The politics of equal aesthetic rights: Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Answering the question: What is to be done?: Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Answering the question: What is to be done? (education) David cunningham The question ʻWhat is to be done?ʼ, Adorno remarked, frequently ʻsabotages the logical progress of knowledge that alone allows for changeʼ . However, despite being always-already-inscribed within the imperatives of instrumental rationality, it is, he acknowledged, nonetheless ʻunavoidableʼ. [1] This is especially so for […]

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education: Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education Stewart martin Documenta 12ʼs commitment to the question of what is to be done in education is to be welcomed from an institution that has sought to sustain itself as an autonomous cultural realm, a public sphere, in the face of its fabulous state sponsorship and relations to the […]

Doing something and doing nothing: Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Doing something and doing nothing Esther leslie Culture is put busily to work these days. In Europe, certainly, culture is made the bearer of promises – the promise of a better quality of life, of a more educated public, of a more efficient and value-added cultural sphere, and, not least, the promise of regenerated economies. […]

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity Stewart martin Art’s relation to commodification is an unavoidable and entrenched condition for much of the theory, history and practice of art today; so entrenched, in fact, as to have become implicit and assumed for many. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, considerations of this relation have […]

The sublime whiff of criticality: Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

The sublime whiff of criticality Radical culture research collective Documenta has always had a political agenda. The first Documenta, organized by Arnold Bode in 1955, was intended to signal to the international art world that the dark days of Nazi philistinism were definitively over: Germany’s demonstrative openness to ‘avant-garde’ art could be taken as a […]

Magazines field, or, the next Documenta should be curated by magazines: Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Magazines field, or, the next Documenta should be curated by magazines Patricia Canetti with Leandro de Paula Canal Contemporâneo I attended Documenta 12 on two different occasions: in June, for the show’s opening, and in July, in order to participate with Canal Contemporâneo in the Magazines Project’s Lunch Lectures. Each visit was marked by an […]

The big lie: Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

The big lie Dario Corbeira and irene montero, Brumaria When Brumaria was invited to take part in the Documenta 12 Magazines Project, in February 2006, we were filled with enthusiasm. We drew up an ambitious project, ‘Art: The Radical Political Imagination’, which, based on post-1968 experiences and recent experiments in counter-hegemonic practices, tried to set […]

A very different context: Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour (with an introduction by Peter Osborne)

Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour

Dossier Art and immaterial labour ‘Art and immaterial labour’… the conjunction is at once innocent and presumptuous. As Adorno suggested, if the general problem with using the word ‘and’ in titles is that it ‘permits everything to be connected with everything else and is thus incapable of hitting the mark’, in some instances it nonetheless […]

Metamorphoses: Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour

Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour

Metamorphoses Antonio Negri To begin with, let us try, from a materialist standpoint, to situate historically the concept of plastic and figurative art – in other words, the definition of its historically determinate link, if there is one, to the development and structure of modes of production. Can this be done? Obviously, once we’re obliged to […]

Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security: Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour

Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour

Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security Maurizio Lazzarato According to Michel Foucault, for some time we have been leaving disciplinary societies in order to enter into societies of security that, unlike the former, ‘tolerate a whole host of behaviours that are different, varied, or even deviant and antagonistic toward one another’. […]

Notes on the photographic image

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

Notes on the photographic image Jacques rancière In the relation between art and image, photography has played a symptomatic and often paradoxical role. Baudelaire made of it the sinister instrument of the triumph of technical reproduction over artistic imagination. And yet we also know of the long struggle of photographers (pictorialistes) to affirm that photography […]

Body without image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan: Dossier: Undoing the Aesthetic Image

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

Body without image Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan Éric alliez [T]he great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. Herman Melvil e, Moby-DickThe IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges … in short, IMAGE is not the work’s supreme motive or unifying end. Hélio Oiticica, Block Experiments […]

This is not my body

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

This is not my body Elisabeth lebovici Indeed there are not two genders, there is only one, the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general. [1] These two sentences, written by Monique Wittig in 1983, pronounce a regime of visibility and invisibility for the feminine […]

Theatre and the public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno

Theatre and the public Badiou, Rancière, Virno Simon bayly and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all. Making public The lack of the appearance of […]

The involution of photography

The involution of photography Andrew fisher As we settle further into the era of digital media and globalized visual culture, it might be tempting to think that photography holds no more than historical interest. Yet it continues to feature in debates with considerable significance for the present. [1] The terms by which it was negotiated […]

Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire: Letter

Philip Derbyshire (‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina’, RP 158) should be commended for his insightful consideration of the literary and psychoanalytic writings of Oscar Masotta, one of the most important Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to make a case for juxtaposing these texts with Masotta’s idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary […]