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Caution, Metaphors At Work

Francis Mulhern on James Wood, Serious Noticing. The literary critic as arbiter of ‘lifeness’, in a wide-ranging collection of essays.

The End of Landscape?

From Carleton Watkins to Edward Burtynsky, shifting relations between portrayals of nature and techno-economic regimes registered in successive eras of landscape photography.

By Their Epithets Shall Ye Know Them

In response to Paul Claudel’s dictum—‘fear of the adjective is the beginning of style’—a defence of adjectival extravagance, mobilizing Nabokov and Mann, Joseph Roth and Herta Müller, to showcase the literary power of the epithet, and its ability to alchemize the noun.

Viewing Velocities

While galleries and museums maximize footfall with an eye on the bottom line, the artwork is often claimed as a haven from the giddy pace of experience. What are the temporalities of the contemporary art world, and how might they be affected by the coronavirus crisis?

Knight’s Moves

A retrospective on the life and work of pioneering cultural critic, theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen. From Methodist roots to Parisian exile, radical journalism to avant-garde filmmaking, auteurism and semiotics to the landmark Raiding the Icebox.

Neo-Backwardness In Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Brazil's foremost cultural theorist considers parallels between the rise of Bolsonaro and the 1964 military coup. Is capital once again advancing its modernization programme with the support of the country’s most backward-looking elements? Paradoxes of politics and culture, from Machado to the present, via tropicalismo and Glauber Rocha.

Always Allegorize?

For Fredric Jameson, allegory exposes the contradictions that ideology obscures: capturing the multiplicities of modernity and forging an interpretive mechanism for the cultural critic. From transforming the text to terraforming the planet, insights into the method of a leading Marxist theorist gleaned from his most recent—and most playful—work.

Two Paragraphs in Raymond Williams

Replying to Francis Mulhern in NLR 110, Joseph North finds support for his project of a critical aesthetic education in the supposedly anti-aesthetic work of Raymond Williams.

Rankings: A Pre-History

A forerunner to contemporary listification in eighteenth-century tabulations of painters, playwrights, poets and composers. Rise and fall of Enlightenment metrics of aesthetic evaluation, squeezed between the dyadic arrangements of classical comparatio and Romantic conceits of off-the-scale artistic genius.

Intaglio as Philosophy

Alice Bamford on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Le graveur et le philosophe: Albert Flocon rencontre Gaston Bachelard. Meditations on art and philosophy, science and reflexivity, sparked by a Surrealist collaboration in postwar Paris.

Memory and Icons

Fate of the photographic icon of war in the age of embedded journalism and the digital camera: why so few images of the conquest of Iraq are recollected, and so many of the fall of the Twin Towers pre-selected? The importance of counter-narratives for fixing meaning to shots of fighting or suffering, and the latent possibilities of the democratization of image-production today.

On Games

Have algorithms and data-farming short-circuited relations between computers, games and the economy, to create a world of involuntary play—and can critical art practice suggest ways to turn the tables?

Beyond the Book

From Mallarmé to Valéry, Benjamin to El Lissitsky and Moholy-Nagy, theorizations of the challenge posed to Gutenberg’s medium by the relentless typographical innovations of the new mass media.

The World As Gallery

First global art movement or mere identity of a New York set? Potpourri of avant-garde practices or formalist tautology? A survey of Conceptual Art’s crystallization, among international neo-avant-gardes and the artistic networks of global centres, between an abstract global imaginary and its concrete contestations.

Gherman’s Anti-Aesthetic

Recent films of the Soviet-trained director Aleksei Gherman read as enigmatic late-modern outcrops—or meteorites from an unimaginable future—resistant to the all-pervasive aestheticization processes of consumer capitalism.

Personafication

The shift of artistic and activist practice towards the performance of personae. Sven Lütticken tracks the fraying limits of subjecthood through post-war action painting, Marcel Mariën’s surrealist-Blanquist parti imaginaire, the 1960s Dutch neo-avant-garde, the Invisible Committee, Rojava and artistic experiments with the political party-form.

Constructing the Liberal Subject

David Simpson on Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man. Crystalization of liberal universalist discourses through the eras of FDR and McCarthy.

Culture After Google

Emilie Bickerton on Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform. Diagnosis of a cultural production laid low by digital consolidation, and political proposals for a push-back.

Goethe’s Nightmare

Barry Schwabsky on Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand. How different are Shenzhen trade-painters copying Western artists from the conceptualists using them?

The Absent Double

What images arise when representation reaches its limits? Two cultural historians explore the emergence since classical antiquity of a series of visual devices for depicting massacres: from hunting scenes and martyrdoms to infernos and Doppelgänger.

Terms of Disparity

Barry Schwabsky on Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. Episodes from a history of modern art, from Winckelmann to Mallarmé to Vertov.

Cultural Revolution

Mutations of an untimely concept, in a period when capitalism has arrogated to itself the power of radical transformation. From Debord and Marcuse to the contemporary art world, by way of punk rock and hip hop.

Past Participating

Marcus Verhagen on Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Antecedents and critical implications of the recent wave of participatory art.

Reserve Armies of the Imagination

Tony Wood on Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen. Dilemmas of representation—aesthetic and political—in the age of the super-abundant image.

Under the Flag

Barry Schwabsky on Anne Wagner, A House Divided: American Art since 1955. Painting and sculpture in the age—and shadow—of US hegemony.

The Gleaners

Clive Dilnot on Chris Killip, Seacoal. Scenes of industrial decay in 1980s Northumberland as images of a workless future.

