Here is a selection of articles in a few thematic clusters. These may overlap with book projects, but they can also traverse different books. I will link to online texts whenever they’re not behind a paywall, and otherwise post PDF or Word files. The print versions may differ from these files in details.
Forms of Abstraction
Most of these texts are from the context of work in progress that has gone through a few mutations in the course of the years, but that is now nearing its definitive form as a two-parter under the overarching title Forms of Abstraction. The first volume is titled Objections, and the second will be Personafications.
–Performing Preformations: Elements for a Historical Formalism (e-flux journal no. 110, June 2020)
–Fetishize This: Artifacts and Other Agents at the Edge of Art (Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, eds., Curatorial Things, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019).
-Gestural Study (Grey Room no. 74, Winter 2019)
–Shattered Matter, Transformed Forms: Notes on Nuclear Aesthetics, Part 2 (e-flux journal no. 96, January 2019)
-Shattered Matter, Transformed Forms: Notes on Nuclear Aesthetics, Part 1 (e-flux journal no. 94, November 2018)
-Filming Capital: On Cinemarxism in the Twenty-first Century (Samir Gandesha and Johan Hartle, eds., Aesthetic Marx, London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2017)
-The Juridical Economy (New Left Review no. 106, July-August 2017)
-The Coming Exception: Art and the Crisis of Value (New Left Review no. 99, May-June 2016).
-Personafication (New Left Review no. 96, November-December 2015)
-Abstract Habitats: Installations of Coexistence and Coevolution (Grey Room no. 59, Spring 2015).
-Shine and Schein (e-flux journal no. 61, January 2015)
-Concrete Abstraction – Our Common World (Open!, January 2015)
-Research Objectives (Texte zur Kunst no. 90, June 2013)
-Inside Abstraction (e-flux journal no. 38, October 2012)
-The Imaginary Museum of Plaster Casts (Kunstverein München newsletter/catalogue, 2012)
-Secrets of the See-Through Factory (Open no. 22, 2011)
-Art and Thingness (e-flux journal nos. 13, 15, 16, 2010)
-Viewing Copies (e-flux journal no. 8, September 2009)
-Atttending to Abstract Things (New Left Review no. 54, November-December 2008; basis for a chapter in Idols of the Market)
–Living with Abstraction (Texte zur Kunst no. 69, March 2008; basis for a chapter in Idols of the Market)
Futurity, Potentiality, Emergence and Divergence
Recent texts on radical genealogies, emergent social and cultural forms and future and potential histories that may or may not feed into a small book at some point.
–Transnational Trajectories (Prospections, 12 August 2021)
-An Aesthetics of Prolepsis (Third Text Online, 7 May 2021)
-Divergent States of Emergence (e-flux journal no. 115, February 2021)
-Running Out of Time (Eric C.H. de Bruyn and Sven Lütticken, eds., Futurity Report, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
–Abdicating Sovereignty (Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, eds., Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Utrecht/Cambridge MA: BAK/MIT Press, 2019)
-Toward a Terrestrial (e-flux journal no. 103, October 2019)
Aesthetic Activism and Culture Wars
Some of the texts here became (the basis for) chapters of my book Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (2017), while others respond directly to the rise of the far right and intervene in/reflect on the Culture Wars.
-Cultural Marxists Like Us (Afterall no. 46, Autumn/Winter 2018)
-Council Aestheticsm? Pannekoek, the Avant-Garde and Contemporaray Art (Studi di estetica XLVI, no. 3, 2018)
-The Powers of the False (Texte zur Kunst no. 105, March 2017)
-Who Makes the Nazis (e-flux journal no. 76, October 2016)
-Neither Autocracy nor Automatism: Notes on Autonomy and the Aesthetic (e-flux journal no. 69, January 2016; basis for a book chapter in Cultural Revolution)
-Posthuman Prehistory (Third Text 29, no. 6, 2015; basis for a book chapter in Cultural Revolution)
-Apocalypse (Not) Now (Nordic Journal of Aesthetics no. 49-50, 2015)
-Social Media: Practices of (In)Visibility in Contemporary Art (Afterall no. 40, 2015).
-Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice (Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 7-8, 2014)
-Cultural Revolution (New Left Review no. 85, May-June 2014; became the titular chapter of my book Cultural Revolution)
-Liberation through Laziness (Mousse no. 42, February 2014; basis for a book chapter in Cultural Revolution)
-Piet Zwart & Zwarte Piet (Jelle Bouwhuis and Kerstin Winking, eds., Project 1975: Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious, Amsterdam/London: SMBA/Black Dog Publishing, 2014)
-World History and Earth Art (e-flux journal no. 49, November 2013)
-Mutations and Misunderstandings (Third Text, January 2013; some of the material is part of the last chapter of my book History in Motion)
-Autonomy after the Fact (Open no. 23, 2012)
-A Heteronomous Hobby (e-flux journal no 22, January 2011)
Time, Moving Images and Performance
Some of the texts in this section are from the context of my book History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (2013). The oldest file here is the PDF of my 2005 exhibition catalogue on reenactment.
–Talking Back and Looking Ahead: Talking Back to the Media and Geneaologies of Critical Media Art (Sanneke Huisman and Marga van Mechelen, eds., A Critical History of Media Art in the Netherlands: Platforms, Policies, Genealogies (Prinsenbeek: Jap Sam Books, 2019)
-Dance Factory (Mousse no. 50, October 2015).
