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This research is part of a core of broader interests which seek to study the diverse cultural positions in South America and to analyze the tensions between traditional hegemonies and the appearance of new centers of cultural diffusion and management within the region. In this text I develop two lines of investigation: firstly, to pursue existing research into the disputes between Argentina and Brazil over hegemony in the region and, second, to propose an approach to Brazilian cultural intervention in Paraguay. The hypothesis of this work states that Brazilian cultural management in Paraguay during the 1950s sought to catalyze the … Read more

The article considers two art works made in recent years in Angola: the exhibition Lion & Ox, which featured art works by António Ole and Art Orienté objet, and the installation Icarus 13 by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Both draw on twentieth century utopias still present in Angola and refer to Agostinho Neto, the poet who became Angola’s first Marxist-Leninist president. While Lion & Ox explores Angolan nature structured through colonial taxonomies, Icarus 13 tells sci-fi narrative of an Angolan space mission to the Sun, suggesting a shift to a planetary imaginary. What does it mean, in the present conjuncture, to … Read more

This stenogram was recorded at an artists’ meeting that took place in 1951 in Kishinev (as the capital of today’s Republic of Moldova was called in those days). The discussion among the members of the local Union of Artists—a new type of art organization that was implemented in Moldova after the advance of the Red Army westwards—revolves around the organization of their annual art exhibition of 1951. The text discloses some of the major issues and challenges faced by the members of this artist organization during the late Stalinist era.

This article reviews Pamela M. Lee’s Forgetting the Art World (2012) and TJ Demos’s Return to the Postcolony (2013). Reviewer examines the texts’ shared concern with self-reflexive art practices that in different ways work to expose their own conditions of existence with respect to globalization. Both authors, according to the review, engage with art as a privileged medium that is capable of materializing knowledge about globalization and that thereby holds some potential to shape, mediate, or confront its trajectory. After appraising both the originality and limitations of Lee’s and Demos’s approaches, reviewer concludes with an outline of the core issues … Read more

This stenogram was recorded at an artists’ meeting that took place in 1951 in Kishinev (as the capital of today’s Republic of Moldova was called in those days). The discussion among the members of the local Union of Artists—a new type of art organization that was implemented in Moldova after the advance of the Red Army westwards—revolves around the organization of their annual art exhibition of 1951. The text discloses some of the major issues and challenges faced by the members of this artist organization during the late Stalinist era.

Chronicles from Majnun until Layla is a film project structured in three stages: 1.) The Museum of Modern Iranian History (2011–2013), 2.) Layla and Majnun (in preparation), and 3.) The Film (in preparation). Each stage bears its own approach, format, and mode of presentation. The first two stages are conceived as preparation for the third and final stage: the merging moment, which will be in the form of a feature-length, hybrid fiction/documentary film. The film depicts a couple, lovers, visiting a virtual museum of modern Iranian history. The lovers appear both as themselves and as “Layla and Majnun,” characters adapted … Read more

This article discusses the plastic arts’ non-dialectical engagement with materiality, by focusing on figures of depth in three recent artworks in mixed media by artists from the Americas: Artur Barrio’s coffee-grounds installations (2000–08), Jacques Coursil’s avant-garde jazz album Clameurs (2007), and Damián Ortega’s action Moby Dick (2004). All three offer aesthetic experiences of depth that propose an approach to the questions of relation and chaos-monde addressed by Édouard Glissant in terms of plasticity and assemblages—unhinged from anthropocentrism and signification.

This article addresses David Lamelas’s 1970 work Publication, arguing that it represents a subtle critique of the internationalization of conceptual art by a recent entrant into the West European milieu. Exhibited at Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London after the artist’s 1968 relocation from Argentina, Publication consists of thirteen written responses to three statements about the possible use of “language as an Art Form” that were sent by Lamelas to international figures in conceptual art such Daniel Buren, Gilbert and George, Lucy Lippard, and Lawrence Wiener. A close reading of this and others of Lamelas’s experiments works leading up to this … Read more

This essay analyzes the recent book Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou, produced by the Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni for the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF). For the project, which was carried out in 2011, concurrent with the events of the Arab Spring, El Baroni invited a group of artists from the Middle East to produce works responding to Alain Badiou’s text “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”. The essay has three objectives, the first of which is to situate Fifteen Ways… relative to the ongoing encounter between contemporary global art and Western philosophy. Next, it considers how the works in … Read more

The text presented here constitutes the first time that Ronald Kay’s work has been rendered and published in English translation. A fundamental figure within Chile’s art scene during its recent dictatorial period (1973–1990), Kay’s written, pedagogic, and editorial contributions were instrumental in shaping the sophisticated and insurgent discourse of the artists working under the rubric now known as the neovanguardia. The first chapter of Ronald Kay’s Del Espacio de Acá (1980), “On photography Time split in two” lays out, in a style and rhetoric that are both lyrical and rigorous, Kay’s theorization of the photographic phenomenon as a miniature geological … Read more

