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Grant Kester

I want to thank Ellen Feiss for her thoughtful and honest response, and I’m glad my essay was able to solicit some further reflection on her part. 1 I would also note, again, that I myself have been guilty of most of the problems I identify in this essay (the off-loading of critique to a theoretical authority figure, failure to engage with the work in its specificity, and so forth). Many of the questions Feiss raises about the role of the critic and the complexities of research into…

e-flux Journal

Posted: May 1, 2014

Category

Anthropology & Ethnography, Education

Subjects

Socially Engaged Art

# 50

The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism

Grant Kester

Monologism … denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing … the other remains entirely and only an object of consciousness and cannot constitute another consciousness. —Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1961) 1 1. Criticism and Monological Thinking For several years now I have written about a new area of dialogical artistic practice, in which the conventional…

e-flux Journal

Posted: December 1, 2013

Subjects

Art Criticism, Socially Engaged Art, Collaboration, Art Collectives

# 31

The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the Taming of Dissent

Grant Kester

→ Continued from “The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part I: Spontaneity and Consciousness in Revolutionary Theory” in issue 30. There is no possibility of escape … —Graciela Carnevale, “Project for the Experimental Art Series” (1968) Let me go, I’m an artist. —Protestor being arrested during a 1968 demonstration at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires 1 As I noted in the first part of this essay, revolutionary action in the Leninist…

e-flux Journal

Posted: January 1, 2012

Category

Latin America, Aesthetics

Subjects

Revolution, Socially Engaged Art, Relational Aesthetics, Conceptual & Post-Conceptual Art

# 30

The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part I: Spontaneity and Consciousness in Revolutionary Theory

Grant Kester

Discipline and Punish I paint this way because I can’t join the shooting in Santo Domingo. —Ricardo Carreira (1965) 1 In 1968 the Argentine artist Graciela Carnevale presented a new work entitled Acción del Encierro (Confinement Action) as part of the Ciclo de Arte Experimental exhibition in Rosario, organized by the Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia de Rosario. 2 The work was participatory, drawing on the then-emerging genres of performance art, installation, and…

e-flux Journal

Posted: December 1, 2011

Category

Latin America, Contemporary Art, Education, Avant-Garde

Subjects

Revolution, Socially Engaged Art, October Revolution