verdurin

American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. Instead, they encourage voters to blame each other. 

The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either. Americans can’t imagine any compelling alternative political systems. And so, American democracy continues on, in a deeply unsatisfying way. Americans invent ever-more elaborate coping mechanisms in a desperate bid to go on. But it becomes increasingly clear that the way is shut. The American political system was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.

Benjamin Studebaker speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the runaway effects of globalisation, the false hope industry, cultural non-politics, and the very unlikely get-out scenarios. 

Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist whose work focuses on notions of legitimacy. He hosts the podcasts Political Theory 101.

• The equality/equity meme
• The 1619 Project
• No Labels, the ‘commonsense majority’ party

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The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy
Benjamin StudebakerThe Way is Shut

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
ISBN 9783031282096

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Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. 

Future Imperfect, Adrian Rifkin’s short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events and moments recalled without a diary with the verification and sometimes undermining effects of new research of materials, the recovery of what was known, what might have been known, and what was merely probable, as if this were a history of the history of art.

Adrian Rifkin speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the uses of radical pedagogy, dreams, art history, and the economy of memory. Wagner and the Teletubbies also feature.

• Adrain’s performance Hypotheses and Loving Contradictions at Haus der Kunst, 2017
• The White Pube 🎨🖌️🐀
• Jeffrey Steele
• Robert Motherwell
• Artangel
• Afterall
• Allan Sekula’s Fish Story
• Elizabeth Price
• Anne Tallentire
• Hanne Darboven
• Hans Eysenck

Adrian Rifkin is a writer and art historian engaged in contemporary art, film, classical and popular music, canonical and mass imagery, literature and pornography. Until recently he was Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths. He is the author of Street Noises: Studies in Parisian Pleasure, 1900-40, and Ingres Then, and Now. His collected essays appeared as Communards and Other Cultural Histories and his work was the subject of the anthology Inter-disciplinary Encounters.

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Future Imperfect, The Past Between My Fingers

Adrian Rifkin

Published by Ma Bibliothèque, 2022
ISBN 9781910055885

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On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum’s castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first—and certainly would not be the last— disaster to upend a museum in the United States. Beset by challenges ranging from pandemic and war to fire and economic uncertainty, museums have sought ways to emerge from crisis periods stronger than before, occasionally carving important new paths forward in the process.

The Museum explores the concepts of the multiple “crises” of the museums, and these historic institutions attempts to dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty. 

Samuel J. Redman speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the fires, floods, wars, and existential crises that have redefined what museums do and how they think of themselves and their public, asking challenging questions about American cultural life. Not deterred by these institutions' tendency to forgot their even recent past, Redman argues that cultural institutions can, and should, use their history to construe their future identity.

Samuel J. Redman is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums and Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology.

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The Museum
A Short History of Crisis and Resilience

Samuel J. Redman

Published by NYU Press, 2022
ISBN 9781479809332

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On the centenary of the fascist party's ascent to power in Italy, Curating Fascism examines the ways in which exhibitions organised after the fall of Mussolini's regime to the present day have shaped collective memory, historical narratives, and political discourse around the Italian ventennio. It charts how shows on fascism have evolved since the postwar period in Italy, explores representations of Italian fascism in exhibitions across the world, and highlights blindspots in art and cultural history, as well as in exhibition practices. 

Curating Fascism treats fascism as both a historical moment and a major paradigm through which critics, curators, and the public at large have defined the present moment. It interweaves historical perspectives, critical theory, and direct accounts of exhibitions from the people who conceived them or responded to them most significantly in order to examine the main curatorial strategies, cultural relevance, and political responsibility of art exhibitions focusing on the Fascist period. 

Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida speak to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the role which post-war exhibitions played in shaping our understandings of Italian Modernist art's relationship with Fascism, their contested curatorial and art historical strategies, and the continuing difficulty of reading political signs in aesthetics. 

• Post Zang Tumb Tuuum at Fondazione Prada
• Maaza Mengiste's Project 3541

Sharon Hecker is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art. She is the author of A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, and co-editor of Postwar Italian Art History: Untying the Knot  and Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art . For her work on Italian art, Hecker has received fellowships from the Getty, Fulbright, and Mellon Foundations.

Raffaele Bedarida is Associate Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, USA. An art historian specializing in transnational modernism and politics, Bedarida focuses on cultural diplomacy, migration, and cultural exchange between Italy and the United States. He is the author of Corrado Cagli: La pittura, l’esilio, L’America and Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera. Bedarida has received fellowships from the Center for Italian Modern Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art

On 'fascism' in contemporary art: Larne Abse Gogarty. ‘The Art Right’. Art Monthly, April 2017. Read and weep.

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Curating Fascism
Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to TodayEdited by Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida

Published by Bloomsbury, 2022
ISBN 9781350229457

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In Uncommon Sense, Craig Leonard argues for the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic theory of Herbert Marcuse, an original member of the Frankfurt School and icon of the New Left, while also acknowledging his philosophical limits. This account reinvigorates Marcuse for contemporary readers, putting his aesthetic theory into dialogue with anti-capitalist activism.

Craig Leonard speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about anti-art, habit, the practice of defamiliarisation, a subversion of common sense. Leonard brings forward Marcuse’s claim that the aesthetic dimension is political because of its refusal to operate according to the repressive common sense that establishes and maintains relationships dictated by advanced capitalism.

Craig Leonard‘s research and teaching interests include artist publications, sound art, performance and sculpture. His recent exhibitions include Central Art Garage (Ottawa), Darling Green (New York) and Double Happiness (Toronto). He is associate professor of art at NSCAD.

Uncommon Sense
Aesthetics After MarcuseCraig Leonard

Published by MIT Press, 2022
ISBN 9780262371681

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NFT, BTC, DAO, ETH, WAGMI, HODL. It would have been hard to avoid these acronyms only a year ago. The hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchain art was almost as annoying as the glee with which crypto sceptics welcomed the sudden onset of the crypto winter.

But for all the popularity of Bored Apes and Ponzi scheme stories, there seems to have been little serious engagement with the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the blockchain. The academy appears to have dismissed the crypto world out of hand, citing its financial unviability and the deeply 'problematic' philosophical foundations of its technology.

Rhea Myers is a crypto artist, writer, and hacker who searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Her engagement in the technical history and debates in blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy.

Remodelling the tropes of conceptual art and net art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.

Rhea Myers speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about art’s role in mapping and shaping the emergent properties of blockchain technologies, the crypto-libertarian, anarchy-capitalist nexus, and the enduring legacy of the conceptual art movement.

Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks with essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.

