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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

Art in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century has frequently been understood as closely tied to Egyptian nationalism, emerging suddenly in 1908 with the founding of the Cairo School of Fine Arts to provide the nation with visual representations. I look at art writing during the first half of the twentieth century in both the Arabic and French-language Egyptian press to show instead that a public discourse surrounding the fine arts emerged slowly over the course of several decades to constitute a locus for the negotiation of mutually constitutive cosmopolitan and national subject positions. Through their work, … Read more

This essay analyzes three polemic newspaper articles written in the early 1950s by the art critic, gallerist, and future Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006), “Artistic Awakening in Ankara” (1953), “The Artist and Politics” (1954), and “The Burden of the Intellectual” (1956). It argues that Ecevit’s articles document a local intelligentsia’s efforts to theorize the role of art in Turkish society at a crucial moment of political transformation. As Turkey abandoned its authoritarian past in order to conduct its inaugural experiment with multi-party democracy, Ecevit’s columns took up two of the period’s most pressing questions: the extent to which the … Read more

Trading Lines is a photo essay that tracks nearly twenty years of research within international museums as well as collecting and sharing photographs and objects. This research began in 1996 at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, where I encountered an Aboriginal skull from N.S.W. Australia —that was part of the active international Aboriginal human remains trade activated from the early 18th century. This photo essay shares correspondence between myself and private and public collection managers and collectors. Some images are from actual installations where I have combined objects with artworks, as a whole, it is an attempt to draw … Read more

This article examines Cildo Meireles’s refusal to describe Red Shift, his 1984 installation, as conceptual, political art. I use his rejection of these terms to reconsider conventional categories of the political in Latin American conceptualism as these have been historicized in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that the artist builds his notions of conceptual and political art based on socio-artistic theories propagated in the short-lived but highly influential publication, Malasartes. This groundbreaking magazine, founded by Meireles and eight others in 1975, published texts crucial to Brazilian art history and translated international articles. These shaped the theoretical ideas … Read more

This essay analyzes three polemic newspaper articles written in the early 1950s by the art critic, gallerist, and future Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006), “Artistic Awakening in Ankara” (1953), “The Artist and Politics” (1954), and “The Burden of the Intellectual” (1956). It argues that Ecevit’s articles document a local intelligentsia’s efforts to theorize the role of art in Turkish society at a crucial moment of political transformation. As Turkey abandoned its authoritarian past in order to conduct its inaugural experiment with multi-party democracy, Ecevit’s columns took up two of the period’s most pressing questions: the extent to which the … Read more

This essay analyzes three polemic newspaper articles written in the early 1950s by the art critic, gallerist, and future Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006), “Artistic Awakening in Ankara” (1953), “The Artist and Politics” (1954), and “The Burden of the Intellectual” (1956). It argues that Ecevit’s articles document a local intelligentsia’s efforts to theorize the role of art in Turkish society at a crucial moment of political transformation. As Turkey abandoned its authoritarian past in order to conduct its inaugural experiment with multi-party democracy, Ecevit’s columns took up two of the period’s most pressing questions: the extent to which the … Read more

This essay analyzes three polemic newspaper articles written in the early 1950s by the art critic, gallerist, and future Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006), “Artistic Awakening in Ankara” (1953), “The Artist and Politics” (1954), and “The Burden of the Intellectual” (1956). It argues that Ecevit’s articles document a local intelligentsia’s efforts to theorize the role of art in Turkish society at a crucial moment of political transformation. As Turkey abandoned its authoritarian past in order to conduct its inaugural experiment with multi-party democracy, Ecevit’s columns took up two of the period’s most pressing questions: the extent to which the … Read more

This article raises two concerns underpinning the need for a critical history of fiber art in the 20th century. The first is a critique of aesthetic formalism predominant in the Lausanne Biennale during the 1960s and 70s, which overlooks artistic, ideological, and political milieus that drew together textile artists from localities formerly treated as peripheral in art history. The second holds to account Euro-American institutions and related historiographies for their curatorial exclusion of Arab and African fiber artists. Such inclusion, I argue, would have conjured tapestry’s deeper incongruities, which emanated from unresolved questions at the core of modernism: the assigning … Read more

During World War I, a peculiar example of disruptive patterning was developed to adorn British and American battleships. “Dazzle camouflage” as it was known, did little to “hide” the vessels themselves. Rather, its function was to confuse enemy aim by utilizing chaotic black-and-white patterns. Vintage photographs of these ships provide startling visuals of a kind of graphical warfare. At first glance, the extreme angles and cutout shapes conjure everything from European Modernist abstraction, Russian Constructivism, and colonial ethnic and tribal patterning, to later forms of Op art and design. As an artist researching these images, I began speculating on the … Read more

“The Objet after Stalin” is a translation of the 1967 text “Sutarin igo no obuje (スターリン以後のオブジェ)” by Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei. Published in the aftermath of Akasegawa’s trial for producing a photomechanical copy of a 1,000-yen note, this brief text traces a parallel between Duchamp’s revolutionary displacement of the urinal into an art museum in New York in 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that same year. Exploring the potentialities of the Surrealist-inspired notion of the artistic objet, Akasegawa wittily alerts to the dangers of bureaucratization of both revolutionary politics and revolutionary art.

This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the international postwar art movements of Pop, Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Anti-Art. It relates the independent coinage of Capitalist Realism by artists Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner in Germany in May 1963 with that of artist Akasegawa Genpei Japan in February 1964 and argues that they were both part of a broader interest in developing new strategies of artistic realism during the Cold War. The artists’ sly and ironic appropriations of consumer objects and advertisements sought to capture the operations of … Read more

This essay critically examines the exhibition Leben mit Pop: Eine Reproduktion des Kapitalistischen Realismus, which was first staged in 2013 at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. This exhibition surveyed the emergence of Capitalist Realism as a regional form of Pop Art in West Germany during the 1960s. The article evaluates Leben mit Pop as a modification of established art historical scholarship and as an intervention within ongoing debates in curatorial practices and critical cultural theory. It aims to resituate Capitalist Realism relative to the consolidation of the North Atlantic art market, arguing that this allows for a more incisive account of its … Read more

In 1963 and 1964, Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was working on two related series of objects he called “model” 1,000 Yen-notes and “model” wrapped objects. As he established in his 1964 “Thesis of ‘Capitalist Realism,’” he made these “models” as a method of exposing the contingent legitimacy that mass-produced currency and commodities had as “real things.” This article focuses its analysis on Akasegawa’s wrapped furniture installation for Room in Alibi (1963) as a complex demonstration of the ways in which the model could “frame” capitalism’s emerging consumer lifestyle object systems. As such, his models can be seen as part of … Read more

This introduction situates Akasegawa Genpei’s text “The Objet after Stalin” and the events surrounding his reproduction of the 1,000-yen note in the art-historical and political context of Japan’s postwar avant-gardes. It explores Akasegawa’s conception of the objet both in terms of its lineage within the history of Surrealism and its reception in Japan and of Akasegawa’s original theoretical claims concerning the political potential of artistic practice.