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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.

Published in the September 1974 Issue: of Artforum, my article “The Provincialism Problem” argued that a world art system, centered on the New York artworld, condemned artists elsewhere to misleadingly perceive their situation as necessarily subservient, and their art as lesser, secondary, and dependent. In fact, this system condemned all involved, including New York based artists, to a vicious cycle of mutual inequity. The article called for artists, critics, and curators to radically reimagine these relationships. Often cited in the decades since then, in recent years it is frequently used as a foil to demonstrate how, within the international artworld, … Read more

“Umetnost, družba/tekst” was an editorial published in the Slovenian journal Problemi-Razprave (Problems-Debates) in 1975. The journal was the central outlet of the so-called Slovenian Lacanian school and as such the most important place for the reception of French anti-humanist philosophy in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the journal was based on interpreting French post-structuralism in the spirit of the Tel Quel magazine, anti-humanist Marxism in the spirit of Louis Althusser, theoretical psychoanalysis in the spirit of Jacques Lacan and his followers, as well as on a special blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian ideology critique, which characterised the French … Read more

What links the existing international surrealist movement—a network of groups who publish their essays and collective experiments in an array of print and online periodicals—to the 20th-century Surrealism of art history textbooks is, to a large extent, its periodical publishing practices. This article pays particular attention to the periodical rubric (defined as a heading or category under which a certain kind of text or image serially appears) and contextualizes its surrealist use within a broader poetics of “objectivation.” In Surrealism, objectivation is the creation of a “thing,” which is to say a form of doing or thinking that acquires a … Read more

The Introduction to the Special Issue: entitled Art Periodicals, Historically Considered sketches an outline of the advent of periodicals in the context of the Enlightenment demand for the public use of reason, and situates the emergence of art periodicals in the context of the advent of autonomous art since the 19th century. The article introduces the contributions to the Special Issue: and opens up a way to reposition the question of critique in today’s art publishing.

This essay explores the role of art periodicals in art worlds past and present. It examines the histories of Artforum and October within the context of the North American art world of the 1960s and 1970, and contextualizes these publications within a larger field of publishing practices, including self-published Salon pamphlets, little magazines, and artists’ periodicals. It explores how the distribution form of the periodical affects the politics of art criticism, and considers how art magazines have served as sites of critical publicity, mediating publics and counterpublics within the art world. It also reflects on the role of magazines and … Read more

“Umetnost, družba/tekst” was an editorial published in the Slovenian journal Problemi-Razprave (Problems-Debates) in 1975. The journal was the central outlet of the so-called Slovenian Lacanian school and as such the most important place for the reception of French anti-humanist philosophy in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the journal was based on interpreting French post-structuralism in the spirit of the Tel Quel magazine, anti-humanist Marxism in the spirit of Louis Althusser, theoretical psychoanalysis in the spirit of Jacques Lacan and his followers, as well as on a special blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian ideology critique, which characterised the French … Read more

This introduction and selection of Questions and Answers are from a conference organized in 2014 at the American University of Beirut Art Galleries titled Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today. The conference summoned editors of art periodicals from different countries in order to discuss the role of art magazines, journals, platforms, and newspapers. While the introduction provides a general report on the conference, discussing the principles according to which the panels were organized or describing and comparing the missions of some periodicals, the selection of questions from the audience and answers from editors that follow aim to convey different editorial strategies, … Read more

Lotus was a tri-lingual quarterly brought out by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. Initially titled Afro-Asian Writings, its inaugural edition was launched from Cairo in March 1968, in Arabic and English, followed by the French. By 1971, the trilingual quarterly acquired the name Lotus. Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic funded its production. The Arabic edition was printed in Cairo, and the English and French editions were printed in the German Democratic Republic. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA) and its over-arching affiliate, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), both had headquarters in Cairo. In 1978, President Anwar Sadat … Read more

I generate diagrams with the purpose of understanding the narratives, form, and aesthetics of sociocultural and political structures. This leaves room for the production of artistic works that can be introduced into the machinery of everyday life. The idea of the diagram emerged almost at the same time as the idea of the machine, although we cannot really tell which existed first. However, it seems clear that both are intrinsically connected. Machines and diagrams can be seen as a representation of a narrative system that leads the process of the creation of knowledge. What they share is essentially narrative: we … Read more

This article analyzes the rhetorical and discursive resonance of the claims by artists and art professionals in Brazil in the 1950s of a connection to the Bauhaus. I examine the curricula of two new art schools established in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, emphasizing the role of central figures, including Mário Pedrosa, and the works by artists trained at the schools, and study paintings by Lygia Clark that in part elicited Alfred H. Barr, Jr. in 1957 to dismiss Brazilian contemporary art as “Bauhaus exercises.” Rather than a case of imitation, as Barr suggested, Brazilian actors transformed Bauhaus ideas, … Read more

The introductory text foregrounds the article “From the Stamps to the Bubble” (1968) by Brazilian historian and curator Aracy A. Amaral. It seeks to locate the primary document within a broader historiography of Brazilian art in the second half of the 1960s, and examine the ways in which the military dictatorship, along with certain cultural exchanges facilitated by Brazil’s economic development in this period affected artistic production. Placing particular attention on the multiple terminologies that were in use when the article was written, the introduction focuses on the contiguities of Pop Art in the Brazilian cultural milieu. It argues that … Read more

The introductory text foregrounds the article “From the Stamps to the Bubble” (1968) by Brazilian historian and curator Aracy A. Amaral. It seeks to locate the primary document within a broader historiography of Brazilian art in the second half of the 1960s, and examine the ways in which the military dictatorship, along with certain cultural exchanges facilitated by Brazil’s economic development in this period affected artistic production. Placing particular attention on the multiple terminologies that were in use when the article was written, the introduction focuses on the contiguities of Pop Art in the Brazilian cultural milieu. It argues that … Read more

Reacting against politically monopolizing attempts at rewriting the socialist past in post-1989 Hungary and Romania, a diverse number of artists, curators, critics, activists and students have come together to form temporary organizations and institutions. Through a contextual reading and critical analysis of The Department for Art in Public Space (2009–2011) in Bucharest and DINAMO (2003–2006) and IMPEX (2006–2009) in Budapest, this article investigates what the author refers to as a “self-institutionalizing” and the ways in which this practice becomes a vehicle to rear politicized civil societies in post-cold war Central and Eastern Europe. The discussion of the two self-institutionalizing initiatives … Read more

By placing on view a large selection of objects recently acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition Incident Transgressions: Report on “Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960–1980” (September 5, 2015 to January 3, 2016) sought to situate artistic practices from Latin America and Eastern Europe within a discursive model of cross-cultural and aesthetic transmission. However, the exhibition marginalized an account of the specific relations between these objects in favor of a more encompassing global curatorial narrative. While seeking to outline the parameters of the exhibition, and its implications in regard to contemporary trends … Read more

This text examines the first official exhibition of the Yugoslav Association of Fine Artists, and the theoretical, socio-political, and institutional contexts of the Socialist Realist period in Yugoslav art (spanning roughly the years between1945 and 1954). Post-war artistic and cultural environment, the first exhibition, and critical aesthetic debates around Socialist Realism exemplify Yugoslavia’s struggle to make sense of, and implement, Socialist Realism as an official artistic, cultural, and political category. Its development paralleled the state’s own wrestling with notions of socialist governance and its proper implementation. Difficulties with Socialist Realist aesthetic and the ensuing paradoxes in its adaptation in Yugoslav … Read more

This review of Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989 by Klara Kemp-Welch situates the book in the existing literature and discussions of post-war unofficial art in Central Europe and assesses the book’s significant contributions, which include a transnational approach, an extensive analysis of six oeuvres created by unofficial artists through their socio-political contexts, and a rigorous interpretive framework built around the titular concept of “antipolitics,” which Kemp-Welch borrows from the Hungarian dissident writer György Konrád. The review, however, also suggests that applying a framework rooted in the writings of political dissidents to unofficial art … Read more