• PostScript Viruses, 1993
• Portrait of V.I. Lenin With Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock III by Art & Language
• Furtherfield Gallery
• Is Art, 2014/15, Art Is, 2014/17
• Certificate of Inauthencity, 2020

Rhea Myers is an artist, writer, and blockchain developer and activist. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers focussed on blockchain tech in 2011, becoming one of the first artists to enter into creative, speculative, and conceptual engagement with ‘the new internet’.

Proof of Wok: Blockchain Provocations 2011-2021

Rhea Myers

Published by Urbanomic, 2022
ISBN 9781915103048

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Visual Culture and the Forensic bridges practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example, in performance and installation art, or photography. David Houston Jones speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the evidentiary and forensic burden of art and photography, the artifice of crime imaging, the visual traces of data, and the ontology of data and objects.

• Angela Strassheim’s Evidence
• Melanie Pullen’s Crime Scenes, Hugo’s Camera
• The death of Alan Kurdi and Ai WeiWei’s restaging of the scene
• Kathryn Smith’s Incident Room: Jacoba ‘Bubbles’ Shroeder, 1949-2012
• Luc Delahaye
• Horace Vernet
• Trevor Paglen’s Autonomy Cube
• Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour
• Julian Charrière’s Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, 2013
• Simon Norkfolk’s When I am Laid in Earth
• Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries, 2003
• My interview with Eyal Weizmann and Matthew Keenan on Forensic Aesthetics and the practice of Forensic Architecture
• Josef Mengele’s bones used in forensic identification
• Forensic Architecture‘s investigations
• My interview with Toby Green and Thomas Fazi on The Covid Consensus.

David Houston Jones is Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter.

Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics David Houston Jones

9780367420932

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During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies.

The Covid Consensus provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shutdowns devastated small businesses, the working classes, and the Global South’s informal economies.

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi argue that these policies grossly exacerbated existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance, with grave implications for the future. Rich in human detail, The Covid Consensus tackles head-on the refusal of the global political class and mainstream media to report the true extent of the erosion of democratic processes and the socioeconomic assault on the poor.

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the emergence of a global consensus, the abject failure of the left to hold power to account, and the sometimes fine line between critique and conspiracy theorising.

• Richard Seymour’s critique of the book on Politics, Theory, Other.

Toby Green is Professor of African History at King’s College London, and author of A Fistful of Shells and The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa.

Thomas Fazi is the author and co-author of several books on economic and political issues, including Reclaiming the State. His article with Toby Green for UnHerd, The Left’s Covid Failure, was translated into ten languages. He is a regular contributor to Compact.

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The Covid Consensus
The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left Toby Green
Thomas Fazi Published by Hurst, 2023
ISBN 9781787388413

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For the past two decades, the arts and cultural establishment in the UK has been trying to engage a broader set of audiences in their work. Countless initiatives to make the arts more accessible to the public and to make them more relevant have been advocated for in policy and funding settlements.

But the dial on who participates and how much has not shifted, despite many thousands of projects trying to address the problem. And this isn’t even the punchline. Not only do the interventions not work, nobody involved in them admits that the interventions may have been a failure.

Having spent many years working in cultural policy studies and in arts practice, Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson take the arts and culture sector to task over this fiction. Their book Failures in Cultural Participation puts a mirror to the industry and invites cultural policymakers, organisations, and practitioners to confront their failures.

David Stevenson speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the culture sector’s refusal to acknowledge failure in widening participation and moving the debate from the ‘value’ of culture to considering how policies can be designed and implemented. David argues for an honest and transparent acknowledgement of failure at individual, organisational and governmental levels.

• The Failspace Project tools
• A special issue of the Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation edited by Leila and David
• David’s “I hate opera” paper.

Leila Jancovich is a professor of Cultural Policy and Participation at the University of Leeds. Before entering academia, she worked for many years in the arts and festivals sector as a producer, researcher, and policy maker.

David Stevenson is the Dean of The School of Arts, Social Sciences, and Management at Queen Margaret University. His research focuses on relations of power and the production of value within the cultural sector.

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Failures in Cultural Participation Leila Jancovich, David Stevenson Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2022 (open access)
ISBN 9783031161155

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Art has a long history of engaging with conflict and violence. From the antiquities, through Goya, to Guernica, our museums are filled with depictions of battles, pogroms, uprisings, and their suppression. Not all of these stories are told from the perspective of the victors.

Many contemporary creatives have continued this tradition. While the position of the official war artist seems to have gone out of fashion, conflict hasn’t. Artists are compelled to document the violence and conflict that for some is the matter of the everyday.

Kaelan Wilson-Goldie’s Beautiful, Gruesome, and True is an account of the lives and practices of three such artists Teresa Margolles, Amar Kanwar, and the collective Abounadorra. The documents which these practices produce have found their way into the mainstream contemporary art world, for better, or often worse.

Kaelan Wilson-Goldie speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the implicit contracts artists enter with their communities, the art world’s exploitative interest in conflict, and the role of aesthetic expression in mediating, if not ameliorating conflict.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic who contributes regularly to Artforum, Aperture, and Afterall, among other publications. She is the author of Etel Adnan, a monographic study on the paintings of the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, and a contributor to numerous books on modern and contemporary art.

Teresa Margolles

• Documentation of Margolles’ pavilion in in Venice in 2009,
• Her works at Mor Charpenter and Peter Kilchmann,
• Her Fourth Plinth proposal for London.

Abounaddara

• Abounaddara at Documenta 14,
• The Right to the Image (in Arabic)
• The Islamic State for Dummies – Part One, 2014.

Amar Kanwar

• Amar Kanwar’s The Season Outside, 1997,
• and Many Faces of Madness, 2000.

ISBN 9781735913735

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In the 1990s, a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art sprung up across Eastern Europe: Almaty, Belgrade, Budapest, Kiev, Ljubljana, Prague, Riga, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Zagreb among them. These centres, funded as their name suggests by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Foundation, had as their mission the cataloguing of dissident pre-1989 art and the introduction of new forms of artistic practice to the art scenes of post-Eastern Block states. Within a decade, the centres wound up their operation and their histories have been forgotten but not because they made a mark on Eastern European art and societies.

The Influencing Machine, Aaron Moulton’s exhibition and book traces the network’s history and evaluates its outsized impact on its host societies. Through the use of template annual exhibitions and synchronised open calls, the Centres pioneered forms of socially engaged practice that preceded the form’s development in Western art capitals and gave artists access to unprecedented production budgets, international networking opportunities, and access to new media technologies.

