Foucault Studies

Cover photo: "Mister Security" © Lukasz Chrobok, Christoph Faulhaber, 2007

Frieder Vogelmann & Jörg Bernardy writes about the photo: 

The cover picture, entitled "Performance", is a compositing which is part of the catalogue "MISTER SECURITY - To Serve and to Observe" by the two German artists Lukasz Chrobok und Christoph Faulhaber. From 2005 to 2007 they ran Mister Security, a fictional security company with the self-proclaimed duty to safeguard public spaces, long before the NSA scandal shocked the world in 2013. With their work, the two artists want to show how the globalised culture of security and surveillance technology creates a new aesthetic regime and influences a whole new lifestyle. Taking its visual and emotional cues from worldwide car advertising campaigns, the picture refers to the global power and uncertainty in the wake of new surveillance technologies. Christoph Faulhaber is well known for his provocative art and has been under surveillance by German intelligence services and the FBI because of it. In his film "Every picture is an empty picture" (2014), he describes his projects in a blend of documentary and fiction. 

Cover photo © Shreyaa Bhatt

Shreyaa Bhatt writes about the photo:

The Roman forum was the administrative and commercial centre of Roman civic life. Today, the site is filled with a deep, but puzzling, sense of history. Existing structures enmesh original ancient ruins dating from the Republican and Imperial periods with Christian and Renaissance facades. At the centre of the photo is the Temple of Saturn, originally dedicated in 497 BCE, and rebuilt several times over the course of the next approximately 800 years due to fire. To the left of temple is the triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, erected in 203 CE and suggestively built in front of the Temple of Concord to imply the restoration of peace following the victories against the Parthians. Behind the arch is the Curia, the meeting place of the Roman senate, the building works of which commenced in 44 BCE by Julius Caesar and completed in 29 BCE by Augustus. The building was in use as a senatorial curia up until 630 CE, when it was converted into the church of Sant’ Adriano by Pope Honorius I. Between the major monuments which still stand, or partially stand, today are broken columns, fragmentary bases of statues and remains of old paths and stairwells, leaving a chaotic and confusing sense of a monumental past, which, in its own day would have been extraordinarily polished and orderly. 

Cover photo © Fergus Murray, 2011. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/0olong/6309157519/in/pool-protestpuppets/).

Barbara Cruikshank writes about the cover photo:

The cover photograph evokes the ubiquitous presence  of giant puppets at protests. David Graeber explains why police hate giant puppets so much that they not only confiscate or destroy them at protests, but also subject giant puppets to ritualistic defilements. Giant puppets  transform the scene of protest from a security threat justifying police action and violence into a circus of direct-action. Giant puppets lampoon police presence. Direct action and giant puppets exemplify counter-conducts of protest. Graeber’s essay, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of Police in American Culture,” is published in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (AK Press 2007).

Cover art: "Ihmisen poika" (The Son of Man) © Sampsa Sarparanta, 2009.

Miikka Pyykkönen about the cover art: Painter and punk rock musician Sampsa Sarparanta has been one of the figures in the alternative movements scene in Finland for some time. His music and paintings touch upon the topics of this special issue on civil society – especially the question of the possibility of resistance in today’s world.

Cover art: © Judith Scott, Untitled, 2004. Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center.

Shelley Tremain writes about the cover art: The background of the photo is black. The artwork in the photo is a sculpture comprised of a bright blue wooden chair with four legs and a back, some parts of which are wrapped in fabric and wool of assorted colours. Various items, including an upturned basket on the seat of the chair and a white wheel rim that sits upright against the back of the chair, are tied to the chair with criss-crossing and overlapping strands of multicoloured fabric, wool, string, and paper. The sculpture was created by Judith Scott, a fiber artist who died in 2005, at the age of 61. Scott, who was deaf and had Down Syndrome, was institutionalized from age seven until her early forties and began to produce her amazing sculptures and other art only after her twin sister removed her from the institution and introduced her to Creative Growth, a centre for disabled artists located in Oakland, CA. From December 2014-March 2015, the Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of Scott's work. A review of that retrospective show with a slide show of some of Scott's work appeared in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/arts/design/judith-scotts-enigmatic-sculptures-at-the-brooklyn-museum.html.

The cover image was produced by Astra Howard, an Action Researcher/Performer currently living in Sydney Australia. Spanning more than a decade, her work has sought to elicit and document marginalised, or overlooked, experiences and discourses of the city. The specific image I have chosen is part of a series entitled 'Kings Cross the Whisper.' This series displays selections from a poem about the Kings Cross area that was written by a local socially marginalised man. The image alludes to forgotten histories and marginalization in an increasingly homogenised and gentrified part of Sydney.

Aernout Mik, Schoolyard, 2009, 2 screen video installation, Courtesy carlier | gebauer, Photograph: Florian Braun

The image is entitled "Red Grunge 5" and is used with courtesy of SXC.hu who holds the copyright