-Performance Art after TV (New Left Review no. 80, March-April 2013; basis for a book chapter in History in Motion)
-Autonomous Symptoms in a Collapsing Economy of Time (from the catalogue Keine Zeit/Busy. Vienna: 21er Haus, 2012)
-General performance (e-flux journal no. 31, January 2012; partly incorporated into the third chapter of History in Motion)
-Transforming Time (Grey Room no. 41, Fall 2010; basis for the first chapter of History in Motion)
-Playtimes (New Left Review no. 66, November-December 2010; basis for a book chapter in History in Motion)
-Acts in the Age of Virtuoso Performance (Texte zur Kunst no. 79, September 2010)
-Progressive Striptease (from my book Secret Publicity, 2006; previously published in Dutch as an article in De Witte Raaf)
-An Arena in Which to Reenact (from my exhibition catalogue Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2005)
Myth, Monotheism and Iconoclasm
A number of the following texts are from the context of my work on iconoclasm, culminating in the 2009 book Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle.
-Monotheism à la Mode (Alexander Dumbadze and Susanne Hudson, eds., Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)
-From one Spectacle to Another (Grey Room no. 32, Summer 2008; basis for a book chapter in Idols of the Market)
-Performing the Veil (Springerin no. 4, 2008; basis for a chapter in Idols of the Market)
-Gert Jan Kocken: The Art of Iconoclasm (SMBA Newsletter no. 100, 2008)
-“Keep Your Distance”: Aby Warburg on Myth and Modern Art (Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 1, 2005)
-After the Gods (New Left Review no. 30, November-December 2004
Monographic Essays and Reviews
-Art without a Shadow: Walid Raad at the Stedelijk Museum (Texte zur Kunst online, October 2019)
-The Distance Between Stanley Brouwn and Yourself (Texte zur Kunst no, 109, March 2018)
-Actors and Directors: Milo Rau’s Congo Tribunal (Texte zur Kunst online, May 2018)
-Modernist Memories: On the Contemporaneity of Günther Förg (Texte zur Kunst no. 108, December 2017)
-Returns of the Stone Age: Kunst der Vorzeit and Allegory of the Cave Painting (Texte zur Kunst no. 102 (June 2016).
-Andrea Fraser: Institutional Analysis (Sabine Breitwieser, ed., Andrea Fraser, Salzburg/Ostfildern: Museum der Moderne/Hatje Cantz, 2015)
-Taking Potshots at Labour: Ehmann & Farocki’s Labour in a Single Shot (Mute, May 2015)
-Hito Steyerl: Postcinematic Essays after the Future (Nick Aikens, ed., Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl, Eindhoven/Berlin: Van Abbemuseum/Sternberg Press, 2014)
-Paul Chan’s Book Club (from Paul Chan, New New Testament, New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2014; later expanded as a chapter in Cultural Revolution)
-“Not Stone”: Acting in and with Louise Lawler’s Pictures (Louise Lawler: Adjusted, Cologne/Munich: Museum Ludwig/Prestel, 2013)
-Cleves and Tartars: Beuys Biography (Texte zur Kunst no. 92, December 2013)
-Dialectic of Dionysos: Asger Jorn’s Writings (New Left Review no. 76, July-August 2012)
-Let’s Fake History: Berlin Biennale 2012 (Texte zur Kunst no. 86, June 2012)
-Interzone: On Three Works by Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Afterall no. 29, Spring 2012)
-Performing Photography after Film (Stan Douglas: Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011)
-Gerard Byrne’s Talking Pictures (published in Witte de With’s 2010 book Cornerstones and in Gerard Byrne: Images or Shadows, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2011)
-A Museum of Monologues in the Vicinity of Art: Falke Pisano (Texte zur Kunst no. 80, December 2010)
-(Stop) Making Sense (Monika Szewcyk, ed., Meaning Liam Gillick, Rotterdam/Berlin: Witte de With/Sternberg Press, 2009)
-The Story of Art According to Jeff Wall (from my book Secret Publicity, 2006; previously published in Dutch as an article in De Witte Raaf)
Myth, Monotheism and Iconoclasm
A number of the following texts are from the context of my work on iconoclasm, culminating in the 2009 book Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle.
-Monotheism à la Mode (Alexander Dumbadze and Susanne Hudson, eds., Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)
-From one Spectacle to Another (Grey Room no. 32, Summer 2008; basis for a book chapter in Idols of the Market)
-Performing the Veil (Springerin no. 4, 2008; basis for a chapter in Idols of the Market)
-Gert Jan Kocken: The Art of Iconoclasm (SMBA Newsletter no. 100, 2008)
-“Keep Your Distance”: Aby Warburg on Myth and Modern Art (Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 1, 2005)
-After the Gods (New Left Review no. 30, November-December 2004)
Various
-Public Sphere and Artifactual Possibility: Interview with Patricia Reed and Joanna Warsza (Public Art Munich, 2018)
-National Customs (Texte zur Kunst no. 101, March 2016)
-Falling Apart, Together (Texte zur Kunst no. 100, December 2015).
-A Tale of Two Criticisms (from Jeff Khonsary and Melanie O’Brian, eds., Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism, Vancouver: Fillip Editions, 2010)
-Once More on Publicness: A Postscript to Secret Publicity (Fillip no. 12, Fall 2010)
-Secret Publicity book (titular chapter from Secret Publicity, 2006, previously an essay in New Left Review)
Sven Lütticken: Texts and Projects 