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This review essay addresses the complex significance of materiality in From Our Hands, a recent site-specific installation at New York City’s 80WSE Gallery produced by Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Cree artist from Northern Ontario. Situating Linklater’s practice as an instance of indigenous institutional critique––an approach that re-functions postconceptual artistic strategies in accordance with the distinct aesthetic, political, and ontological concerns of colonized native populations––the essay examines the ways in which such work might disable longstanding assumptions at a moment when indigenous contemporary art is receiving increased attention. In addition to materiality, the text focuses on a group of qualities with … Read more

Despite the fact that the growing reception of Antonio Dias (b. 1944) in the English-speaking world is happening under the sign of global art history, the trajectory of the Brazilian artist in the 1960s and 1970s actually suggests both a counter-genealogy and a counter-geography of the global. This essay explores this situation by recontextualizing Dias’s emergence vis-à-vis the critical debate on realism and underdevelopment that marked the Rio de Janeiro avant-gardist scene of the mid- to late-1960s and involved writers such as Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, Mário Pedrosa, Pierre Restany, and Frederico Morais. It subsequently argues that such critical terms … Read more

This essay makes the first sustained study of the Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu (1941–2015) who used American Pop Art vocabularies to describe the complex realities of US-occupied Okinawa. Focusing on his 1972 installation Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, the essay examines the critical ambivalence of Makishi’s Political Pop as a translation strategy. Despite his critique of both American and Japanese imperialism, Makishi was aware that Okinawa was inseparably entangled in it, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which brought violence, but also economic benefits, to Okinawa. Despite his use of the American Pop idiom … Read more

For this roundtable we invited several respondents to reflect upon both the history and the present of artistic realism. We ask how its various revivals might be regarded as part of a long trajectory of “Western” art and aesthetics, and how such revivals might be triggered by discourses outside of contemporary art. If a new aesthetics of realism were possible today, how would it differ from its multiple historical antecedents? Is realism in its various modes an obsolete artistic form or style of the past (like baroque painting or modernist collage) that is as such incompatible with the modes of … Read more

The introductory essay places “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics” (1920), a piece of early criticism written by the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida during the first year he lived in Mexico City, within the contexts of the cosmopolitan milieu of post-Revolutionary Mexico and the artist’s own trajectory. It suggests that the text both demonstrates intellectuals’ interest in questions of form and national art and Mérida’s desire to provide a critical framework for his own paintings of indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican women. In “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics,” … Read more

This essay is a review of art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu’s Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015). The book offers a chronicle of artistic theories, practices, and institutions during Nigeria’s independence years (1957–67) amid the historical frames of Third World liberation, African decolonization, and Cold War realpolitik. The essay explores in particular how Postcolonial Modernism revisits and explores the thematic of “national culture”—the concept presented by Frantz Fanon in 1959, with long-lasting impact on theories of postcolonial arts—in the (decentralized) Nigerian art world, with a focus on the synthetic studio practices of members of the … Read more

This short comic based narrative depicts the challenges to and climate of an alternative form of realism in the art-world as a new project for art’s politics and construction. Determinism Noir, Realism and Its Discontents calls upon the classic genre of noir narratives to situate themes of agency, mastery, rationalism and metaphysics. These ideas and images are generated in the nihilistic climate of alienation, itself borne out through the machinic, technological and capitalistic forces of the Twentieth Century. The comic presents three parts: first we see the formation of a project base to insinuate a rational determinism: A world of … Read more

In the late 1960s, New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected a scandalous proposal submitted by Marcel Breuer and Associates to float a fifty-five-story office tower in the air rights above Grand Central Terminal. The tendency among historians has been to treat Breuer’s tower as an act of vandalism, but this article argues that such an interpretation obscures the real political and economic stakes of the controversy. In fact, Breuer’s design uncovered the single-minded profit orientation of development interests and the preservationists who opposed the scheme operated less on behalf of a landmark threatened with defacement than against an economy of … Read more

The introductory essay places “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics” (1920), a piece of early criticism written by the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida during the first year he lived in Mexico City, within the contexts of the cosmopolitan milieu of post-Revolutionary Mexico and the artist’s own trajectory. It suggests that the text both demonstrates intellectuals’ interest in questions of form and national art and Mérida’s desire to provide a critical framework for his own paintings of indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican women. In “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics,” … Read more

