through which it was produced. The melancholic funereal aftermath nature of Smith’s work has been highlighted recently by Chris Sharp in his “A Complete Rest,” Kaleidoscope Magazine 10 (Spring 2011), 42–49.
See also Joshua Simon, “Neo-Materialism, Part Two: The Unreadymade,” e-flux journal no. 23 (March 2011).
Email conversation between Thys and de Gruyter and Katia Anguelova and Andrea Wiarda, published in the booklet accompanying “Suitcase Illuminated #6: Tunnel Effect – Part 1: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys,” curated by Katia Anguelova, Alessandra Poggianti, and Andrea Wiarda (DCM—Dipartimento Curatoriale Mobile) for Kaleidoscope HQ, Milan, May 27–June 30, 2009. See also Joshua Simon, “The Silence of The Lamps,” Afterall 22 (Autumn/Winter 2009), 63–70.
See Michel Chion, The Films of Jacques Tati, trans. Antonio D’Alfonso (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2003), 81.
Being the ultimate representational system of value in this civilization, Money, argued Marx, actually changes the object it represents. Marx demonstrated how commodity fetishism is the mechanism that conceals labor (i.e. social relations) through an objective-symbol known as money-value. In “the market,” the maker, despite the fact that his or her labor is the source of the value of the commodities, thinks of them as a consumer would—as an object to be bought and traded. The voice of the commodity is the echo of the workers’ silence.
“Suitcase Illuminated #6,” op. cit.
Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 316.
See Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Things,” available at →.
See also Hilary Jane Englert, “Occupying Works: Animated Works and Literary Property,” in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007), 218-241. I would like to thank Ofri Ilany for drawing my attention to this book, which makes the connection between the early rise of capitalist consumerism and its animistic manifestations.