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What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?

ARTMargins Online, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 8-96.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00301

What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one another? Could you describe a specific work or text that might serve as an illustration of class struggle or as an exploration of the problem of representing it? Let us say that visual art, broadly speaking, does express the worldview of the dominant class. What kind of art then expresses the worldview of, say, hedge fund managers? Does the dialectic of the visible and invisible still hold for conceptual and post-conceptual art? What alternative critical apparatus would you propose, since neither Lenin nor … Read more

Apart from the longstanding and much-debated problem of art’s commodification, how does neoliberalism transform and determine the conditions of artistic practice? Further, if neoliberalism is a substantially distinct stage in the history of capitalism, and not merely its intensification, what are the implications of this new condition for the practice and criticism of contemporary art? What does it mean to practice and theorize art, to be an artist or critic, under neoliberalism? Drawing on the central topic of this issue, is aesthetic, artistic, or political radicality in art still possible under the neoliberal condition? Can, or should, artistic practice constitute … Read more

The devastating effects of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic have poignantly laid bare, once again, the limits of our capacity to act together and cooperate, even in the face of imminent threats to human survival on this planet. Unsurprisingly, deeply ingrained market mechanisms have ensured, both institutionally and ideologically, that international competition rather than solidarity determined the rhythm and mode of the fight against the global pandemic. Beyond and besides the very necessary measures to prevent contagion, the current crisis further accelerated the proliferation of borders, walls, and checkpoints (physical and otherwise) that have been more effective at segregating humans than … Read more

Weiss and Camnitzer discuss his ideas about the transformative potential of art in education; his experiences in and thoughts about Cuba and Cuban art; his “Uruguayan Torture” series of prints, and his thoughts about productive anarchy.

This article looks closely at the inclusion of Albanian Socialist Realism in one of renowned Swiss curator Harald Szeemann’s last exhibitions, Blood & Honey: The Future’s in the Balkans (Essl Museum, Vienna, 2003). In this exhibition, Szeemann installed a group of around 40 busts created during the socialist era in Albania, which he had seen installed at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana. This installation of sculptures was part of an exhibition entitled Homo Socialisticus, curated by Gëzim Qëndro, and Szeemann deployed it as a generalized foil for “subversive” postsocialist contemporary art included in Blood & Honey. The Homo … Read more

This article maps the complex socio-political terrain negotiated by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) during the early 1970s from Buenos Aires. It shows how the CAYC attempted to continue the internationalising aims which the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had pursued in the 1960s, while also providing a space for the exhibition and development of Conceptualism that engaged with political conditions in Argentina and in other countries including Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Columbia, developing the framework of “systems art” in order to do so. The compromises necessitated by CAYC’s balancing act opened the organisation, and in particular its director … Read more

The artistic practice of the Polish-born Ewa Partum can be divided chronologically into Polish (1965–1982), West Berlin (1982–89) and transnational / global (from 1989) periods. This essay focuses on the specificity of the conceptual art developed by Partum and her self-historicization as a conceptual artist. At the same time, it regards the local and global historicization of conceptual art as fragmentary and contradicting processes. The study examines local genealogy of Partum’s conceptual strategies as part of a localized reflection on the geopolitics of knowledge; it considers a specific position of cultural production that is characteristic of Central and Eastern European … Read more

_rt Movement(s) is an artist research project intended as a text object that materially represents the complex, relational articulation of art and history with particular emphases on the contingent relationships made by movements of different kinds: geographical migration of artists, displacement of art objects, performances, institutions/festivals, and theories/theorists. _rt Movement(s) challenges the linear developmental approach of normative art history, and its nationalist, racialized, and ethnocentric assumptions. Instead, the project argues through diverse sources, including texts, images, graphs and other visualizations for the essentially translocal and transhistorical character of works of art.… Read more