Moulton proposes that the Centres played an underappreciated role in orienting artists ideologically in pro-Western and pro-neoliberal directions, a that the extent of their influence has been underappreciated. In societies making the transition from socialism to free-reign capitalism, the actions of a single NGO which habitually outspent all other funders appear to have been glossed over if not outright expunged from memory.

The book invites a conversation about the global art world, the role of activism in art, and the power of institutional critique. Its proposals should be a warning to anyone attempting to understand the role of capital in forming cultural consciousness today. If a single NGO could be credited with creating the cultural values of a whole region without once being called to account, what other ideologies is contemporary art producing and on whose orders?

Aaron Moulton speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the legacy of the Soros Centers of Contemporary Art Network, gonzo anthropology and conspiratorial theorising as methods for writing art history from neglected vantage points, and the antisemitic, bogeyman tropes which appear along the way.

Aaron Multon trained at the RCA, London and was the editor of Flash Art International and a curator at Gagosian Gallery. He founded the Berlin exhibition space Feinkost.

• The Influencing Machine exhibition at CCA Ujazdowski Castle
• My interview with Geert Lovink

The Influencing Machine

Aaron Moulton Published by CCA Ujazdowski Castle, 2022
ISBN 9788367203050

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Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money?

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.

Sad by Design by Geert Lovink offers a critical analysis of the controversies which drive our online media behaviours. Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’.

Geert Lovink speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the frustrations of studying the internet as it evolves from networks to platforms, the politically-contingent notions of online 'communities', and cycles of ideological production and capture.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic who has chronicled the development of internet and network cultures as they came of age alongside him. He is the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, Social Media Abyss, and most recently Struck on the Platform. He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam where we met.

Sad by Design
On Platform Nihilism Geert Lovink

Published by Pluto Press, 2019
ISBN 9780745339344

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It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and come with their own artefacts and subcultures.

Peter Rehberg’s book Hipster Porn looks at one such source artefact and its fandom, using as its matter the pink-papered magazine Butt which gained a cult following among European gay men in the first decade of the 2000s. The book reconstructs an important chapter of recent gay and queer history in order to make sense of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years in the contemporary gay world.

Peter Rehberg speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about pornography after porn, Butt‘s outsized influence and the ultimate failures of its politics, as well as queer theory’s urgent need to refocus on the realities of sex and sexuality.

Peter Rehberg is a writer, critic, and curator. He holds a PhD in German Literature from New York University and has taught and researched at universities and institutes including Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, University of Bonn, The University of Texas at Austin, and The University of Illinois, Chicago. He has published two novels and a collection of short stories. He also writes regularly for German media. In his academic work, he focusses on queer theory, queer visual culture, and popular culture. He is also the head of collections and archives at Schwules Museum, Berlin.

Butt magazine website and archive.

Hipster Porn 
Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine Butt Peter Rehberg Published by Routledge, 2021
ISBN 9781032044613

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Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art  maps, critiques, and celebrates activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to activism by artists, and activist forms of art.

Gregory Sholette speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the vanishing distinctions between art, art activism, and traditional political activism, and the political dimensions of culture in a hyper-aestheticised world that is indicative of a broader crisis of capitalism. Sholette describes a new wave of activist art taking place not only within community-based protest groups, as it has for decades, but amongst professionally trained artists many of whom refuse to respect the conventional borders separating painting from protest, or art from utility.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and activist. He has participated in, documented, and written about activist art for over forty years. He is the co-convenor of the school Social Practice Queens, a pioneering programme training artists to become social and political activists.

The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art Gregory Sholette

Published by Lund Humphries, 2022
ISBN 9781848224414

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Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonisation, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the project of ‘decolonisation’ as intellectually unsound and unrealistic. Táíwò rejects decolonisation’s conflation of modernity with coloniality and takes to task the decolonisers’ confused attempts at undoing of global society’s foundations.

He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.

This much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German and Portuguese. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015.

• NBN interview with Olúfẹ́mi on Africa Must Be Modern

Against Decolonisation
Taking African Agency Seriously Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò Published by Hurst, 2022
ISBN 9781787386921

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Art after Liberalism is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others.

What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development can no longer be counted on to produce a world worth living in? It is increasingly clear that these commonplace liberal conceptions have failed to improve life in any lasting way. In fact, they conceal fundamental connections to enslavement, colonization, moral debt, and ecological devastation.

Nicholas Gamso speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the ills of liberalism and art’s role in deciding on what may come after the impasse.

Nicholas Gamso is a writer and academic who works across theory, visual culture, performance, and space/place. He’s an editor at Places.

• Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014
• Manaf Halbouni, Monument, 2017
• Warren Kanders controversy at the Whitney
• Triple Chaser by Forensic Architecture
• My conversations with and on Forensic Architecture
• Wolfgang Tillmans and his anti-Brexit campaign
• Ren Hang

Art After Liberalism Nicholas Gamso Published by Columbia University Press, 2022
ISBN 9781941332689

In 2008, the artist Renzo Martens released his controversial film Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The film portrayed the artist as a colonial explorer travelling around the Congo’s plantations with the naiveté of the cartoon character Tintin. Martens encounters poverty, hunger, and abuse, all the while narrating the way in which these experiences enrich him as a western observer.

In a manner now familiar in mainstream critical culture, the film was labelled as 'problematic'. Martens’ work and method were critiqued widely by an array of commentators. Some have changed their mind in light of Martens’ further work. Others - and I know this from speaking with an editor of a prominent art magazine - won’t come anywhere near it even fourteen years on "for fear of inadvertently promoting Martens' practice".

Critique in Practice, a volume edited by Anthony Downey brings together a range of responses to Enjoy Poverty, some dating from 2008, others more recent. It contains essays by the likes of Dan Fox, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Artur Zmijewski, TJ Demos, JJ Charlesworth, Ariella Aisha Azoulay, JA Koster, and Gregory Sholette. The book explores the limits of artistic practice as critique, challenging both Martens and the writers.

Because it would be impossible to speak to them and because I already interviewed Anthony Downy not long ago, I invited Renzo Martens, the subject of the book and its critiques to join me.

• Watch Episode III: Enjoy Poverty
• Institute of Human Activities
• The Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC)
• CATPC at Sculpture Center
• Article in The New Yorker
• The Balot NFT
• My interview with Anthony Downey

Critique in Practice 
Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty Edited by Anthony Downey Published by Sternberg, 2019
ISBN 9783956795053

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organisations and has found them wanting.

In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art’s sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the histories and futures of Institutional Critique, the museum’s neoliberal catch-22, and about an exhibition that didn’t happen.

