Refine your search

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?

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.

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.

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.

Dialectic of Dionysus

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

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.

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.

Post-Postmodernism?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Managing the Avant-Garde

In the age of franchise museums and mega-shows, what role for the artist? Borrowings from the revolutionary avant-garde in the practices of present-day creator-impresarios, seamlessly fusing the realms of commerce and culture—and the refusenik stance of Kabakov’s conceptual counter-projects.

After the Gods

Mythology as the ‘condition and subject of all art’ in the varying conceptions of the early German Romantics and neoclassicism: from Schelling and Schlegel to Winckelmann and Goethe, meditations on Laocoon and anticipations of the Gesamtkunstwerk—issuing into the uncanny mythopoeias of modernity in Melville’s Confidence Man and the White Whale.

On Variousness; and On Persuasion

The resources culture may appropriately furnish for a critique of society, not always unpolitical, defended against Francis Mulhern’s case in Metaculture and its sequels. Does criticism persuade by attraction of example, or by force of proposition?

Codeword Modernity

Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s narratology of modernity, and current attempts to reinstate it as a master category of the time, requiring no suspect prefixes. The political dialectic behind such impulses of restoration, and the artistic practices which prepared them.

What is Cultural Criticism?

Meanings of culture, the place of politics and role of intellectuals in the practice of criticism, as conceived since Arnold. Replying to Stefan Collini in NLR 18, Francis Mulhern asks how far the arts of a conversible portraiture bear on a critical agenda.

Fridamania

Threads from the history of Mexican surrealism: the Blue House in Coyoacán and Breton’s protegée as avant-garde antidotes or postmodern devotional objects. The components of the Kahlo cult and its basis in the artist’s own practice of self-fabulation and masquerade, concealment and display.

Future City

After the dilapidation of urban modernism, what kinds of city and what forms of architecture await us? The author of The Seeds of Time considers their flowers in the dizzying work of Rem Koolhaas, the mega-developments of the Pearl River Delta and the conceptualization of ‘Junkspace’. Breaking back into history with a battering-ram of the postmodern?

Stripes, No Stars

Sven Lütticken on Daniel Buren, Mot à Mot. Could a collaboration between avant-garde artist and sociologist escape the logic of the spectacle, or must it in some fashion reproduce it? Bourdieu’s last notes on art, with a view of Paris rooftops.

More Conjectures

Replying to critics of his ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (NLR 1), Franco Moretti considers the objections to a world-systems theory of the relations between centre and periphery in the sphere of the novel or poetry, and proposes some new hypotheses about the morphology of forms and the politics of comparative literary studies.

On the First Pop Age

If Britain rather than the US, in the fifties rather than the sixties, originated Pop Art, what ingredients made it possible, and how did its pre-eminent painter Richard Hamilton tabulate the arrival of a new ‘super-fetishism’?

The Ecstatic Spiral

Tony Wood on Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique. From Eisenstein to Deleuze, luminous snapshots of the cinema that would substitute a single regime for historical periods.

Defending Cultural Criticism

Is cultural criticism condemned to the gestures of an anti-political disdain, whether Right or Left in origin? Replying to Francis Mulhern in NLR 16, Stefan Collini argues to the contrary that it signifies an indispensable moment of committed reflection.

Secrecy and Publicity

Can the legacies of the classical avant-gardes be renewed as effective strategies in postmodern conditions, or are they condemned to mere pastiche? After Bataille, Warhol and Smithson, the possibilities of counter-media, and uncertainties of counter-publics.

Beyond Metaculture

Replying to Stefan Collini in NLR 7, Francis Mulhern extends his critique of the pretensions of culture to general social authority, to the Marxist versions of Kulturkritik in the Frankfurt School. What defines the difference between politics and culture as practices?

Anglo-Globalism?

Does Franco Moretti’s new programme for a study of world literature carry global English in its pocket, as the ticket to leave close reading behind? The cost and benefits of Auerbach’s philology and Said’s sociology, as alternative approaches.

The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes

Schiller’s conception of play, foundation at once of the art of the beautiful and the art of living, as the original scene of Western aesthetics, generating a set of recurrent emplotments of the relations between life and art, from the Juno Ludovisi to Jeff Koons.

Between the Cultures of Capital

T. J. Clark’s landmark study, Farewell to an Idea, takes the art of modernism to be a convulsive attempt to imagine modernity in forms other than the triumph of capitalism. Malcolm Bull suggests it might be better conceived as a fold in the overlap between two contrasting cultures of capitalism, classical and commodity, of which only one is left today.

Modernism’s Nightmare?

In coolly proclaiming itself to be essentially the application of technique to matter, to what further consequences did modern art discover it was committing itself? Christopher Prendergast traces the ‘frightful clockwork of the world-structure’ in the games of Mallarmé, puppets of Flaubert and Kleist, musings of Mann, and the hurdy-gurdy of Cézanne overheard by T. J. Clark.

Parklife

From the zoological garden, via the nature reserve and the theme-town, to the TV reality-show—sequences from the evolution of ‘parklife’. Disney and Waco, Sloterdijk and Deleuze, Spielberg and Smithson, as prisms for the fate of postmodern space.

