Issue no. 100 of Texte zur Kunst, which is also the magazine’s 25th anniversary issue, is dedicated to “The Canon.” In my contribution, titled “Falling Apart, Together,” I reflect on canons and counter-canons, on institutionalization and fragmentation, on consensus, filter bubbles and the proliferation of Other Criteria.

It’s that man again: the illustration shows the first and the latest issue of Texte zur Kunst, from 1990 and 2015, respectively. 

 

Mousse magazine no. 50 (Ocober 2015) contains my article “Dance Factory,” which is essentially an essayistic review of a few recent choreographic or dance-related projects in major European art institutions, culminating in observations on value and labour in today’s performative economy.

 

“In a preview of the forthcoming issue 40 of Afterall journal (Autumn/winter 2015), we are pleased to make available a new essay by Sven Lütticken, who outlines a theory of mediated life from nineteenth-century barricades to twenty-first century occupations.” The text is online here, and Charles Esche’s editorial for this issue can be found here.

Image: Jonas Staal, New World Academy at BAK (Utrecht) with We Are Here.

 

Eran Schaerf currently has an exhibition at Établissement d’en face in Brussels, and the opening of this show was also the launch of his new publication, which sums up of his FM Scenario – The Listener’s Voice series of exhibitions and radio programmes (2012-15), of which the Brussels exhibition is another iteration. “Sums up” is actually the wrong term, for while the publication is indeed a summa of sorts, it does not merely represent the exhibitions; rather, it reenacts them on the page, reshuffling the elements whose intricate interrelations and interactions make up FM Scenario.

In fact, the book does this not once, but twice—by coming in markedly different English and German editions, each with a specific design and a different (re)formatting of texts and images. Frequency-Modulated Scenario is published by Archive Books, and Frequenz-moduliertes Szenario by Intermedium/Belleville. I contributed an essay titled “Images Losing the Plot”; other contributors include Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Eva Meyer, Gerald Raunig and Margit Rosen. Should the name Eran Schaerf not ring any bells for you, or only the faintest of bells, this should be all the more reason to check out at least one version of this publication.

 

The catalogue of Andrea Fraser’s Salzburg retrospective has returned from the printers and is beginning to show up in bookstores. This publication contains texts by Shannon Jackson and myself, as well as by Sabine Breitwieser and Andrea. Of course, Andrea’s own writings are a significant part of her practice and have shaped the reception of her work—but by now, her 2002 remark (in an October roundtable on art criticism) that there are “no monographic essays about my work” no longer applies. I’m very happy with how my text “Andrea Fraser: Institutional Analysis” has panned out. While it is obviously informed by Andrea’s incisive texts, I have an agenda that does not necessarily concedes with the artist’s, but is developed in a critical dialogue with her. More artist monographs to which I have contributed will follow over the coming months: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Willem de Rooij, Eran Schaerf.

Edit: I have no idea what has happened here or who might be behind this, but my text has been posted online (in a pre-layout version, without any images). Nonetheless: if you are interested in Andrea Fraser’s practice, I recommend getting hold of this substantial and thorough publication.

 

Vdrome is a welcome initiative: while it does not constitute a remedy for the problem of art world’s restrictive distribution protocols concerning video pieces, it at least makes a selection of such videos available online, one at a time, for a limited time – but if a work is particularly important to you, you should be able to save the file. From 1 to 14 July, Vdrome is streaming The Otolith Group’s film The Radiant (2012), accompanied by a short introduction written by me.

This intro based on a substantial essay on artistic and activist responses to the nuclear regime from the mid-1940s to the present day, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen. I assumed it would see the light of day around now, but recently Mikkel informed me that, due to the Nordic Journal’s uniquely whimsical production process, the issue has been delayed till hopefully-later-this-year. Knowing Mikkel and the list of contributors, it should be worth the wait.

 

Dissect is a new Australian journal of contemporary art. When the editors asked me to contribute something to their second issue, on art and the digital condition (or post-internet art, if you prefer), I offered them an extended version of the text that I’d written for Paul Chan’s award-winning New New Testament. That shorter version was called “Paul Chan’s Book Club”; the maxi remix is titled “Rewriting the Book.”

Issue no. 2 of Dissect is being launched down under these days: click here for more information.

 

The long-term project KIM at Leuphana University of Lüneburg was an “innovation incubator” (that’s EU speak for you) that focused on the production, distribution, and the construction of the value and price of contemporary visual art. As its final result, the incubator has now hatched the massive publication Art in the Periphery of the Center (published by Sternberg Press).

For the section “The Return of History,” I contributed “Liberating Laziness: Chronopolitical Remarks,” a reworked version of an essay that previously appeared (under a subtly different title) in Mousse.

Image: Sloths Against Nuclear State.

 

Open! is hosting “virtual round table” on the state of the universities (in Holland in particular) titled Common Knowlegde.” It is a spin-off from the “Commonist Aesthetics” series that I’m co-guest-editing (with Binna Choi and Jorinde Seijdel). The introduction is here, and you can click your way to the first articles via the links at the bottom of the page. More to follow soon.

Photo by Matthijs de Bruijne.

 

For Mute, I reviewed the exhibition of Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s project Labour in a Single Shot at the HKW in Berlin.

Image: still from Rui Silveira, Untitled, 2011.