Karen Archey is Curator of Contemporary Art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Formerly based in Berlin and New York, she worked earlier as an independent curator, editor, and art critic, writing for publications such as Artforum and frieze.

• Lawrence Weiner, A Square Removal from a Rug in Use, 1969
• Mel Bochner, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, 1966
• Seth Siegelaub, The Xerox Book, 1968
• Hans Haacke, Condenstation Cube, 1963-68
• Steyerl, Hito. ‘The Institution of Critique’. In Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, 13–20. London: MayFlyBooks, 2009
• Mario García Torres, Preliminary Sketches for the Past and the Future (Stedelijk Museum), 2007
• Isa Genzken, Ohr (Ear), 1980
• Josh Kline
• Park McArthur, Ramps

After Institutions Karen Archey

Published by Floating Opera Press, 2022
ISBN 9783981910889

How can a library change the world? How can an art library change the art school or the gallery? Or even an art practice? In shelf documents, artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians reflect on how they can use the beloved library as a source of inspiration or a field of action.

In thinking about diversity in collections, the publication proposes art libraries as sites of intersubjective communion. shelf documents is rooted in a collaborative book acquisition project, initiated by the artist Heide Hinrichs at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, in which her group integrated over 200 new titles in art libraries as a way to fill gaps, to amplify voices, and seek out the self-initiated or the overlooked.

Heide Hinrichs, Elizabeth Haines, and Jo-ey Tang speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about working with institutions, working slowly, and working together to interfere with the permanence of libraries.

Heide Hinrichs is an artist who works with found and existing materials. For the first Kathmandu Triennale, she developed the project On Some of the Birds of Nepal. In 2018, she published Silent Sisters/Stille Schwestern, an unauthorised German translation of Theresa Hak Kyng Cha’s novel Dictee.

Elizabeth Haines is a historian and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Bristol. Her interdisciplinary interest in the materiality of knowledge productions draws on her education in fine arts.

Jo-ey Tang is an artist, curator, and writer. He was previously the director of exhibitions at the Beeler Galery at Columbus College of Art & Design and is currently the director of Kadist, San Francisco.

The list of books involved in the project is available at second-shelf.org.

shelf documents
art library as practice edited by Heide Hinrichs, Jo-ey Tang, and Elizabeth Haines, with drawings by Heide Hinrichs

Published by b-books, 2021
ISBN 9783942214384

We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses.

Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between this self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of social and mental distress, these theoretical insights are potential dynamite. Shifting his explorations from the sonic to the social, amplifying alienation and playing with psychic noise, artist and performer Mattin finally lights the fuse.

The noise is here to stay. Alienation is a constitutive part of subjectivity and an enabling condition for exploring social dissonance—the territory upon which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit today.

Mattin speaks (and sings) to Pierre d’Alancaisez about his performance score Social Dissonance, in which the audience is the instrument and the legacy of the Marxist theory of alienation.

Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practice and writing, he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide.

He has performed in festivals such as Performa and Club Transmediale and lectured in institutions such as Dutch Art Institute, Cal Arts, Bard, and Goldsmiths. Mattin is part of the bands Billy Bao and Regler and has over 100 releases on different labels worldwide. He co-hosts the podcast Social Discipline. Mattin took part in 2017 in documenta14 in Athens and Kassel.

• Information on the Social Dissonance concert at Documenta 14
• A video recording of one of the performances

Social Dissonance Mattin

Published by Urbanomic, 2022
ISBN 9781913029814

Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded at-hoc in discrete, time- and output-bound chunks.

This is the logic of projects. The workforce no longer dedicates itself to the making of a singular commodity, as it was the case with Smith, but bids for discrete pieces of work when those are in demand. In some industries, for example, in the art world, the workforce is also charged with building the demand for their work by initiating the project which would then employ them.

The ABC of the Projectariat by Kuba Szreder contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in contemporary art. It is both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. Kuba Szreder speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the artistic project, and the effects of projectarisation on workers’ solidarity, communal governance, and the precarity of artistic activity.

Kuba Szreder is a lecturer in the department of art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He combines his research with independent curatorial practice. His previous publications include Joy Forever: Political Economy of Social Creativity (2011) and Art Factory: Division of Labor and Distribution of Resources in the Field of Contemporary Art in Poland (2014). In 2018, together with Kathrin Böhm, he initiated Centre for Plausible Economies, a cluster devoted to reimagining economies of contemporary art and using artistic imagination to redraw the economy at large.

• A report on the Free/Slow University of Warsaw
• Pierre’s interview with François Matarasso on community art
• Pierre’s essay on the social artist’s absorption into the professional-managerial class
• Kuba’s work with Kathrin Böhm (Company Drinks/myvillages) on the Centre for Plausible Economies, which contributed to Documenta 15
• A New Books Network Interview with Dave O’Brien et al on Culture is Bad for You
• Pierre’s review of Sam Friedman’s and Daniel Laurison’s The Class Ceiling

The ABC of the Projectariat 
Living and working in a precarious art world Kuba Szreder

Published by Manchester University Press, 2021
ISBN 9781526161321

The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to seemingly leaderless internet misinformation.

Many of such events have been the subject of academic study - but research is often slow to keep up with the rapidly changing scene. If a researcher tracing the role of the meme to the politicisation and radicalisation of online communities struggles to keep up what hope does an artist have?

Joshua Citarella’s practice starts with the understanding that it is impossible to predict what the next generation of meme posters will be interested in and whether their memes will reach beyond their tiny echo chambers. What is clear is that mainstream politics, particularly the politics of the left, remains afraid of these unruly communities that can just as easily turn to the dark corners of the demonised alt-right as they are to carry the flag for Bernie.

Joshua Citarella speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about researching internet subcultures, playing politics with the extremely online, the multiple meanings of radicalisation, strategies for subverting right-wing content, and the role of art in internet political aesthetics.

Joshua Citarella is an artist, content creator, and researcher. Politigram and the Post-left is one of many projects he has released through self-publishing channels and directly to his supporters.

• Joshua on Instagram and Patreon
• 20 Interviews with meme-posters
• Do Not Research, and online internet culture magazine
• When Guys Turn 20, Joshua's video series at dis.art
• Do Not Research exhibition at Lower Cavity
• Interview with Mike Watson on The Memeing of Mark Fisher

Politigram and the Post-Left Joshua Citarella

Published by Blurb, 2021
ISBN 9781006610196

In conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequal ity has been supplanted by fast-evolving set of reflections of group identity. Mainstream politics makes fast and loose assumptions about the relationship between class and identity, and between economic conditions and culture. These assumptions are a key contributor to the culture wars.

