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Memories of the Present
What forms of criticism should be brought to bear on the pseudo-realist ‘photographs’ produced by prompts to AI programmes? Julian Stallabrass gets a bead on these thrice-alienated products of human image-making by framing them within information-science concepts of cultural entropy and philosophical considerations on déjà vu.
Jameson after Post Critique
Radical literary theory has defined itself in opposition to a ‘historical-contextual’ approach said to be exemplified by Fredric Jameson. Is this a misreading? Leo Robson on the author of The Political Unconscious as appreciator of plot and popularizer of a positive hermeneutics of globalization.
Reflections On An Exhibition
A co-curator’s tour of the ‘No Master Territories’ show at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, presenting an international array of feminist non-fiction filmmaking practice. Erika Balsom explains the thinking—film-theoretical, gender-political, curatorial-technological—that underlay the scale and scope of the selection.
Editing Chills
Theorist of Afro-American cultural politics and multimedia practitioner, Arthur Jafa’s recent videos—high-velocity juxtapositions of found footage seen through a distinctively mellow Afropessimist lens—define a new space for black art. Naomi Vogt explores the less-examined formal properties of a unique body of work.
Making Time
From recent reflections by Jacques Rancière on how capital partitions the time of those it controls, to a stoppage by Maria Eichhorn of her exhibition to allow workers at the gallery to articulate their own experience of labouring in it—lines of insurgent art that expose and challenge segmentations of time, even as, perforce, they illustrate them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.