Another upcoming Viennese volume, which is being readied for print as we speak, is Eva Maria Stadler and Jenni Tischer’s Abstraction & Economy: Myths of Growth, which comes out of an online lecture series and a symposium organized by Eva Maria and Jenni at the Angewandte (for which Falke Pisano made poster designs). In some ways, this could be seen as a sequel to Gean Moreno’s In the Mind but Not from There: Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art—and indeed my own contribution is a tweaked and updated version of my essay in that volume, “Concrete Abstraction—Our Common World.”

Meanwhile, I will try to make time (easier said than organized) for my ongoing work on abstraction. I have cancelled an upcoming lecture in Berlin because I really do not see how I could speak in Germany right now, but I will try to use talks and articles to continue developing what should at some point become the second volume of Forms of Abstraction. In addition to Jaleh Mansoor’s review of the first volume (Objections) in De Witte Raaf (in Dutch), I was happy to see a brief but illuminating discussion by Tobias Dias in a Danish-language article on Georges Didi-Huberman and form. With the collapse (intellectually and politically, and sometimes organizationally or financially) of so many magazines and journals, this is already quite something!

Sabine Folie’s exhibition History Tales: Fact and Fiction in History Painting is on view at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna till May 26. The exhibition places works by contemporary artists and a variety of loans in a critical dialogue with paintings, prints, plaster casts and various documents from the academy’s collection. Alexander Kluge contributed a number of his recent short films produced with the AI image generator Stable Diffusion. For the catalogue, which is currently in production and will be presented on March 7, I wrote a short text on these pieces titled “Alexander Kluge: Alternate Histories, Potential Images.”

Images: An Installation view with Kluge’s film Digitale Kommentare zu dem Bild Triumphaler Einzug von Henri IV in Paris von Peter Paul Rubens, a version of the catalogue cover design with a still from Kluge’s film, and the final catalogue.

My book Objections is slowly finding its way in the world… Recently, a substantial and thoughtful review by Jaleh Mansoor was published in De Witte Raaf—in a Dutch translation by Christophe Van Gerrewey, but in case Dutch is all Greek to you, you could always get some helpful AI entity to (re)translate it for you.

Belatedly, I’m doing a couple of book launches in the coming months: on November 10 (19:30) at pro qm in Berlin, and on December 7 (18:00) at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. As ever, I try to make these events dia- rather than monological. I will be in conversation with Marina Vishmidt at pro qm; participant(s) the the Rijks will be announced soon.

In light of the Stanley Brouwn cottage industry that has sprung up in the US, I thought I’d post a scan of my 2018 review of two modest Dutch Brouwn exhibitions, which is buried in an old issue of Texte zur Kunst. Apart from an annoying autocorrect mishap/editorial oversight that turned a French Enlightenment philosopher into an airplane (Concordet became Concorde), I’m still quite happy with this short reflection on Brouwn’s practice—and on the challenges it poses for the critic or art historian.

At the Miss Read book fair at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, from September 22-24, BAK distributed a printed brochure with Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf’s essay on Jacqueline Kahanoff’s notion of Levantinism, which I commissioned for my “ExitStateCraft” series on BAK’s prospections platform. The text is here.

It’s funny that the text was thus circulated in the HKW; in 2020, Eran, Eva and I proposed a project on Levantinism to the then-curator of the HKW, but we never heard back. Now it turns out there’s an office space dedicated to Kahanoff at the institution—which is something, I suppose.

Under the dismal circumstances of the present, it is as crucial as ever to sound out the anachronistic potential of Kahanoff’s Levantinism. As Alexander Kluge once put it: “The potential and the historical roots and the detours of possibilities also belong to reality. The realistic result, the actual result, is only an abstraction that has murdered all other possibilities for the moment. But these possibilities will recur.”

The second part of my essay “Capitalism and Schismogenesis” is in the October issue of e-flux journal. In a way, the splitting of this article into two installments strengthens the pun in the title; after all, Capitalism and Schizophrenia consists of two volumes. Nonetheless, the article was not written as a two-parter, and should be considered one text. While I may be slightly ambivalent about breaking up, on the whole I couldn’t be happier with the care taken by the editors in making this long-gestating piece public.

E-flux journal no. 138 (September 2023) is out, with the first part of my essay “Capitalism and Schismogenesis.” This wasn’t designed to be a two-parter, but given the text’s length (true to form), the editors thought it wise to split it up. The piece is part of a book-in-progress titled States of Divergence.

The aforementioned publication on the occasion of Dora García’s exhibition at Antwerp’s M HKA (this is how they actually spell their name) has materialized. Inserts in Real Time. Dora García: Performance Work 2000-2023 is a catalogue of the artist’s performance pieces, accompanied by writings by García herself, a conversation with curator Joanna Zielińska, and essays by Bojana Cvecić and myself. I’ve largely stopped buying big monographic exhibition catalogues, and one does wonder who actually reads these things—but Inserts in Real Time is one of those carefully crafted and well-edited volumes that just about justify the existence of the entire genre.

In retrospect, my text “Enacting Red Relations: On Dora García and Performance” seems like the completion of an unplanned trilogy of monographic essays that revolve around issues of performance, acting and enactment (in Andrea Fraser’s psychoanalytically informed terminology). The “series” started with “‘Not Stone’: Acting in and with Louise Lawler’s Pictures” (in the Museum Ludwig’s catalogue Louise Lawler: Adjusted, 2013) and continued with “Andrea Fraser: Institutional Analysis’ (in the catalogue of Fraser’s 2015 exhibition at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg). Those earlier text can be found on this site’s articles page—which I really should update one of these days.

(Very funny, Dora and Sophie!)

I’m deeply saddened to hear that the brilliant and wonderful Kobe Matthys has lost his long battle with cancer (though trite and contested, the metaphor does not feel inappropriate here). In 1992, Kobe founded Agency, a practice revolving around an ever-expanding archive of “things” that had been subject to intellectual property disputes; such things were presented and discussed by Agency in various types of assemblies. I have discussed of few of these pieces in some of my writings, including Objections, and there’s more to come in Personafications. Given Kobe’s condition, Agency became a not-for-profit association in 2019, so the archive in Saint-Gilles (Brussels) has a legal status that will hopefully protect it, enabling Kobe’s associates to keep the legacy of Agency alive. If anything, I would say that Kobe’s Lebenswerk has not yet received the sustained attention it deserves. To be continued…

Like Kobe, I like filing things in boxes (though my shelves are less tidy). My archival box for Agency contains, aside from various publications and correspondence, some photos that bring back memories… However, although I’m sure I took a picture at the time, my most vivid recollection of any Agency assembly is not represented here: Sanne Oorthuizen dressed as a penguin. It seems that some memories are unarchivable.

The new issue of Grey Room contains my article “Plan and Council: Genealogies of Calculation, Organization, and Transvalation.” Responding to the renewed discourse on socialist calculation and economic planning in the context of Big Data, this text revisits debates on plans and on workers’ councils, with particular focus on the role of aesthetics and visualization—from Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath in the 1920s and 1930s to recent projects by artists such as Jonas Staal and Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. If the texts appears to resonate somewhat with my recent October essay on organizational aesthetics, this is not entirely coincidental: the plan is that they become the basis for consecutive chapters in the second volume of Forms of Abstraction—at some point, if there is enough interest to warrant the effort.

Images: Gerd Arntz in Die proletarische Revolution (1927); Make Amazon Pay campaign designed by Jonas Staal.