A trip to New York with my daughter Agnes. I’ll accompany this little collection with some writing, a kind of cultural dossier, for Autre Magazine.
Autrewise
Summer 2024
I went to see the Vivian Meier show at Fotografiska and also caught the Bruce Gilden. Kind of a great pairing. I think Vivian is such a fascinating character, precluded from consideration in her time and then opportunistically seized upon by someone without a serious knowledgeable art historical background posthumously. Who then manufactures this totally bogus mythology and then a number of scholars go about trying to amend the record. The work really speaks clearly for itself though. And that she took on nannying to commit to her street photography practice! You feel her disposition and the moods of her time; alienation, urbanization, loneliness—but also warmth, compassion, levity, and this fascinatingly somber and resolved self reflexivity.
Where Vivian feels like a sensitive spirit floating around Chicago, Bruce is like a wild animal hunting in the urban jungle. They had a bts piece in the galleries of him working the streets with a handheld flash, and it looked like he was literally mugging people. Some of the images are unbelievable tho. There’s one of an upper east side type of woman that’s just perfect. I watched a talk between Martin Parr and Gilden, who are not dissimilar but with hilariously different manners, it was entertaining. It feels like a bygone era, no? Now we have Armin Linke, Ariella Azoulay and so on. Which is also totally fascinating to me. Photography in its brief history has gotten so complicated in its production and circulation. Much of the twentieth century theory doesn't seem to hold. I also think the conflation of anthropological work (when it feels less like a mugging) and all the horrors of various colonial projects is a bit overdetermined—though important conversations happening to be sure. I guess it has a lot to do with the framing and context.
These tensions came up for me when I chanced on a book of Mitch Epstein’s India photos in a charity shop. I totally fell for them. He was born in Holyoke, studied at Cooper with Garry Winogrand and was of the generation where deciding to shoot color was considered a radical move. I learned he married an Indian filmmaker and collaborated on some films and I think his work from that period is wonderful. I suppose a cartoon version of Azoulay would likely have none of it, with its colonial gaze, european compositions and so on… but I think it gets interesting when you engage this work with all its complexity, implications, and so on. It’s also just so visually arresting.
I watched a few interviews with Mitch and found him gentle, soft spoken, intelligent and exhibiting an incredible sensitivity for beauty and these cinematic renderings. Also well educated, concerned with social and ecological themes, and often turning an ethnographic gaze back on his life and land. He has no pretensions about doing documentary and I see him as a kind of philosopher aesthete. Also enthralled with India and producing syncretic work that speaks to his involved relationship to that culture. I think I’m interested in writing more about him and exploring his archive. Maybe also doing an ethological read of some of his India work, looking at his respectful depiction of animals, particularly cows, and opening that up into some animal rights themes I’ve been considering lately.
He also did a series on leisure I find compelling. Actually the theme of leisure feels significant right now too, and might even be a timely one for the magazine. There’s a text by Byung-Chul Han called Good Entertainment that I’m fascinated with. It deals with the saturating Christian passion narratives in western art in a way that has really affected how I’m experiencing culture these days. There’s also an intriguing text from the UK publisher Urbanomic by Hiroki Azuma, The Philosophy of the Tourist https://www.urbanomic.com/book/philosophy-of-the-tourist/ that seems like a recuperation of this maligned archetype in an increasingly networked and cosmologically promiscuous global era. Azuma’s work is distinctive and contemporary, exploring manga, database culture and postmodern de-authored construction of narrative. He might be interesting to be in conversation with.
I came across another Urbanomic text in the Miguel Abreu bookshop called Pleromatica by Gabriel Catren, described in its inside jacket as a ‘phenoumenodelic solution to this momentous ungrounding, defiantly refusing both unrestrained contingency and arbitrary refoundation.’ nice way to put it, and makes me curious about Catren’s phenoumenodelia…
Robin Mackay, the director of Urbanomic, might be an interesting person to be in touch with as well. Robin has a special vantage on some pretty radical horizons of thought, and he has been translating and publishing the composer and philosopher Francois Bonnet, whose work I like, especially a text called The Music to Come.
This leisure theme I think is salient in post-fordist economies of the global north, which have assigned leisure a new frontier of extraction, particularly in virtual spaces. I’ve heard recently that video games have become the largest form of entertainment today and as such an important site of critical engagement. I think HUO has a group at Serpentine working on this, likely with less criticality than I would prefer. I know the bright young Italian philosopher Federico Campagna did his dissertation on world-building in video games at the RCA before putting out a string of theological longue duree historiographical studies of media and ontology—as well as a nice podcast with the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. A few artists come to mind working on this and I imagine there’s a lot of interesting activity happening here. I started exploring the work of Soraya Murray at UCSC. Maybe there’s a thoughtful group on critical video game studies that could be convened for Autre.