The text presented here constitutes the first time that Ronald Kay’s work has been rendered and published in English translation. A fundamental figure within Chile’s art scene during its recent dictatorial period (1973–1990), Kay’s written, pedagogic, and editorial contributions were instrumental in shaping the sophisticated and insurgent discourse of the artists working under the rubric now known as the neovanguardia. The first chapter of Ronald Kay’s Del Espacio de Acá (1980), “On photography Time split in two” lays out, in a style and rhetoric that are both lyrical and rigorous, Kay’s theorization of the photographic phenomenon as a miniature geological … Read more

In 1932, Paul Strand travelled to Mexico. The work he completed during his two-year stay has framed our histories of Strand’s practice in the 1930s and 1940s as a history of his turning away from his commitment to formalism in the 1920s. Paul Strand’s Living Labor challenges this history through an examination of The Wave, a documentary film Strand shot in 1934. A study of labor struggles in post-revolutionary Mexico, The Wave, this essay argues, reanimates Strand’s investigation of the relationship between man and machine evident in his first film, Manhatta (1921). Focusing on Strand’s obsession with the close-up and … Read more

The text analyzes the early activity of the Romanian artist Horia Bernea (1938–2000), putting it in conjunction with various aspects of conceptual art. It emphasizes points of contact between Bernea’s practice and the existing narratives of conceptual art (including the Eastern European ones) and it provides contextual information about the artistic and socio-political environment in Romania during the period of liberalization which debuted at the end of the 1960s and lasted for a few years. The text mainly focuses on a close reading of some Bernea’s works which were made in this timeframe, namely the Production Charts series and his … Read more

This article examines the memory-image in a set of drawings produced by the Iraqi artist Dia Azzawi on the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camp, Tel al-Zaatar, during the Lebanese civil war. It traces the development of this memory-image in Iraq in the 1960s, within a paradigm of the modern artwork established by the work of the artist Kadhim Haidar. Generalizing in modern art a mode of allegory from the poetic tradition of the husayniyyat, that paradigm introduced a philosophy of history in which the past was interpreted as a tradition of tragic forms that could be revived in painting … Read more

This article presents an interpretation of three works by Cairo-based artist Hassan Khan. The works are “17 and in AUC” (2003), “Conspiracy: Dialogue/Diatribe” (2006/2010) and “Dead Dog Speaks” (2010). I argue that in these works Khan stages a withdrawal from the legacy of the 1967 Naksa. He does this by means of a separation of his figures from their particular contexts, reflexive narrative strategies, non-periodic scene structures and substitutive manipulations of his figures. I argue ultimately that Khan’s staging of uprooted figures of Egyptian identity sends up the ethnographic notion of the “native informant” on which post-Naksa nationalists discourses have … Read more

This article examines Syrian art discourse on either side of the Naksa, the defeat of the Arab forces by Israel in June 1967, particularly transformations in the social value Syrian artists accorded to the irreducibly formal elements of the artistic craft. It analyzes these values by focusing on a reform program in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus, 1964–67, as well arts coverage in al-Bacth newspaper, exhibition texts, and the reception of artworks by Nazir Nabaa, Guido La Regina, Mahmoud Hammad, and Ahmed Nawash. It also explores the connotations of the term “plasticity,” a description of … Read more

This article observes how the new understanding of art which was introduced at the end of the 1960s by pop art influenced groups was pursued and radicalised in the second half of the 1970s, in a period generally referred to as the weakening of the avant-garde. It focuses on the texts by Leonhard Lapin, promoting art as a means of creating a new living environment. Taking Lapin’s text as a framework, the author analyses the intervention in the official exhibition of monumental art in 1976.

Leonhard Lapin’s “Objective Art” was written for “Event Harku ’75. Objects, Concepts” – an exhibtion and an accompanying symposium on the premises of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Harku, near Tallinn, Estonia, in December 1975. Objective art, in the artist’s mind, answered to the industrialization and urbanization of the late 20th century, to the growing significance of not only mechanical but also electronic machines in everyday life, and to the emergence of the so-called artificial environment. Rather than representing this environment, new art had to intervene in it or even produce it. Lapin’s call was quite different from other … Read more

Leonhard Lapin’s “Objective Art” was written for “Event Harku ’75. Objects, Concepts” – an exhibtion and an accompanying symposium on the premises of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Harku, near Tallinn, Estonia, in December 1975. Objective art, in the artist’s mind, answered to the industrialization and urbanization of the late 20th century, to the growing significance of not only mechanical but also electronic machines in everyday life, and to the emergence of the so-called artificial environment. Rather than representing this environment, new art had to intervene in it or even produce it. Lapin’s call was quite different from other … Read more

In chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, St. John of Patmos is made to eat a book he has not read. The witness of the apocalypse is impregnated by an event which he now carries. This essay extrapolates on the condition of the witness who ingests a drastic event and searches for a tongue with which to speak that which he does not fully know. As a ventriloquist, St. John is proposed as someone who is not muted by the event but rather one who finds his tongue forked and capable of speaking much and simultaneously. This essay also … Read more

This article discusses an approach to arts writing rooted in the work of Egypt’s earliest art critics and historians, yet associated primarily with the legacy of those writers who dominated artistic discourse of the 1960s. In suspending the assumption that Egyptian arts writing resists methodological analysis, I seek to describe the procedures and premises that characterize this approach, as well as address its longstanding dominance within the field, its relationship to the role of concepts of change and continuity in shaping artistic discourse in Egypt of the latter part of the 20th century, and its enduring influence today.

Nun’s Fret Not is a photomontage project that tells the story of a nun who, following an epiphany, embarks with her convent on becoming a “missionary artist” through a study-by-mail artist’s course, and her subsequent disillusionment. A continuation of the work begun in icehouse in 2010, it re-contextualizes Kovitz’s previous art work into a meta-narrative that examines recurrent themes in his art practice: artist and audience, success and obscurity, art market and art education, dominant cultures and subcultures. All characters in this project share the same face– the face of Litmus– an alter ego Kovitz made for his work based … Read more

This introductory essay by members of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey provides a quick overview of the significance of the 1967 defeat of Arab military forces by the Israeli army for the historiography of modern and contemporary Arab art. It then details a recent turn to more critical engagement with that historiographic framework, as exemplified by the 2012 conference The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories, and introduces the four articles published in ARTMargins that came out of the conference.

In this text, which takes the form of a conversation and is preceded by a short introduction, the ARTMargins collective seeks to draw the readers’ attention to a global artistic community known as Stuckism. The contribution highlights some of the most conspicuous issues raised by the Stuckists. For more than a decade Stuckism has critiqued the mainstream contemporary art world, accusing it of being at the mercy of global speculative capital; Stuckism also questions the mainstream aesthetics of conceptualism and its insistence upon de-materialized artistic practices. Instead Stuckism calls for respect for traditional or fine arts media, providing in the … Read more

The first biennial founded outside Venice opened in São Paulo Brazil in 1951, providing a fulcrum between “dependency” and “developmentalism” (to use economic terms). In terms of art history, it presents a useful anomaly in which an international style (“concrete abstraction,” a European import) was used simultaneously to eradicate local difference and to declare a cosmopolitan, up-to-date Brasilidade (Brazilianness). More crucially, I argue that the São Paulo Bienal was the precondition for the newly rigorous conceptualism that followed, as Brazilian artists in the late ′60s rejected “Concretismo” to craft a new world picture, radically transforming margin and center through the … Read more

The two texts presented here were written by members of conceptual artists’ group ACT operating in Armenia in 1994–1996. The group developed affirmative artistic actions and exhibitions to support the constitution of the new state based on the principles of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Its conceptual interventions and actions, both in conventional spaces of exhibition, but also on the street and in the already dysfunctional factories, were often formally minimal and austere, but almost always prescriptive in terms of offering a model of political and aesthetic participation.

Japanese art critics of the 1950s perceived the locus of a new materialist aesthetics in the new trends of informal abstraction emanating from the United States and France. This revealed a stark contrast with the idea of individual freedom that informed North-American discourse on Abstract Expressionism. Focusing on the writings of Miyakawa Atsushi, Haryū Ichirō, and Segi Shinichi, this article explores the political significance of the question of matter in Japanese postwar art criticism and indicates its importance for the subsequent development of avant-garde art in 1960s Japan.

This article examines the cultural, economic and political context of the Art Dubai art fair and its symposium the Global Art Forum, as well as the commercial, educational and curatorial role of the recent flourishing of galleries in Dubai. It unpacks the complex connections that exist in the MENA region between art as a critical practice, and art a marker of modernity and a commodity of hyper-capitalist consumption. The article evaluates the consequences of importing internationalist and activist art discourses to a conservative and absolutist monarchies in the Gulf with curtailed freedom of speech and of expression.

The two texts presented here were written by members of conceptual artists’ group ACT operating in Armenia in 1994–1996. The group developed affirmative artistic actions and exhibitions to support the constitution of the new state based on the principles of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Its conceptual interventions and actions, both in conventional spaces of exhibition, but also on the street and in the already dysfunctional factories, were often formally minimal and austere, but almost always prescriptive in terms of offering a model of political and aesthetic participation.