In The Identity Myth, David Swift covers the four different kinds of identity most susceptible to rhetorical and cultural manipulation – class, race, sex, and age. He considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, it is not that identities are simply more ‘complex’ than they appear. Rather, there are commonalities more important to the creation of solidarity.

David Swift speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the crisis of class and the deceptive allure of identity politics. We talk about the divisive nature of the contested claims of identity and about strategies for regaining control of the narrative. In a powerful call to arms, Swift argues that we must unite against these identity myths and embrace our differences to beat inequality.

David Swift is a historian and writer who specialises in the history and contemporary politics of the British Left. He has written on the state of the Left for The Times, Fabian Review, Progress Online, Jewish Chronicle, and The Critic. He is the author of A Left for Itself, 2019.

• The Emily Thornberry white van tweet story,
• Gordon Brown's 'bigotgate',
• Keir Starmer and 'beergate',
• Tomiwa Owolade's essay on Anglican social conservatism in London, 'rooted' in David's work,
• Rachel Dolezal is now an artist,
• San Francisco school board recall,
• White narcissism at a BLM protest.

The Identity Myth
Why We Need to Embrace Our Differences to Beat Inequality David Swift

Published by Constable, 2022
ISBN 9780349135366

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Through his blog K-Punk, Mark Fisher become one of the cult figures of cultural theory after the economic crash of 2008. One of Fisher's insights, widely taken up by the online memesphere, was that capitalism breeds depression. Mike Watson picks up Fisher's prognosis when the locked-down pandemic world is mired in a depression that is economic and psychological, and no doubt exacerbated by the transfer of culture and life online.

In the aftermath, The Memeing of Mark Fisher revisits the Frankfurt School theorists who worked in the shadow of World War Two, during the rise of the culture industry. In examining their thoughts and drawing parallels with Fisher's Capitalist Realism, Watson aims to render the Frankfurt School as an incisive theoretical toolbox for the post-Covid digital age.

Taking in the phenomena of QAnon, twitch streaming, and memes, Watson argues that the dichotomy between culture and political praxis is a false one. As more people have access to the means for theoretical and critical engagement online, he urges the online left to build a real-life cultural and political movement.

Mike Watson speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about Mark Fisher's legacy in critical online spaces, the democracy of memes and their aesthetic warfare, the Acid Left, and how the Frankfurt School thinkers foreshadowed our current moment.

Mike Watson is a theorist, critic and curator who is principally focused on the relationship between culture, new media and politics. He hosts the podcast Theorywave Nights.

• Can the Left Learn to Meme?
• Mark Fisher's K-Punk blog archive
• K-Punk anthology
• Know Your Meme database
• Capitalist Realism bed meme
• 4chan
• Wojak meme
• Doomer meme
• The Acid Left podcast
• Mike's book memed by Academic Fraud

The Memeing of Mark Fisher 
How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What to Do About It Mike Watson

Published by Zer0Books, 2021
ISBN 9781789049336

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In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Place or the oxycontin scandal have forced changes to the governance of some of the world’s best-known institutions. At the same time, the work of journalists and museum scholars has revealed that the relationships between trustees, curators, collections, and the public are often far more complex than the narratives of public benefit and private value would have us believe.

Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth is a critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form. In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in ‘public trust’ on behalf of the nation. Shaked argues that the public serves as an alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets.

In The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum, Georgina Adam tracks the phenomenon of the collector’s museum in the 21st century. There are some 400 private art museums around the world, and an astonishing 70% of those devoted to contemporary art were founded in the past 20 years. Although private museums have been accused of being tax-evading vanity projects or ‘tombs for trophies’, the picture is complex and nuanced. Private museums can add greatly to the cultural life of a community, giving a platform to emerging artists, supplying educational programmes and revitalising declining or neglected regions. But their relationship with public institutions can also be problematic.

Are museums purely public affairs? How do private collections serve the greater good? What happens when these missions become confused? Georgina Adam and Nizan Shaked speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the 500-year history and the recent rise of the private art museum and consider if even public museums are, in the end, private.

Georgina Adam is a journalist specialising in the art market. She writes for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper. She is the author of Big Bucks and The Dark Side of the Boom.

Nizan Shaked is a professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies at California State University Long Beach. She is the author of The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art.

• Museum Susch
• The Fisher collection at SF MoMA
• Warren Kanders leaves the board of the Whitney

ISBN 9781848223844

ISBN 9781350045767

For better or worse, artists write. But why would a visual artist write a novel? How should such a novel be experienced? How does the artist’s novel compare or compete with literary fiction as we know it?

David Maroto, the author of The Artist’s Novel considers the proliferation of artists writing novels as a sign of the emergence of a new medium. Artists engaging in this new medium do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favouring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. Maroto’s work is the first to explore the subject of the artist’s novel in depth.

David Maroto speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the artist’s novel and the demands it makes on its readers and, as he found out through his own practice, on its curators and publishers. David reads from Benjamin Soror’s Mime Radio and voices the mythical satyr Marsyas but, sadly, stops short of singing.

David Maroto is a visual artist, researcher, writer, and curator based in Rotterdam.

• David Maroto’s first novel Illusion
• The Book Lovers, a project by David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska
• Benjamin Seror’s Mime Radio
• Goldin+Senneby‘s Headless
• Ale Cecchetti’s exhibition at Ujazdowski Castle
• Alex Cecchetti’s novel Tamam Shud

The Artist’s Novel
A New Medium
The Fantasy of the Novel David Maroto

Published by Mousse, 2020
ISBN 9788867494224, 9788867494255

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According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description.

For many artists, however, the practice of Surrealist art took on an explicitly political and therefore practical dimensions. In Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, art historian Abigail Susik argues that many Surrealists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work.

Abigail Susik speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Oscar Domínguez. She brings these questions into the present by engaging with the work of the Chicago Surrealists of the 1960s and 70s.

Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and co-editor of Surrealism and film after 1945.

• Man Ray, Séance de rêve éveiillé
• Oscar Domínguez, Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle
• Surrealism Without Borders at Tate Modern
• Abigail’s op-eds in the Washington Post and New York Times
• Abigail’s forthcoming book Radical Dreams

Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work 

Abigail Susik 

Published by Manchester University Press, 2021 

ISBN 9781526155016

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Killing for Show 
Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq Julian Stallabrass

Published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2020
ISBN 9781538141809

In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck that may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus to Iraq and back, burning £35,000 an hour in fuel, to launch a smart missile costing £100,000 to destroy a truck or, rather, to create a video that shows it being destroyed. Some lives are ended—it is impossible to tell whose—so that the government can pretend that it taking effective action by creating a high-budget snuff movie. This is killing for show.

