On autonomy and the avant-garde

But if this position rightly demolishes the opposition between art and technological mediation enshrined in late modernist theory1 it nevertheless suffers from its own kind of blindness: the identification of technological mediation with the democratization of form. By subsuming art under technology, this kind of thinking renders the connection between form and ethics harmless or […]

Susan Sontag, 1933–2004

Obituary Counter-traditionalist Susan Sontag, 1933–2004 In the prefatory note to her first collection of critical writings, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag reflected that ʻin the end, what I have been writing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibilityʼ. The statement holds true for […]

Walter Benjamin und die Künste, Haus Am Waldsee, Berlin, October 2004–January 2005: Crevices and footholds

News Art in the age of its political reproductionPopulism, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 8 April–4 June 2005; National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, 15 April–2 September 2005; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 29 April–28 August 2005; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 10 May–4 September 2005, www.poppulism2005.com [archive] START KAPITAL, STANDARD (OSLO), 14 April–22 May 2005, […]

Beyond Barthes: Rethinking the phenomenology of photography

Beyond Barthes Rethinking the phenomenology of photography Andrew fisher This article attempts to outline a phenomenology of photography, oriented by the situation of photography in contemporary media culture. Various recent photographic art practices have come to emphasize what may be seen as specifically phenomenological issues of appearance, perception and form. The widespread use of photography […]

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 […]

People exposed, people as extras

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

People exposed, people as extras Georges Didi-Huberman The title of the first film shown in history is La Sortie des usines Lumière – in English, ‘Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory’. On 22 March 1895, in the rue de Rennes in Paris, in front of about two hundred spectators, Auguste and Louis Lumière showed for the […]

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 […]