Yesterday, Andrea Fraser’s retrospective at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg opened – so if you find yourself in the vicinity, be aware that there’s more to Salzburg than Mozart’s Birthplace and Sound of Music city tours! The catalogue will feature essays by Andrea, Shannon Jackson, and myself. My text “Andrea Fraser: Institutional Analysis” focuses on the role(s) of performance, collaboration and group dynamics in her work. I’m happy with the text, and it seems as though this publication will be quite substantial. It is now just about to enter the design stage and should become available in June.

Image: Andrea Fraser, Men on the Line at the Balie in Amsterdam, 2014 (co-organized by If I Can’t Dance and Casco).

On Tuesday, students who were occupying the University of Amsterdam’s Bungehuis building as part of the ongoing protests against the draconian cutbacks at the university’s Faculty of Humanites were expelled by the police. They university’s governing board had already threatened them with a 100,000 euro fine per capita. On Wednesday, the students took over the UvA’s headquarters, the Maagdenhuis, was famously occupied in 1969. For the time being, the protesters and occupiers are almost exclusively humanities students, since this is the department that is currently being threatened. Making the protest more general will likely be as big a problem as it is at the VU, my own university, where an occupation of the VU’s church hall at the faculty of Earth and Life Sciences last fall seemed to interest practically nobody outside it. Politicization sets in, if at all, when the threat is imminent, and when it is almost certainly too late – at least if the protest remains local and containable.

However, the events are certainly developing a dynamic that might give rise to the unexpected and the truly eventual. Even if you weren’t there, you could get a sense of this via the online video stream from the Maagdenhuis on Wednesday night, when the occupiers debates among themselves and with university board members and the mayor of Amsterdam. To paraphrase my former student Roel (seen above in the red hat): while the revolution will not be televized, the revolt is being live-streamed, linked and liked. Regular updates are here and here and here.

See for instance http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/isis-fighters-destroy-ancient-artefacts-mosul-museum-iraq

And if you think that some of those statues look quite plaster-casty: http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2015/02/27/misreporting-of-islamic-state-looting-does-damage/

Why destroy the real thing if you can sell it after having staged a spectacle of destruction?

The January issue of e-flux journal is the first half of a two-parter, guest-edited by Tom Holert, on “The Politics of Shine.” My essay “Shine and Schein” can be found here.

While the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre was unfolding in the media in real time, I came across this drawing (depicting an editorial meeting on a Wednesday, no less) from a 1967 comic by Goscinny and Gotlib. Cabu being late (en retard) with his drawings was evidently a running gag that lasted for half a century, and to which fellow cartoonist Zep has now given a final twist:

Meanwhile, this made-for-social-media bloodbath clearly has the desired effect of strengthening the proponents of ideological Kulturkampf on all sides, and making any genuine social and political analysis and action extremely difficult. Olivier Roy has a good, level-headed take on the situation in Le Monde, but the online version is behind a paywall. In the New Statesman, Žižek displays his knack for dialectical acrobatics in thinking beyond the ideological opposition between Liberal West versus Fundamentalist Islam.

Open! has published my essay “Concrete Abstraction – Our Common World,” which is roughly and partly based on a talk I gave at the Art in the Age Age of Real Abstraction symposium at UCL in the spring of 2014. After “Living with Abstraction” and “Inside Abstraction” this is my third essay on the subject, and I promise it’s the last one. (With the proviso that at some point, this text and bits of “Inside Abstraction” should become a book chapter.)

In the context of Open!, the essay is part of the “Commonist Aesthetics” series.

The December issue of Texte zur Kunst contains my review of Johanna Burton and Ellegood’s exhibition catalogue, Take It or Leave It, which reexamines genealogies of institutional critique and appropriation art. My text is supposed to be titled “Expanding Concepts and Fields,” which admittedly isn’t terribly catchy, but has a clear connection with the content of the piece. When I received the issue, it became apparent that this had been changed into the horribly generic “Event Horizon,” – the very same title that Artforum had bestowed upon my review of Gerald Raunig’s Art and Revolution back in 2007. That text was originally titled “Retro Revolution.” Great minds think alike – and so, it would seem, do editors.

Okay, I’ve vented my spleen. The actual text is, I think, quite substantial and worth checking out, and it has benefited greatly from the Texte zur Kunst editors’ editorial care.

For the December issue of Metropolis M, the editor has asked Marina Vishmidt, Tom Vandeputte and myself to say a few words on the state of art theory in Holland (in Dutch).

The December 2014 issue of Theory, Culture & Society contains a section on Jacques Rancière edited by Nikos Papastergiadis. Nikos was involved in the organizing of the Autonomy Symposium at the Van Abbemuseum in 2011, and like 2012’s autonomy issue of Open, which I guest-edited, this TCS special is an outcome of the symposium. My essay, “Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice,” is a further development of my essay in the Open issue and related to the subsequent book chapter (“Autonomy in Action”) in History in Motion (2013). Originally I assumed that Nikos’s Rancière issue would see the light of day before my book, but the glacial pace of peer-reviewed academic publishing has decreed otherwise. The advantage of this is that it has allowed me some further tweaking. It’s fair to say that the Open issue had its share of small editorial slip-ups, due to pressing temporal constraints – though I wouldn’t have wanted to wait till 2014, quite apart from the fact that at the moment Open (now Open!) is an online platform. (The possibility of paper anthologies for certain thematic strands is however being examined.)

Meanwhile, the Art and Autonomy reader on which I’m working for Afterall is also inching forward in a snail-like manner, mostly due to the many pressures on both parties (Afterall and myself). It should see the light of day sometime in 2015.

Image: Charles Esche, Nikos Papastergiadis and Jacques Rancière at the Autonomy Symposium. Photo by Emilio Moreno.

It’s that time of year again… There’s no escaping Zwarte Piet. Last year I wrote an essay on the “Black Pete” phenomenon and the Dutch postcolonial condition in Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam’s publication Project 1975. I have posted the text, “Piet Zwart & Zwarte Piet” (minus the illustrations) in the articles section of this site. Happy holidays, but watch out for that colonial hangover!

The new issue of the journal ARTMargins features a roundtable on “the critical archive,” in which I’m one of the participants. I’m erroneously identified as a lecturer in art history at the University of Amsterdam (or UvA). I teach at the other Amsterdam-based university, the Vrije Universiteit, a.k.a. VU University Amsterdam. My recent blogpost about the crisis at the UvA has apparently also created some confusion on this point. My post was made in solidarity with my UvA colleagues (and their students). The two universities collaborate on a number of levels, including joint MA programmes, and we are ultimately all in the same boat. Earlier this year, when the VU’s Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences faced similarly draconian cutbacks, students actually appropriated a flyer for the famous 1969 occupation of the UvA’s headquarters – the Maagdenhuis.

When the UvA’s humanities students announced their protests, the university’s newspaper Folia noted that their calls for resistance were “reminiscent of the 1960s.” If the VU students’ flyer ironically acknowledges that the potential for student protest and resistance has lain dormant for all too long, Folia‘s remark reads as a subtle putdown. Oh, those hipster students and their retro fads! It is of course true that the tables have been turned: if once the university was there to be taken, to be occupied, by progressive forces, today’s occupation actually starts in the boardroom and proceeds with through a dialectic of shock therapy (as in the current UvA situation) and the steady hollowing-out of rights and of forms of life through “baby steps” gradualism.

In 1968, the Situationist-dominated “Council for Maintaining the Occupations” at the Sorbonne put out a poster decreeing the “End of the University.” Now that universities have been occupied by rather different forces, a dystopian version of this utopian promise is a daily lived reality.