Since the Vietnam War the way we see conflict – through film, photographs, and pixels – has had a powerful impact on the political fortunes of the campaign, and the way that war has been conducted. In this fully illustrated and passionately argued account of war imagery, Julian Stallabrass tells the story of post-war conflict, how it was recorded and remembered through its iconic photography. Through accounts of events such as My Lai massacre, the violent suppression of insurgent Fallujah, or the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, Stallabrass maps a comprehensive theoretical re-evaluation of the relationship between war, politics and visual culture.

Julian Stallabrass talks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the inescapable complicity of photography and media in warfare, the technical and social evolution of images as lethal weapons, and their changing role as witnesses or propaganda documents.

Julian Stallabrass is an art historian, photographer, curator, and professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

• Thomas Dworzak’s Taliban studio photographs
• Documentary on Eugenie Goldberg’s Open Shutters of Iraq
• Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, photographed by Eddie Adams
• Lisa Barnard
• James Bridle’s Dronestagram
• Omer Fast’s 5000 feet is the Best

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Medium Design 
Knowing How to Work on the World Keller Easterling

Published by Verso, 2020
ISBN 9781788739320

How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas, from climate change, to inequality, to concentrations of authoritarian power? Keller Easterling argues that the search for singular solutions is a mistake. Instead, she offers the perspective of medium design, one that considers not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. This background matrix with all its latent potentials is profoundly underexploited in a culture that is good at naming things but not so good at seeing how they connect and interact.

In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design looks not to new technologies for innovation but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organisations of all kinds.

Keller Easterling speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about thinking in a world where ‘nothing works’, the paradoxical possibilities for solving concurrent problems, and the chances of winning games rigged by the Superbug.

Keller Easterling is a designer, writer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. She is the author of  Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014) and numerous other books and articles. Easterling was a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design, and the recipient of the 2019 Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking.

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What Do Men Want? 
Masculinity and Its Discontents Nina Power

Published by Penguin/Allen Lane, 2022
ISBN 9780241356500

Something is definitely up with men. From millions online who engage with the manosphere to the #metoo backlash, from Men’s Rights activists and incels to spiralling suicide rates, it’s easy to see that, while men still rule the world, masculinity is in crisis. Feminism has gone some way towards dismantling the patriarchy, but how can we hold on to the best aspects of our metaphorical Father?

Nina Power speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the challenge of accepting biological differences and the potential for men and women living well in a world where capitalism has replaced the values – family, religion, service, and honour – that used to give our lives meaning.

Nina Power is a philosopher, critic, and cultural theorist. She is the author of One Dimensional Woman, a co-host of The Lack, and she publishes a newsletter on Substack.

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The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality Grant Tavinor

Published by Routledge, 2021
ISBN 9780367619251

When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the “real” world.

Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved.

But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve.

This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography.

Grant Tavinor speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about some of the fundamental features of virtual reality, the implications of working in a picturing medium, as well as the challenges that VR poses to the philosophy of the arts and ethics.

Grant Tavinor is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lincoln University, New Zealand. He has published widely on the aesthetics of videogames, virtual worlds, digital media ethics, and the philosophy of technology.

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A Philosophy of the Art School Michael Newall

Published by Routledge, 2021
ISBN 9781032094342

If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between ‘you too are an artist’ and ‘abandon all hope you who enter here’ would be difficult. Despite significant changes in mainstream art education in recent decades, many anglophone art schools have not abandoned the principal tools of the masterclass or the crit that stem from some stubborn 18th-century ideas and the belief that creativity is the preserve of the artistic genius. Considering these histories can shed light on the role of the art school in the 21st century.

Research on art schools has been largely occupied with the facts of particular schools and teachers. Michael Newall’s book presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. It analyses two models that, hidden beneath the diversity of contemporary artist training, have come to dominate art schools. The book draws on first-hand accounts of art school teaching and is deeply informed by disciplines ranging from art history and art theory to the philosophy of art, education and creativity.

Michael Newall speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the masterclass and the crit, the pervasive idea of the Romantic genius, creative disagreements with Kant, and the lessons for the future that a historical perspective may offer.

Michael Newall is a programme leader in art and philosophy at the University of Kent.

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The Play in the System
The Art of Parasitical Resistance Anna Watkins Fisher

Published by Duke University Press, 2021
ISBN 9781478009702

What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System, Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism, a tactic of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures.

Anna Watkins Fisher speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the underhand tactics of the parasite – artists like the collective Ubermorgen, Núria Güell, the writer Chris Krauss, or Roisin Byrne – by which it appropriates the logic of their hosts – Amazon, the Spanish State, Dick, and in the case of Byrne, Watkins Fisher herself.

• Ubermorgen, Amazon Noir
• Núria Güell, Stateless by Choice, Humanitarian Aid
• Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present
• Ann Liv Young archive.org capture, Sheryl Is Present
• Lauren Barri Holstein

Anna Watkins Fisher is a cultural and media theorist whose research spans the fields of digital studies, performance studies, visual culture, environmental humanities, and critical theory. She is an associate professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The Play in the System is available as an open-source download.

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Sociopolitical Aesthetics 
Art, Crisis and Neoliberalism Kim Charnley

Published by Bloomsbury, 2021
ISBN 9781350008748

Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions that are somewhere between art and politics. Kim Charnley’s Sociopolitical Aesthetics traces key currents of theory and practice, mapping them against the dominant experience of the last decade: crisis.

Drawing upon leading artists and theorists within this field – including Hito Steyerl, Marina Vishmidt, Art & Language, Gregory Sholette, John Roberts and Dave Beech – Sociopolitical Aesthetics argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between socially-engaged art and neoliberalism. Kim Charnley explores the possibility that neoliberalism has destabilized the art system so that it is no longer able to absorb and neutralize dissent. As a result, the relationship between aesthetics and politics is experienced with fresh urgency and militancy.

Kim Charnley speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the political punditry of Artist Taxi Driver and the political sloganeering of Tim Etchells, the limits of institutional sociality in the work of Tania Bruguera, the various guises of institutional critique, and what these developments owe to the conceptual art practices of the 1970s.

Dr Kim Charnley is an art historian and theorist at the Open University.