The Three-Headed Horse

Echoes and parallels between the work of Eisenstein, Picasso and Orozco in the late 1930s. The recurring spectres of war, conquest and destruction stalking the world from Moscow to Guadalajara to Guernica, travelling back and forth between film, wall and canvas.

Dialectic of Dionysus

Sven Lütticken on Asger Jorn, Fraternité Avant Tout. The Danish artist and Situationist wrestles with Engels and Nietzsche.

Art of the Industrial Trace

Looking down at man-made landscapes from an airplane window: entry-point to an allegorical materialism, mapping art onto its double in production? The role of the indexical in earthworks, crop art and aerial photography, and the limits it places on allegory.

Theses on the Short Story

Argentina’s leading novelist reflects on the hidden architecture of the form, and the unfolding of its iterations from Chekhov to Hemingway, Kafka to Borges.

The Forgotten Space

The oceans as neglected but indispensable medium for globalized industry. Snapshots from the maritime landscape of exploitation.

Scars and Faultlines

The art of Doris Salcedo as test-case for the complex interaction of aesthetics and commerce. For works aiming to commemorate lives lost in Colombia’s civil wars, what are the consequences—economic, ethical, critical—of integration into the circuits of both memory and market?

Playtimes

Once deemed extinct, the play instinct now pervades the worlds of work and leisure. Can it be turned to radical ends? Sven Lütticken seeks clues in Schiller and Debord, Neuschwanstein and computer games.

Regieoper, or Eurotrash?

Opera has been globalized, and big-bang productions of Wagner’s music-dramas now outnumber those of all other works. How to frame an aesthetics for this cultural-historical phenomenon—allegorical ideogram strings, or Gesamtkunstwerk as vaudeville?

The Ideology of Universalism

Contending visions of universality, from Kantian common sense to the doctrine of human rights. Can a constellation of singularities emerge within the standardization envisaged by globalized production? Prompts from Musil, Gursky and the carpet-weavers of Kuyan-Bulak.

Green Cabinet, White Cube

The necessity of Arcadia, as fabular vantage-point for clear vision of the world we inhabit. Malcolm Bull follows a wooded path leading from the mythological parallels of Renaissance art to the modern gallery space.

Jameson and Form

Identifying Fredric Jameson’s literary style as one of his signal achievements, Eagleton asks whether his formal emphases also serve to stave off questions of content: morality, sexuality, subjectivity.

Post-Postmodernism?

Owen Hatherley on Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant. A super-curator wanders in search of art after postmodernism.

Marx and Montage

The author of Archaeologies of the Future unearths fragments from ‘ideological antiquity’ in Alexander Kluge’s recent film on Capital. Encounters with Eisenstein’s unrealized equivalent, seeking a cinematic transposition of the commodity fetish.

Brecht’s Relevance: Highs and Lows

In what ways does Brecht’s drama—and the world-transforming impulse behind his strategies of defamiliarization—speak to times and places other than his own? Ups and downs of his resonance in Brazil and beyond, shadowing the movements of history’s leading edge.

Post-Communist Aesthetics

Barry Schwabsky on Groys, Art Power. Essays on aesthetics and politics, founded on the disconcerting insights of late-Soviet conceptualism.

Culture and Society, Then and Now

The idea of culture in Raymond Williams’s classic work, and discrepant readings of it, fifty years on. Gestation amid CP debates on the English tradition, hidden affinities with the Frankfurt School, and counterposition to the verities of today’s liberal multiculturalism.

The Lens of War

Reviewing the Brighton Photo Biennial, Peter Campbell writes on the aesthetics, ethics and technology of war photography: images as evidence, cameras as combatants, from the Crimean War to Abu Ghraib.

Attending to Abstract Things

From the philosophe De Brosses in the eighteenth century to the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman and the conceptualist Sol LeWitt in the twentieth—via Hegel, Creuzer and Marx—the fates of the fetish and the commodity, in critical thought and art.

Words that Shook the World

Kheya Bag on Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution. The rules of the manifesto as a form, in revolutionary politics and in avant-garde art, and the history of its fortunes.

Conceptual Perspex

Marcus Verhagen on Liam Gillick, Proxemics. Writings of a graphomaniac artist, with bearings drawn from ‘relational aesthetics’ and a postdated modernism.

Idolatry and its Discontents

Amid rhetorical dust-storms over purported Islamist threats to Western values, Sven Lütticken finds antecedents for contemporary struggles over the image in Judaic and Protestant bans on idolatry. Multiple meanings of the veil and varying forms of iconoclasm, under the aegis of the spectacle.

Suspense and . . . Surprise

Media projections of the ‘war on terror’ as manipulations of shock and time, purveyed through a perpetual present of 24-hour coverage and on-line news. Lessons from Hitchcock, Conrad and Benjamin on the poetics of suspense and possibilities for a rehistoricization of the attentat.

Celluloid and Plasma

Tony Wood on Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. How has the digital era changed the cinematic viewing experience—and the spectator? Freeze-frame fetishism and narrative disruption from Lumière to Kiarostami, via Hitchcock and Rossellini.

The Feathers of the Eagle

Lifting, swiping, zapping: popular expressions that have been aesthetic tactics since Dada. Sven Lütticken recasts the history of such practices of appropriation—not excluding those of Warhol or Debord, sometimes misplaced—as so many exercises in mythology. Anticipated by Flaubert, theorized by Barthes, staged by Broodthaers, is time running out for such creative misuses of past or present, as ‘intellectual property rights’ tighten?