I’m reading an interesting text from Arne De Boever called Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism. After a discursive exploration of Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty and exceptionalism, foregrounding a theological holdover in modern state power, he gets into an great text by Han called Shanzhai; Deconstruction in Chinese that deals with the fixation on essence and being in western art and its unavailability to eastern conceptions of relational becoming. This perhaps attenuates the need for cultural tribunals on historical practitioners mediating their times, or better yet welcomes the engagement in its fleeting and co-constitutive immanence. I’ve been thinking about a sort of abolitionist approach to western museology that seems de rigueur today, especially as I’ve taken Agnes to Met three times in the last week and appreciated nearly every moment of it. I’ve come away siding with Chantal Mouffe, who Boever cites in Aesthetic Exceptionalism, offering a prompt to agonistically engage institutions to make them better and change their behavior. I also noticed a number of initiatives to repatriate or share works responsibly with collaborating institutions from their geographical provenance. What am I saying? Basically, I think the stakes of widespread social and ecological remediation are largely outside of encyclopedic museums, which can be reformed and actually are by and large fascinating, pleasurable and publicly accessible repositories of media and narratives. Although when it gets out the British Museum can’t even keep track of their imperial spoils—that are literally turning up on ebay for ~150 quid, I’m not so sure…
I had a lovely afternoon at the seminary co-op bookstore in Chicago before going to New York. I’ll include a few interesting titles I encountered. Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy has been well-received. She’s looking at art mirroring the value systems of platform capitalism, valorizing speed and intensity, disintermediation and data, and exploring what’s at stake. She’s lamenting the flattening and unambiguity of art today and I imagine she’s pairing that with a clear indictment of the digital feudal class. The big picture seems obvious, these tech companies move into technology-enabled deregulated zones and wildly exploit users and precarious workers, often who have been rendered illegal to further ensure a powerless labor force. The content-ization of art—not inconsequential for me—is a troubling trend. That said, I’ve noticed this condition of devaluation getting mobilized by the same disruptive tech feudalists that call for ever more proprietary vectors and means of enclosing and commoditizing our shared lifeworld, which feels to me like a nightmare hellscape of financialization that should certainly not be implemented for the sake of artists allegedly being treated more equitably (and gets us back into aesthetic exceptionalism and the artist sovereign). To my mind, the question of artists' value and access to a life with dignity is inextricable from a larger, global, and also more-than-human struggle, that I’m skeptical factional affinity groups can meaningfully address (to paraphrase and remix James Baldwin).
Agnes and I took an uber to the airport in Oakland, and learned from the driver, who was a former professional soccer player from Ethiopia banned from FIFA after not returning to an unstable Ethiopia after a eurocup in South America, that he kept only $21 from the $80 fare. It's outrageous! This is wage theft, is it not? I feel like his story would be a strong way to talk about issues of migration and the way illegalized persons produce deregulated labor forces, and then how platform capitalism virtualizes, normalizes, and exports these social relations. Virtual extrastatecraft. I wonder what Keller Easterling has to say about this… and what she’s working on more generally.
While on the subject of art mirroring post fordist capitalism, I was saddened to learn of the premature passing of Marina Vishmidt. I unfortunately never met her during our overlapping time at Goldsmiths but truly admired her work from afar. I think she grasped these connections between financialization and contemporary art with such incredible rigor.
Circling back to Kornbluh, I listened to an interview about Immediacy and got the sense she’s lamenting a tendency towards immanence in art, that I suppose in her usage means a kind of frantic keeping up with the velocities of the hyperindividualized present, and the loss of meaningful and attentive narrative—a theme brilliantly clarified in Han’s new text on narration (you may be getting the sense I’m a bit obsessed with Han right now). Part of me resists the pejorative treatment of an immanence that could perhaps also include a long eastern disposition towards life and art. I get what she's saying though, in the sense of an eternal present, sensational attention-mongering, the collapse of history, doomscrolling, the proliferation of neoliberal auto-this-and-that in literature, etc. I guess I’m still cautious about the esteem we give big narratives (unrestrained contingency and arbitrary refoundation). I suppose I mostly agree with the argument at this moment, and especially as these reactive right formations are mobilizing poststructural relativism. I’m still into subjectivity though, especially when in dialogue.
She opened the interview, saying to her pair of interviewers that she was really into the conversational mode, as opposed to eccentric individuals with their proprietary takes. It made me think of a review of Maggie Nelson’s new book I read a few days ago and the author quoted a conversation within; ‘In the exchange between Nelson and Björk, the musician closes by musing about what the future philosopher, in the Nelson model, should be: not someone who produces an extended pontificating ‘guitar solo’ but ‘someone like you who collects the writings of our species, merges it and distills it into a human form adding diaries and emotional responsibility’. I find this especially resonant. It reminds me of the ‘becoming-ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation’ that Sianne Ngai describes in Theory of the Gimmick. And which I half-jokingly borrowed as the name for my art and theory reference library project in graduate school.