Amy Sara Carroll’s ReMex: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era interprets Mexico City-based, feminist, and border, or Chicano, art in and around the 1990s. Its premise is that aesthetics and politics “form a loop” in order to express what the author calls “Greater Mexico.” With this term, Carroll proposes that “Mexico” is no longer a territory but rather an imaginary that transcends its geographic borders. In her view, the denationalization brought about by the liberalization of markets led to a multicultural utopia best expressed in border art and art concerned with race and gender issues. In her account, … Read more

“To Mohassess, For the Wall” is an article written in 1964 by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most influential and charismatic Iranian intellectuals of the time. Three years before writing this article, Al-e Ahmad had published Weststruckness, discussing the Iranians’ cultural alienation caused by the dependence on the west. In “To Mohassess, For the Wall”, Al-e Ahmad shifts his analysis to Iranian painting, arguing that Iranian painters during the 1960s merely repeat Western cultural processes and strategies instead of constructing Iranian ones. The context for Al-e Ahmad’s argument is the Pahlavi regime’s radical program of rapid modernization, which in … Read more

In 1844, the year of Marx’s Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts, J.M.W. Turner presented Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, the first landscape painting to both articulate the ontological shifts brought about by new modes of extraction and production, but also to suggest concomitant transformation in perception. In this way, it collapsed the dialectical relation between perceiving subject and external landscape, suggesting the reciprocal relationship of reification. In 2013, the contemporary artist and filmmaker Zachary Formwalt produced a piece entitled Projective Geometry in which he read from Chapter 25 of Marx’s Capital, the chapter on “So-called … Read more

“Reframing Landscape” explores three distinct landscapes that have been decisively impacted by conquest and colonization, reframed by three artistic interventions: painting, photography, and sculpture. August Earle shows us the de-forested landscape of 19^th century New Zealand, still guarded by a Maori totem; Miki Kratsman photographs a wall mural in occupied Palestine that erases the presence of indigeneous people; and Antony Gormley anticipates the clearing of Manhattan by a pandemic in whirlwind of metal. Real spaces and places are converted into landscapes of attention into what has been lost and what is to come.… Read more

In the 1960s, Japanese artists and filmmakers directed their fury against the sterile urban landscapes which surrounded them. The “Theory of Landscape,” developed by Matsuda Masao as well as many other filmmakers, artists, and writers, posited that our lived landscape is an expression of dominant political power. This article uses the lens of Landscape Theory to analyze three Japanese political avant-garde films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, all of which mark frustration and anger through a reworking of the mundane urban environment that surrounds them: Wakamatsu Koji’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), Oshima Nagisa’s The Man Who … Read more

In the oldest Austro-Hungarian sugar refinement plant opened in mid 18thcentury in Rijeka, today Croatia, a series of “idealized” landscapes pained by unknown artisans include depictions of slaves. The so-called Vedute ideate are a rare depiction of the racialized slave labor in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that points to the invisible labor, which enabled industrial production of sugar and made visible the relation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, together with the peripheral port town of Rijeka, to the global flow of capital and the history of colonialism. By drawing on Catherine Baker’s recently published “Race in Yugoslavia” we look at how representation … Read more

The essay inquires about the historical condition of representation in our present while invoking the modern experience of the sublime and landscape as the medium of that experience. Can the sublime as the experience of the subject confronted with the very limits of representation be extended to our late capitalist conditions of mediatized representations? What constitutes “a landscape” as the site of the experience of the sublime in late capitalism? The essay addresses these questions through a renewed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936) by focusing on the discussion of the … Read more

In 1920, the Czech avant-group Devětsil, led by Karel Teige, put forth a leftist program that embraced a multimedial and transnational approach to art and poetry. This vision was articulated through the group’s homegrown -ism, “Poetism,” which incorporated principles of Constructivism and Dada. While Poetism’s affinities with the former is well-documented, this article introduces more fully Devětsil’s engagement with Dada, in print and through performance and dance. It also positions such manifestations not merely as a reflection of Dada tendencies occurring elsewhere, but also as a useful category for thinking in new ways about some of Devětsil’s own artistic production … Read more