Art Agonistes

Hal Foster on Amy Newman, ed., Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974. The modern fate of art criticism through the prism of America’s leading journal of the visual arts in the sixties—a retrospect of the time beyond Abstract Expressionism.

Culture Talk

Between the elite traditions of Kulturkritik and the populist enthusiasms of Cultural Studies, nominal antagonists, Francis Mulhern’s Culture/Metaculture discerns a covert bond—a common hostility to politics proper, as the antonym of culture. Stefan Collini queries his way of resolving the tension between these two.

From Media to Mythology

From Lessing to Greenberg, criticism of the arts was founded on the distinctions made between them. Does technology today irreversibly ruin these? Sven Lütticken asks what a radical practice that accepted convergence between artistic media would look like.

Blue

An elegy for Derek Jarman, meditating on the meanings of the monochrome he took from Yves Klein for his last film, confronting death. From lapis lazuli to ultramarine: shades of paradise from Ficino and Blake to Goethe and Guy Debord.

Taking a Bead on Brit-Art

Bryan Appleyard on Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite. Precedents and pioneers among tacticians of fame—the rise of the new British art.

Deadly Potions: Kleist and Wagner

Could there have been a link between Kleist’s suicide and Wagner’s Liebestod? Michael Maar’s bravura exploration of the ties of life and art that bound the composer to the writer—sexual and lethal passions in the same retort.

MoMA 2000: The Capitulation

Time was when New York’s Museum of Modern Art plumed itself as an uncompromising guardian of Modernism. The arrival of its ‘themed’ re-hang—mimicked now at London’s Tate Modern—reduces a hundred years of defiguration to a stroll through an aesthetic department store.

Origins of the Present Crisis

Postmodernism is typically seen as a recent sequel to modernism. T. J. Clark queries Perry Anderson’s account of the break between them, and concludes that there is more continuity of conditions than meets the eye. It may be too soon to judge whether modernism has passed.

Something About the Poetry: Larkin and 'Sensitivity'

To Julian Barnes, on 27 September 1985, Philip Larkin wrote concerning an encounter with almost the only woman he ever admitted to ‘adoring’: read more

The Crisis of Contemporary Culture

St Catherine’s, the college to which I have just migrated, got its name by a mistake. The college began life in the nineteenth century as a society for matriculating students too poor to gain entry to the University, which is not least of the reasons why I am . . . read more

Subcultures and Society

In their Foreword to Political Shakespeare Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield give a brief account of ‘cultural materialism’: a mode of critical analysis which examines both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ texts, insists on their implication in history, denies that they have any transcendent meanings, and takes its stand on . . . read more

Words Words Words: A Reply to Tony Pinkney

‘Modernism’ and the ‘Avant-garde’ are not synonymous terms’. Tony Pinkney is absolutely right in saying so, in stressing the relevance of Bürger’s book (which, alas, had not been published at the time I wrote my article), and in pointing to the terminological ‘slide’ in the opening sentences of . . . read more

The Moment of Truth

Literary genres have temporal boundaries, and the current definition of modern tragedy is an evident if vague acknowledgment of this fact. But they have spatial boundaries too, which may be at times even more revealing—historically revealing—than temporal ones. Such is the case with modern tragedy, whose own geography . . . read more

The Language of African Literature

The language of African literature cannot be discussed meaningfully outside the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demanding our attention, and a problem calling for a resolution. On the one hand is, let us call a spade a spade, imperialism in its . . . read more

The Dialectic of Fear

The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy . . . read more

On Bertolt Brecht

In the realm of aesthetics, the way a thing is expressed is of a qualitatively different order from what it would be in science. No one will deny that even in science a statement can be made in a clear or confused, an elegant or a laboured manner, . . . read more

Introduction to Lukacs

The aesthetic debates within German Marxism are now acknowledged to constitute one of the most remarkable sequences in European cultural history this century. Few episodes either in the general history of Marxist theory or in the course of aesthetic discussion as a whole can match the depth and . . . read more

Image of the People

Each of Timothy Clark’s two books merits a separate study. Both are important works, especially fascinating for a French reader. But I shall confine myself here to Image of the People, since its field is narrower than that of The Absolute Bourgeois, and for that very reason it . . . read more

'Tolstoy and the Novel'

John Bayley: Tolstoy and the Novel. Chatto & Windus. 35s. read more

El Lissitsky

When we published the Jakobson-Tynyanov theses last year (nlr 37), we wished to draw attention to the confrontation of vanguard art and aesthetics with revolutionary politics and theory in the Soviet Union during the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution. El Lissitsky’s polemic on the future of the . . . read more

Magritte and the Bowler Hat

Why did Magritte populate his surrealist images with bowler hats? Peter Wollen takes us from the oneirics of the Belgian painter to the antics of Tintin and Chaplin, the purism of Le Corbusier, memories of Beckett, fantasies of Bond and Kundera. Emblem of working men and city toffs, cabaret girls and Orange parades—what icons have matched it for multiple meanings?