Francesco Casetti’s recent Screening Fears: On Protective Media with Zone looks interesting. If not groundbreaking, it seems like a thoughtful and dialectical exploration of the false promise of the internet's claim to connecting people more meaningfully to the world. Amerasia, also with Zone, is a curious volume dedicated to the surprisingly sustained ignorance of the early modern connection with the new world, and the literal hundreds of years people in Europe continued to harbor the idea that the Americas were actually part of Asia. It's kind of amazing, and draws from a wide range of surviving agnotological texts and visual culture. It lends weight to Graeber and Wengrows rendering of the indigenous critique of Europe and the subsequent effect on the so-called enlightenment.
I left the Seminary co-op bookstore, after 5 hours and several thoughtful conversations with the gracious staff, with an excellent text from Zygmunt Bauman called Living on Borrowed TIme, that was compiled from a series of conversations with Citali Rovirosa-Madrazo. The conversational approach of the book distills Baumans breathtaking erudition and makes it easy and pleasurable to read. I think it's important to invite academics to have colloquial conversations and make those popularly available. I noticed Citali wrote an interesting paper on ecocide and international law last year too. Maybe a conversation between Citali and Jonas Staal about legal approaches to assembly, art, ecological remediation and more-than-human rights would be a good addition to the magazine. I’m troubled a bit by a sort of legal fetish, and Lourdian impasse, but I think it's consequential work.
I have to say after several weeks with Agnes, wrestling her off her iphone, I’m so distressed about the cretinization of the algo-media. She’s been totally svengalied and neurochemically reprogrammed by her phone and platform capitalism. It’s really such a crisis and I don’t know what to do about it. It's so sophisticated and these kids really don’t stand a chance. I’m a sad case myself, with the constant documentation of everything, but I try to sublimate it at least... Agnes and I are making a zine from our trip, I’ll share a version. We did field trips to printed matter to look for inspiration and ask about printing resources. They have an outpost now at the Swiss Institute, which also has a lovely library and reading room and an initiative to show rotating artists in neglected spaces throughout the building, in the staircases, etc. They’re showing the work of Kobby Adi atm. I think he’s a thoughtful artist and big thinker that might be nice to include in the magazine. I saw Kobby’s graduate show at the RA in London and it made an impression on me. A kind of infrastructural aesthetics. I could write about this maybe, perhaps in conjunction with Marina Vishmidt’s work on infrastructural critique. I’m still exploring this concept in her work. I take it to mean on one level building enduring alternative spaces and relational practices, and then there's also something about temporal infrastructures she’s exploring. I think we’re both locating the stakes of a critique of production in the temporal to some extent, for her—in what I’ve read—as a container for possibilities, and for myself, in the distribution of what I call agential time, that pragmatically aims for a revaluation of expectations about the amount of time people are expected to labor. Both in industrial and agrarian work as well as in the postindustrial underemployed precariat on-demand platform service paradigm. I think of this as pragmatic at the axiomatic level. As in a foundational shift in peoples normalization of these coercive labor regimes using the measure of one's right to agential—that is self-determined—time. Self determined in a way that allows for a healthy sociality, time with family, friends, neighbors.
At Printed Matter I picked up a transcription of a speech from a former CIA agent called John Stockwell’s Secret Wars of the CIA. It was put out by a small publisher called Crisis Editions. I like the simple language and urgency of this kind of publishing. I don't think American imperialism is discussed enough. I’ve been spending a lot of time with old Michael Parenti lectures and they’re so plainspokenly good. A bit shouty sometimes… but they just get right past all the usual art world and academic obfuscation. Related to this—though less plainspoken—is Anselm Franke’s penultimate show at the HKW called Parapolitics, and catalog, dealing with the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom that ‘At its height, had offices in 35 countries, employed dozens of personnel, and published over twenty prestigious magazines. It held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances.’ It’s a really interesting and shocking history and way into understanding how much cultural production was determined along a liberal trajectory by the US government. And how much it saturates contemporary art and culture. I spent some time with the catalog from the Parapolitics show at the Flaxman library at SAIC. I had such a lovely visit there with two librarians who pulled all of these wonderful artist books and scholarly articles related to the sugar project. I felt embarrassed by their generosity. They had just returned from the printed matter book fair as well, so I got to see all their picks for the archive. Talisa Lallai’s Post Tropical and Amanda Teixeria’s A Settlers Town… both caught my eye. I also saw some gorgeous photos at the AI from an architect called Howard Dearstyne, a student of Mies at the Bauhaus, immanence rendered beautifully.