The works we discuss:

• Chunky Mark / Artist Taxi Driver on YouTube, Twitter
• Tim Etchells, Revolution
• Tania Bruguera, 10,148,451 at Tate Modern
• Mark Storor’s work with The Heart of Glass
• Andrea Fraser on institutionnel critique
• Hito Steyerl, November, 2014, Is the Museum a Battlefield, 2013
• Art & Language, The Fox, 1975-76

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Communions Adam Lehrer

Published by Hyperidean Press, 2021
ISBN 9781916376755

Artists from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse command fascination not only for their work but also for their drug addictions and the manner of their death. Communions is an attempt to understand the role that opiates play in the artistic lives of those who are gripped by addiction.

Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorisation, Communions probes the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture.

Adam Lehrer speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about addiction and class, our fetish for the artist flirting with death, communing with his heroes, his experience of the opioid crisis, and the role for art criticism in unraveling all these issues.
Lehrer reads a chapter on Darby Crash from Communions.

Adam Lehrer is a writer and art critic, but he’s also a former heroin addict himself. He blogs at Safety Propaganda.

• A Statement On My Severed Relationship With The Quietus
• Art’s Moral Fetish
• Darby Crash
• Frisk, film based on a novel by Dennis Cooper
• Dash Snow
• Beautiful Boy, film based on memoirs by David and Nic Sheff
• Zoë Tamerlis Lund

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Investigative Aesthetics 
Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth Matthew Fuller
Eyal Weizman

Published by Verso, 2021
ISBN 9781788739085

Today, journalists, legal professionals, activists, and artists challenge the state’s monopoly on investigation and the production of narratives of truth. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes, and technological domination. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, Bellingcat, or Forensic Architecture pore over open-source videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what Fuller and Weizman call ‘investigative aesthetics’: the mobilisation of sensibilities associated with art, architecture, and other such practices in order to challenge power.

Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art. These new practices take place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as they strive towards the construction of a new common sense.

Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the logics behind Forensic Architecture and the evidentiary turn: the aesthetics of distributed sensing, the investigative commons, and the condition of hyperaesthesia.

Matthew Fuller is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Media Ecologies, and with Andrew Goffey, Evil Media.

Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Hollow Land, The Least of All Possible Evils, and Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability.

• Forensic Architecture investigation archive.
• Investigation: The Bombing of Rafah, 2015
• Investigation: The Killing of Mark Duggan, 2020
• ICA London exhibiiton.
• Investigation: Triple-Chaser, 2019
• Protests surrounding the Whitney Museum’s trustee Warren Kanders’ involvement with Safariland.
• Kanders divests from his arms production holdings.

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Between Discipline and a Hard Place
The Value of Contemporary Art Alana Jelinek

Published by Bloomsbury, 2020
ISBN 9781350100473

Some fields have an easier time describing themselves than others. “History is the study of past events.” “Biology is the study of living organisms.” But art? Is art a discipline? Is it a practice? Who gets to answer this most fundamental of questions, and why do we prefer not to try? Between Discipline and a Hard Place, written from the perspective of a practising artist, proposes that, against a groundswell of historians, museums and commentators claiming to speak on behalf of art, it is artists alone who may define what art really is.

Between Discipline and a Hard Place is a passionate treatise arguing for a new way of understanding art that forefronts the role of the artist and the importance of inclusion within both the concept of art and the art world.

Alana Jelinek speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about a disciplined and disciplinary approach to thinking about art and its value outside the current preoccupation with economic considerations and the great potential of interdisciplinary working.

Alana Jelinek is an artist and a researcher at the University of Hertfordshire.

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Bound by Creativity
How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged Hannah Wohl

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2021
ISBN 9780226784694

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone.

Hannah Wohl speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about Bound by Creativity, her ethnographic study of the New York contemporary art scene that reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions and how aesthetic judgment evolves between artist studios, galleries, art fairs, and collectors’ houses.

We mention Paula Cooper Gallery and the work of artists Lucky DeBellevue and Gina Beavers. The Armory Show takes place in NY in early September 2021.

Hannah Wohl is an assistant professor in sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara.

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The Ends of Art Criticism Patricia Bickers

Published by Lund Humphries, 2021
ISBN 9781848224261

Crisis? What Crisis? At a time where there are repeated claims of the impending demise of art criticism, The Ends of Art Criticism  dispel these myths by arguing that the lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not, as some believe, a weakness, but a strength, allowing previously marginalised voices and new global and political perspectives to come to the fore.

Patricia Bickers speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about her time as the editor of Art Monthly, the changing role of art criticism, the politics of speaking and writing about art, the art school, the relationship between artists and critics, the academicisation of critical discourse, the relationship between art history and criticism, and.. the art of the interview.

Some of the works mentioned in the conversation:

• The Freeze exhibitions
• That Jerry Saltz tweet
• Richard Serra, Weight and Measure
• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Black Trans Archive
• Pilvi Takala, The Trainee
• Cameron Rowland, 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73
• The Art Monthly Talking Art anthology of artist interviews: Volume 1, Volume 2

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Art as an Interface of Law and Justice 
Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption Frans-Willem Korsten

Published by Hart, 2021
ISBN 9781509944347

Art as an Interface of Law and Justice looks at the way in which the ‘call for justice’ is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. Such calls may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it.

Frans-Willem Korsten speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about art that attempts to support – or disturb – law in pursuit of justice. He discusses Milo Rau’s The Congo Tribunal, Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive, the practice of Forensic Architecture, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Only God Forgives. Through art’s interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light.

Frans-Willem Korsten holds the chair in “Literature and Society” at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and works at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society in the Netherlands.

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Speculation
A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI Gayle Rogers

Published by Columbia University Press, 2021
ISBN 9780231200219

In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy?

Gayle Rogers speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the mirror and the watch tower, the Calvinist reformation, the scientific revolution, through Jane Austen, to the founding of the United States, and the shape of contemporary capitalism – with booms, manias, busts, and bubbles along the way. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future.

Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Creating Spaces of Hope 
Young Artists And The New Imagination In Egypt Caroline Seymour-Jorn

Published by The American University in Cairo Press, 2021
ISBN 9789774169748

It is now just over a decade since protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square started Egypt’s chapter in the events of the Arab Spring. Much has been made in western criticism of art and culture’s role in the revolution, but the everyday cultural production of studio artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and writers since has attracted less attention. How have artists responded personally and artistically to the political transformation? What has social role of art been in these periods of transition and uncertainty? What are the aesthetic shifts and stylistic transformations present in the contemporary Egyptian art world?

Caroline Seymour-Jorn speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about her many years of research in Cairo that goes beyond the current understandings of creative work solely as a form of resistance or political commentary, providing a more nuanced analysis of creative production in the Arab world. Caroline suggests that young artists like Hany Rashed or The Choir Project have turned their creative focus increasingly inward, to examine issues having to do with personal relationships, belonging and inclusion, and maintaining hope in harsh social, political and economic circumstances.