Conjectures on World Literature

Nearly two hundred years ago, Goethe announced the imminence of a world literature. Here Franco Moretti offers a set of hypotheses for tracking the birth and fate of the novel in the peripheries of Europe, in Latin America, Arab lands, Turkey, China, Japan, West Africa. For the first time, the prospect of a morphology of global letters?

Chris Ofili and the Limits of Hybridity

Aside from a typically cheeky demand to be presented with the cheque up-front, there was little surprise in Chris Ofili’s 1998 Turner Prize victory. His solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, had been a huge success, pulling in large crowds and excellent reviews. His lush, psychedelic, highly . . . read more

Surrealism’s Feminine Side

What is surrealism? As this anthology superbly documents, it is not a ‘French literary school from the 1920s’, but a vast and ambitious poetic, cultural and political revolutionary movement, a subversive protest, in the name of desire and imagination, against bourgeois civilization. International in its scope, historically open-ended, . . . read more

Europa and Utopia: How Cultural History Deals with the Paradox of Modernity

In the light of Luisa Passerini’s new book on the cultural and political discourse on Europe in Britain in the 1930s, it is tempting to draw a number of parallels between that decade and our own. The inter-war years, Passerini shows, were a period of much speculation and . . . read more

Centennial Politics: On Jameson on Brecht on Method

O great academics! Still, let’s search more diligently and not despair. read more

Raiding the Dressing-Up Box

This month, at the Paris fashion shows, designer Alexander McQueen’s collection for the house of Givenchy featured an austere black Victorian crinoline, whose heavy satin folds and ruched white petticoats parted at the front to reveal leather biker trousers worn underneath. Very ‘now’, this Victorian-biker look; so postmodern, . . . read more

From the Naked to the Nude

The representation of the unadorned human body by artists—the transformation of the naked into the nude—was reckoned among the highest goals of European art from the Renaissance until well into the present century. But preconceptions of what such images should look like have changed radically during that period. . . . read more

Art, Class and Cleavage

Attention all socialists and left-thinking people of the Earth. And all you left-sided, critical (down to your last unpierced body part) poststructuralist radicals. Punks and drum-and-bass heads too, listen: Ben Watson has a message for you. Art, Class and Cleavage proposes a negative dialectics intoxicated with the excesses . . . read more

The Multiple Identities of Walter Benjamin

In the August issue of Biography, a popular us magazine, the editor-in-chief prefaces some musing on that month’s star profiles, General George C. Marshall and Tina Turner, with an outline of the magazine’s core philosophy: ‘No two life stories are even remotely the same, even the ones . . . read more

Captured by the Screen

With every chapter, Gargantua serves up a concentrated dose of commodity images, most of these glossy and seen on a screen. Under Stallabrass’s direction, the commonplace artefacts of our daily lives impose themselves like actors in a technological drama. The computer screen perched on desk or lap, captures . . . read more

Cold Eye

What appear to be a sequence of old snapshots in faded colour have been framed and hung on the gallery wall. They look as if they had been dug from some forgotten trunk in a family home, yet they show only backgrounds—walls, garden lawns, a deserted tea-table, an . . . read more

Scavenging by Night

How art confronts industrial capitalism and its directors, the bourgeoisie, has troubled the modern Western world ever since Théophile Gautier acted as cheerleader on the first night of Victor Hugo’s Ernani in 1830, causing a riot. Then, the fight was between the Romantics and the classicists, but from . . . read more

The Ideology of the Aesthetic

In Ingmar Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute, the camera, throughout the overture, traverses the faces of an audience divided by age, sex, ethnicity and style, but united in its common rapture. It is a compelling image of the power of the ‘aesthetic’ to realize—despite everything that tends . . . read more

The Place of Theory

Readers not yet familiar with Fredric Jameson’s corpus will find this collection of his theoretical essays a useful introduction to the major themes and methods that have dominated his work for two decades. From the groundbreaking programmatic text, ‘Metacommentary’ (1971), to his more recent writings on postmodernism (represented . . . read more

From the Collective to the Collection: Curating Post-Communist Germany

Who still has souvenirs of Autumn 1989 stored away in the cupboard? To mark the tenth year of post-communism, curator Bernd Roder of the Prenzlauer Berg Museum in Berlin recently put out such a call for donations. His planned exhibition, The Time Is High, sets out to punctuate . . . read more

The Grand Hotel Abyss

A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss. . . a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort. . . And the daily contemplation of the abyss, between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment . . . read more

Postmodernism and Post-Socialist Society: Cultural Politics in China After the 'New Era'

Enthusiasts for Chinese postmodernism are nowadays put on the defensive by those who dismiss the issue as a Chinese problematic, or resist postmodernism in general. However, it is often neglected that, at a pedestrian, journalistic level, it has never been too difficult to identify and inventory postmodern(ist) works . . . read more

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City

Sometime during 1996, at the very latest, Latinos surpassed Blacks as the second largest ethno-racial group in New York City. (They long have been the largest census group in the Bronx.) There were no street celebrations in El Barrio or Washington Heights, nor did the mayor hold a . . . read more