I have to say the art on this NY trip was mostly underwhelming, while everything around was melting and shimmering. Evening walks into the night with Agnes were the best. I thought a lot about Olmstead and the construction of Landscape in Central Park. I’ve been connecting art and nature a lot in my mind lately. I read that the Amazon was methodologically cultivated and also that there's mounting evidence complicating the teleological view of agrarianism, with many kinds of seasonal and migratory forms of cultivation that trouble the narrative of linear agrologistics. I suppose both Agrarianism, with its favoring of sweetness and durability and Conservation with its suspended exceptionalism, assert aesthetic dispositions commensurable with modern conceptions of art.
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit how much I was into Martin Eder’s paintings at Marlborough, and I think that might have been their last show… quite a parting comment. I saw a beautiful textile show at Kasmin. An interesting group show on rituals at Print Center NY in Chelsea. There was one work of small sculptures by Kate VanVliet that I loved. It reminded me of Cecila Vicuna’s precarios.
We went to visit the turtles in the japanese corner of the south side of the park every few days around sunset. Watching them playfully breach the constellations of light over water I began to understand the Indigenous cosmovision of Turtle Island. You can see a bit of what I mean in the collection Agnes and I are making. New York truly amazes and exhausts me. I needed twenty years in rural California to learn the restraint and habits of restoration to return home and survive there.
I found the Whitney biennial unsatisfying, and the Joan Jonas retrospective strained and affected, partly resuscitated by a performance of her mirrors work, which has taken on new dimensions with the proliferation of networked screen culture (and its attendant psychosocial maladies). I tried to connect Agnes with the permanent collection at MoMA and we both felt a bit cold. The Met was deeply satisfying. In particular a beautiful sit with a Buddhist stele and an 8 panel painting done like a Japanese screen by a Korean artist trained in Tokyo and Paris, a syncretic fauvist wedding scene that really delighted me. My most enjoyable artful experience likely was an afternoon with Sophia and Agnes at the Noguchi museum and garden, and then a ferry back to the city for miso at lovely day as the Elizabeth street garden was closing and it began to rain.
I’m still waiting to learn if I’ll get the post production grant to finish the film. I’ve been researching early childhood education at the moment too for a project with Sophia. And I’m sequencing several hundred scanned images from Jim’s collection for an ambitious project on capitalist realism and the end of history. Maybe I can share the essay I’m working on and get your thoughts... This is on top of the daily applying for teaching and non profit jobs, which as of yet has produced nothing besides two tantalizing interviews. One for a position producing art books with Radius in Italy and another managing David Byrnes non profit focused on solution-based news. The latter was a 20 hour a week remote position that paid 65k and included some really pleasant sounding travel. Can this please be the new global standard of degrowth work? Also a degrowth issue might be a good idea…
Thoughts for Citizen issue:
There’s been a reevaluation of the Mongol period that in part examines the cosmopolitanism and tolerance to diversity they displayed, a kind of proto modernist set of intercultural dynamics. Favereau’s text was a big part of this https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674244214
Peter Frankopan also in his silk roads book. He’s really major and would be good to interview but maybe hard to get.
I think Jonas Staal is a very important artist today working with inclusive and more-than-human forms of politics and assembly. This opens up into the current vogue for granting legal rights to non-human entities like rivers and so on https://www.jonasstaal.nl/projects/
There’s a few texts on border abolition. I’d like to learn more about this and find particular voices. I read against borders and remember it felt like an urgent manifesto in tone but not as much substance as I’d like. It strikes me that the intensity of militarized borders and surveillance is unprecedented. At the same time illegalized populations are used as a deregulated labor force around the world.
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2655-against-borders
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745348988/border-abolition-now/
As far as visual art Amanda Teixeia’s A settler's town is a well fed town. Its belly is always full of good things is a small passport book that she adorns with fruit stickers. I thought it was strong distilled work that invites consideration of global flows of commodities and bodies. And how consequential these commodity frontiers in the colonial period are to determining people’s lives.
In Mexico City I saw Petrit Halilaj’s beautiful show at the Tamayo. I remember these drawings of migratory birds done on immigration application forms. This would be strong to include in the citizen issue. His installation work is very visually striking as well. Less excited about the current met roof commission.
AES+F did a series of porcelain sculptures dealing with immigration called Mare Mediterraneum. #9 and #1 are very striking and attention gathering.
Armin Linke
Photographs the material infrastructures and bizarre psychogeographies of institutions of power. I know some of his work intersects with the theme of citizenry.
Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography is her most influential book and the central claim is that the condition of being able to be photographed admits one into a universal citizenry with certain rights.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781890951894/the-civil-contract-of-photography
Of course all the whistleblowers John Stockwell is still alive, Julian, Edward, so on