This essay focuses on Brazilian–American artist Vik Muniz’s 2008 Pictures of Garbage and the pendant 2010 documentary on their making, Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker. Muniz enlists a group of Brazilian garbage pickers as subjects and participants in the construction of their own portraits, using garbage picked from a landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro. The use of garbage as a material draws attention to global patterns of exploitation that produce both the waste itself and the poverty of the garbage pickers. However, this essay argues that Muniz’s social aims are undermined by formal incoherences within the portraits and … Read more

The present dossier compiles brief responses to the anonymously published “Art, Society/ Text: A Few remarks on the Current Relations of the Class Struggle in the Fields of Literary Production and Literary Ideologies” (1975), from five scholars working in the fields of philosophy, literary theory and Marxism, as well as Latin American and Asian studies. First published in the Slovenian journal Problemi-Razprave (Problems-Debates) and first translated in an excerpted form in ARTMargins (October 2016), the text and its responses raise a series of questions about the specificity of art and literature as signifying practices in the wake of modernist autonomy; … Read more

This text introduces the translation of Amir Esbati’s essay “The Student Movement [Revolt] of May 1968 and the Fine Art Students,” first published in Labour and Art in Tehran in 1980. In the midst of the Iranian Revolution political and aesthetic upheaval, Amir Esbati, a member of the Marxist Group 57 student organisation, observed the following in the local revue Labour and Art in December 1978: “The walls of the city have become like the pages of a popular history book, so specific that we can tell the date and time of each sign or inscription.” This introduction looks at … Read more

Recorded between 1976 and 77, Juan Downey’s video experiments with the Yanomami people have been widely celebrated as offering a critique of traditional anthropology through their use of feedback technology. This article argues, however, that close attention to the different feedback situations the artist constructs with the group reveal a more complex relationship between Downey and that discipline. In the enthusiasm he manifests for synchronous, closed-circuit video feedback in many of his statements about his Yanomami project, Downey in fact tacitly affirms some of the most problematic principles of traditional anthropology. In his emphasis on the real-time quality of this … Read more

In International Pop, the curators Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan propose a new reading of Pop that establishes a set of relationships marked by difference. Theirs is a world riven by disconnection over flow, in which migrations and networks are frequently translated, blocked, or interrupted. While the US mass media provided source material for many artists it was often reworked to other ends. While many narratives of Pop have stressed distance and irony here we witnessed a new version of the moment that made a virtue out of intimacy, politics, and desire.

This text introduces the translation of Amir Esbati’s essay “The Student Movement [Revolt] of May 1968 and the Fine Art Students,” first published in Labour and Art in Tehran in 1980. In the midst of the Iranian Revolution political and aesthetic upheaval, Amir Esbati, a member of the Marxist Group 57 student organisation, observed the following in the local revue Labour and Art in December 1978: “The walls of the city have become like the pages of a popular history book, so specific that we can tell the date and time of each sign or inscription.” This introduction looks at … Read more

“Graphic design” was not a proper term until the beginning of the twentieth century. This led to confusion in credits/authorship for book covers, typography, which was exacerbated by the fact that printers, in addition to being in charge of the production process of books, were also making decisions regarding their finishings. Venezuela presents an interesting chapter in the history of publishing in the world given the hybrid character of publishing in the country in which traditional national artists, illustrators, and publicists comprised a mix of European and North American immigrants. The lack of current bibliographic material inspired me, as a … Read more

This essay reviews the three-venue exhibition ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, which opened in July of 2015 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio and the Loisaida Center in the Lower East Side. It assesses the three significantly different approaches of these institutions to capturing the visual and performative legacy of the Young Lords, a radical decolonial Nuyorican group of the early 1970s whose political activism engaged communities to transform space through artistic practices. In critically surveying these three approaches, this essay means to explore the cultural, art-historical, and political stakes of exhibitions like … Read more

The Regime of Visible, in the form of a pocket map, introduces two ways of exploring Cannerberg, a small hill situated between Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Kanne, Belgium. One side of the map traces the ownership of land by mapping cadaster parcels and their corresponding buildings and underground tunnel structures. The other side traces varied sources from the history and geology of Caestert plateau with a focus on Cannerberg. From Neolithic times, continuous mining of flint nodules and later limestone created a complex network of underground tunnels around Maastricht, popularly called “the caves.” Flint nodules were used to make tools … Read more

