Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury, eds., Nightcleaners and ’36 to ’77 (London: Raven Row, LUX and Koenig Books, 2018). Box-set containing two books (214pp.) and two DVDs/Blu-Rays. £24.00, 978 3 96098 381 1 From campaign film to experiment in documentary representation, and from exemplary instance of anti-realist and self-reflexive ‘Brechtian’ counter cinema (according to some […]
'Art' tag archive
The monochrome and the readymade
Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 288pp., £80.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82236 245 6 hb., 978 0 8223 6260 9 pb. The title of Jaleh Mansoor’s Marshall Plan Modernism provides a number of clues about the author’s methodological ambitions. The juxtaposition […]
Entrepreneurial subjectivity
Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value in Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 254pp., £120.00 hb., 978 9 00429 137 9 When the Swedish artists Goldin+Senneby’s Eternal Employment was chosen as one of the main public art works to feature in the massive rebuilding of the […]
Interview: Forgetting Vietnam
Trinh T. Minh-ha teaches in the University of California, Berkeley’s departments of Rhetoric, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Born in Hanoi in 1952, Trinh emigrated to the United States in 1970 where she studied musical composition, ethnomusicology and French literature, completing her PhD dissertation in 1977 under the title: Un Art sans Oeuvre: l’Anonymat dans […]
The Palestinian Museum
How are we to think about a museum that represents a people who not only do not exist on conventional maps but who are also in the process of resisting obliteration by one of the most brutal military complexes in the world? What is, and what can be, the role of a museum in a […]
Everybody out!
Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 304pp., £16.99 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 1 78478 188 0 hb., 978 1 78478 681 6 pb. Yates McKee’s book is concerned with the power of the strike under contemporary conditions. What he understands by ‘strike’ incorporates, however, a […]
Now the party’s over
Paul Clements, The Creative Underground: Art, Politics and Everyday Life (New York and London: Routledge, 2017). 232 pp., £110.00 hb., 978 1 13888 686 5 As Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, the creative process is an event or ‘festival’ which demands a break with linear time, a de-temporalisation of modernity; a […]
Extra, extra, read all about it!
extra, extra, read all about it! Contemporary art is postconceptual art Antonia birnbaum * Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013. vi + 282 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78168 113 8 hb., 978 1 78168 094 0 pb. Numbers in parentheses in the […]
Neoliberal Art History
that emerge in viewing the past, even our own pasts, which these psychoanalytically versed historians all choose to emphasize. The early and celebrated Italian practitioner of this genre Luisa Passerini sums up the shared outlook in the final essay in this volume: The main contribution of psychoanalysis to historical studies … has been to make […]
Claire Fontaine
Interview Claire Fontaine Andrew Culp and Ricky Crano At the heart of Claire Fontaine’s critique of contemporary art is a critical appraisal of the role played by relational aesthetics in relaying the social conditions and objects of capital into the space of art. Readymades like Duchamp’s Fountain, on the one hand, saturate the art world […]
Architecture or art? (Response to Leslie); War between philosophy and art (Response to Bernstein); Frank significance (Response to Orozco)
~’, LETTERS Architecture or art? Esther Leslie’s sour dismissal of the wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (RP 77) contains a number of doubtful and contradictory arguments. Permission to wrap the building required a parliamentary vote; approval was by 295 votes to 226. This democratic act by an institution of the state is […]
Revealing the Truth of Art
Revealing the Truth of Art Andrew Bowie Philosophical discussion of art in English tends not to aim its sights particularly high, and some Anglo-Saxon philosophy has effectively denied art any serious philosophical significance at all. In this light a contemporary German book* which wishes to argue for the truth of art over that of the […]
The Situationist International
The Situationist International: A Case of Spectacular Neglect Sadie Plant The recent exhibitions of Situationist art and paraphernalia in London, Paris, and Boston, have given the Situationist International (SI) an unprecedented academic and cultural profile. Even during the movement’s most active period, when many of its ideas and practices were realised in the events in […]
Images of the French Revolution; Reviving Cultural Studies; Philosophy and the Visual Arts; Nietzsche Society and Conference
of Oxford University’. Ayer’s radicalism, together with his enduring commitment to scientific philosophising in the manner of Russell, made the rest of the British philosopical establishment uneasy, and his philosophical work was widely regarded as obsolete by the 1950s. (His masterpiece, Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936.) Still, he had ‘the qualities of […]
From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns
From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns: Developments in a Feminist Aesthetic Pauline Johnson Contemporary feminist art theory and practIce has, by and large, turned away from a modernist affirmation of the autonomy of art from IHe towards a post-modern problematisation of the specIfIc category of the aesthetIc. The modernist assertion of the freedom of the […]
The Narration of an Unhappy Consciousness
The Narration of an Unhappy Consciousness: Lukacs, Marxism, the Novel, and Beyond Keith Ansell-Pearson Parmenides said, ‘one cannot think of what is not’; – we are at the other extreme, and say, ‘what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.’ – Nietzsche (1) Introduction J. M. Bernstein has written a book that merits […]
Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and the Motivation to make Political Art
‘eorg Lukuc:s, Waiter Benjamin, and the Motivation to make Politic:al Art Jennifer Todd In this paper I re-explore the relations which do and which should hold between art and politics. I reaffirm the traditional Marxist view that there is an overlap between socialist politics and aesthetic activity from which both politics and art should benefit. […]
Media and Images
practice, or realism and idealism. Different forms of it are attacked in different books. In The Clue to History Macmurray looks at the split between the theory and practice of religion; in Reason and Emotion he argues that the real distinction should be intellect and emotion, and that both are capable of rationality or irrationality. […]
The significance of Yves Klein’s “Ritual”
27 28 29 individual as a matter of course, or else it offers only inapplicable good advice and is therefore not worth a brass farthing to people who are without these means. To avoid misunderstanding, let me say that (i) I don’t see much danger of revolutionary organisations propagating the ideas of the official bourgeois […]
Understanding the occult
them, but they are arhitrary in the sense that there is no rationale behind them. [Radical Philosophy 5, p34J Klein, I think, must berated among the most perceptively biting of these cynics, these nasty people who try their damnedest to upset the cultural applecart. The Neo-Dadaists set out to shock the ‘cultured classes from their […]
The Marxist Theory of Art
THE mARHIST THEORY OF ART ************************ ****************************************** Rager Taylar Therefore, concepts have histories and that this is so has rich implications for conceptual enquiries, for with the demise of essences concepts become no more and no less than historical phenomena, so that their history is not incidental to what they are. Thus, conceptual investigation must […]