Caroline Seymour-Jorn is professor of comparative literature and Arabic translation at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of Cultural Criticism in Egyptian Women’s Writing, 2011.

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Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies
Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity Gemma Commane

Published by Bloomsbury, 2021
ISBN 9781788311267

What makes a woman ‘bad’ is commonly linked to certain ‘qualities’ or behaviours seen as morally or socially corrosive, dirty and disgusting. Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies explores the social, sexual and political significance of women who are labelled bad or dirty. Through case studies (including Empress Stah, RubberDoll or Doris La Trine), the book challenges the notion that sexual, slutty, bad, or dirty women are not worth listening to. Gemma Commane speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about her study of neo-burlesque, queer performances, and explicit entertainment as sites of power, possibility, and success.

Gemma Commane is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University. She is active in research in the fields of media and cultural studies, and gender and sexuality.

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A Restless Art 
How participation won, and why it matters François Matarasso

Published by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (open access), 2019
ISBN 978­1­903080­20­7

It is almost twenty years since contemporary art took a ‘participation turn’.  Now,  just about every museum or theatre company has a participation or engagement department. It is nothing short of orthodoxy that one of art’s core roles is to reach out to audiences beyond art institutions – and paradoxically it is often art institutions that mandate this function. How can we reconcile the somewhat forgotten history – and ongoing practice – of the community arts with the recent rise of participatory art, social practice, or outreach and engagement?

François Matarasso speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about his long-term engagement in community art practice, the meanings of participation and cultural democracy, and his proposals for thinking about cultural and artistic participation as a fundamental human right. We talk about the history of the community arts movement in the UK, his influential 1997 paper Use or Ornament, ways of supporting cultural democracy through projects like Fun Palaces, and reaching peak culture.

François Matarasso is a community artist, writer, and researcher, and one of the co-creators of the 2020 Rome Charter.

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Another Aesthetics Is Possible
Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War Jennifer Ponce de León

Published by Duke University Press, 2021
ISBN  9781478011255

In Another Aesthetics Is Possible Jennifer Ponce de León examines the roles that art can play in the collective labour of creating and defending another social reality. Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States, Ponce de León shows how experimental practices in the visual, literary, and performing arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist movements and popular uprisings that have repudiated neoliberal capitalism and its violence. Whether enacting solidarity with Zapatista communities through an alternate reality game or using surrealist street theatre to amplify the more radical strands of Argentina’s human rights movement, these artists fuse their praxis with forms of political mobilization from direct-action tactics to economic resistance. Advancing an innovative transnational and transdisciplinary framework of analysis, Ponce de León proposes a materialist understanding of art and politics that brings to the fore the power of aesthetics to both compose and make visible a world beyond capitalism.

Jennifer Ponce de León speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the counter colonial practice of the artist Fran Ilich, the activist performances of Grupo de Arte Callejero, Etcétera, and International Errorista rooted in the political histories of Latin America as a site of resistance in which the boundaries between art and politics blur.

Jennifer Ponce de León is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on cultural production and antisystemic movements in the Americas since the 1960s.

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Research/Practice

edited by Anthony Downey

I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze / Michael Rakowitz
The General’s Stork / Heba Y. AminRachel Armstrong

Published by Sternberg Press, 2019, 2020
ISBN 9783956794766, 9783956794780

In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s The General’s Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance. It is also the subject of the most recent book in the Research/Practice edited by Anthony Downey.

Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts, the series examines the interdisciplinary research methods that artists employ in their practices. In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to generating research, what forms of knowledge do artists produce?

Anthony Downey, speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the work of Heba Y. Amin and her exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms which he curated and the epistemic implications of cartographic imaging and computer vision for our understanding and command of territories. Downey also discusses I’m Good at Love, I’m Good at Hate, It’s in Between I Freeze, a volume in the series that follows the artist Michael Rakowitz as he attempts to restage a concert by the singer Leonard Cohen that never took place in the occupied Palestinian territory.

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Working Aesthetics Danielle Child

Published by Bloomsbury, 2019
ISBN 9781350022393

Working Aesthetics is the story of art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic but is heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks.

With the narrowing of work and art visible in galleries and art discourse today, Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today.

Danielle Child speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the rise of the art fabricator embodied by the stories of Lippincott, Inc. and Mike Smith Studio, dematerialised labour of Rimini Protokoll, and the digital afterlives of etoy and the brave new world of NFTs.

The opening street scene by Eyre Crowe is here.

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The Art of Experiment 
Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century Architecture and Design Rolf Hughes
Rachel Armstrong

Published by Routledge, 2021
ISBN 9781138479579

The Art of Experiment is a handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times. In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. Hughes and Armstrong search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus.

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes speak with Pierre d’Alancaisez about their approach to knowledge-making and organa paradoxa as an apparatus for incorporating the unexpected into research and practices. They also talk about sending cockroaches into space, living Shakespearean bricks, and about the value of experimentation in establishing productive cross-disciplinary collaborations.

• Some of the works discussed in the interview are described and illustrated in a Nature article.
• Caustic Ophelia from Brick Dialogues is on Bandcamp.
• The Hanging Gardens of Medusa can be seen here.
• The cockroaches’ journey into space also inspired a short story It by Rolf Hughes, which was published by the British Interplanetary Society.
• Hughes’ and Armstrong’s earlier collaboration with Espen Gangvik The Handbook of the Unknowable is available in full here.

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The Making of the American Creative Class Shannan Clark

Published by Oxford University Press, 2020
ISBN 9780199731626

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this centre of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labours.

Shannan Clark speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the origins of the creative class, their labour union struggles and successes, the role of the Works Projects Administration, and institutions like the Design Laboratory and Consumer Union which foretell the experiences of today’s culture workers.

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How media and conflicts make migrants Kirsten Forkert
Federico Oliveri
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Janna Graham

Published by Manchester University Press, 2020
ISBN 9781526138118

Has ‘migrant’ become an unshakeable identity for some people? How does this happen and what role does the media play in classifying individuals as ‘migrants’ rather than people? How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants challenges the idea of the ‘migrant’, pointing instead to the array of systems and processes that force this identity on individuals, shaping their interactions with the state and with others.

Kirsten Forkert, Gargi Bhattacharyya, and Janna Graham speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about their research carried out in the United Kingdom and Italy and examine how media representations construct global conflicts in a climate of changing media habits, widespread mistrust, and fake news.

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