American painter Frederic Edwin Church’s monumental oil painting Aurora Borealis (1865) presents a stark contrast to the dominant Western tradition of representing the Arctic as monochrome and static. This article discusses how the impressive palette of Aurora Borealis and its black semi-circle in the center allow for a revisionist understanding of Church’s contributions to a rich history of Arctic representation, including in an age of climate change and rapidly melting ice. The article connects Aurora Borealis to emerging lens technologies—especially photography and astronomy, and later the cinema and composite satellite imagery, to argue for circumpolar north as globally connected—then, and … Read more

This introductory essay examines the role of two articles on the Cuban painters Roberto Álvarez Ríos and Wifredo Lam, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos” (1962) and “Lam” (1977), in the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s writing on art. It argues that these largely ignored articles offer snapshots of two key shifts in Althusser’s thought: his transition, during the early 1960s, from Hegelian Marxism to structural Marxism, and, during the late 1970s, from structural Marxism to so-called aleatory materialism. It contextualizes the articles in the social and political milieu of French philosophy during the 1960s and 70s and … Read more

Despite the home’s long history as a locus of cultural and political action in Cuba, serious studies of its informal residential culture are only now beginning to emerge. This article explores how the exhibition of art in private homes intervenes in debates about public space in Havana. It situates these exhibition practices historically with respect to the spatial politics of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, while mapping the reorganization of official and unofficial cultures after the demise of the Soviet bloc. Bringing into relief how these home exhibits problematize state and market alliances in the postsocialist context, I argue that … Read more

This article analyzes Oscar Bony’s work La Familia Obrera (1968), in which a working class family sat on view in the gallery of the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires. What might be read from the transformation of a working class family into a work of art? How was Bony’s own artistic labor reconfigured in the process? How did Bony’s display of a working class family engage with both the context of the Instituto Di Tella—an extension of Argentina’s most prominent industrial company—and the demands for productivity made by the developmentalist dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía? In other words, how … Read more

This project is part of my practice of resisting aspects of visual culture and deconstructing images that is partly indebted to 1960s conceptual text-based artists, letterism, and Situationists, but also correlated to orthodox attitudes towards the image. It examines restrictions that Israel places upon Palestinian telecommunications in the West Bank, such as the locations of radio masts placed within Israel, the height Palestinian networks are permitted to build their masts, and that illegal Israeli settlers living illegally inside Palestine enjoy 3/4G coverage while Palestinians receive 2G. These technological infringements inhibit the movements for everyone in the West Bank and Gaza … Read more

Southeast Asian modern art has thus far been historicized largely within national historical frameworks. The region’s contemporary art has been pulled, sometimes unwillingly, into those national frameworks, even as it enters a global market and takes part in a more transnational dialogue. What is the geography proper to contemporary art? And what insights might a regional perspective afford about art that speaks to a world beyond the nation, but resists outright assimilation under the rubric of ‘the global’? This essay proposes a calibration of three art historical frames – national, regional and international. I argue that far from meaning transcendence … Read more

This text introduces a programmatic text of Otto Neurath on the educational use of the method of pictorial statistics. Neurath emphasizes the importance of a visual method to transfer scientific knowledge to popular audiences. At the same time, his Vienna Method attempts to adapt the popular educational strategy to an increasingly visual modernity. The specific educational interest of Neurath’s Vienna Method consists in political education, in transferring basic knowledge about the general structure and dominant developments of society. His program thus echoes his contemporaries’ debates on the possibilities of social realism. To understand the historical significance of Neurath the introductory … Read more

This text introduces a programmatic text of Otto Neurath on the educational use of the method of pictorial statistics. Neurath emphasizes the importance of a visual method to transfer scientific knowledge to popular audiences. At the same time, his Vienna Method attempts to adapt the popular educational strategy to an increasingly visual modernity. The specific educational interest of Neurath’s Vienna Method consists in political education, in transferring basic knowledge about the general structure and dominant developments of society. His program thus echoes his contemporaries’ debates on the possibilities of social realism. To understand the historical significance of Neurath the introductory … Read more

In tracing the development of Cuban cultural policy between the years of 1959 and 1976, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt conceptualizes that history, and its ideas about the role of culture in society, as a potential “antidote” to contemporary, neoliberal policy paradigms. However, in its intense focus on the positions articulated by the revolutionary leadership, her account of that history shortchanges the ideas of those who held critical or opposing views. This review locates Gordon-Nesbitt’s approach in the context of debates about early revolutionary cultural policy, and in relation to the current tendency in cultural policy, which thoroughly instrumentalizes creativity and culture.