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Arts

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work

Antonin Artaud’s last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time. Foreword by John Zorn.

poetry
Modernism
autobiography
literature
poetry
avant-garde

Fiction

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats.

Discourse

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

mother figure
gender
body
poetry
contemporary art
motherhood

Humanities

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream

Magazine

Surrogacies

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

queer theory
mother figure
aesthetics
motherhood
feminism
gender
body
father figure
contemporary art

Magazine Online

News + Events

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>Art, Magazine, Books

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

diaphanes_net

Observing the Spectator

Article

Condolence. Mourning Companions on Burgundian and other Sepulchers

Starting out from the two famous sepulchral monuments of the Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (d. 1404) and John the Fearless (d. 1419) in Dijon, this article examines the function of the anonymous companions of the funeral procession immortalized in stone, who are standing around the tomb, the so...

Henrike Haug

Anteilnahme

Anthology

Involving the Beholder

The invention of depicting figures participating in an event — nameless bystanders, beholders, and onlookers — marks an important change in the ways artists addressed the beholder of the artworks themselves. This shift speaks to a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their audience. The public in the...

Beate Fricke (ed.), Urte Krass (ed.)

The Public in the Picture / Das Publikum im Bild

Article

Complicity in Spectatorship

The special case of lustful murdering soldiers of King Herod and the introduction of spectators on frescos by Giotto and pulpits by the Pisani are at the core of this contribution, which poses the question: How is cruelty visualized in Italy around 1300? The introduction of detached spectators in opposition...

Beate Fricke

Complicity in Spectatorship

Article

The Meaning of the Inner-pictorial Viewer. Reflections on Audience, Witness, and Spectator

Spectators and audience are constructions of the past. They are present at historical events, witness history and even verify records of the past. The eyewitness has already seen and carries his testimony into present or future. But within the motive of the Fifteen Signs before Doomsday the circumstances are inverse:...

Daniela Wagner

Gegenwart und Zukunft

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G.

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war
war experience

Current Texts

A for Anomie

We cannot assume that all government/terrorist interactions will take the form of a two-person zero-sum game.

A for Anomie

The idea that terrorism and other forms of political violence are directly related to strains caused by strongly held grievances has been one of the most common explanations to date and can be traced to a diverse set of theoretical concepts including relative deprivation, social disorganization, breakdown, tension, and anomie. Merton (1938) identifies anomie as a cultural condition of frustration, in which values regarding goals and how to achieve them conflict with limitations on the means of achievement.

Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “Research on Terrorism and Countering Terrorism”, Crime and Justice, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2009.

B for Block or Blocked

If terrorism in each of its expressions can be considered an indicator of the existence of a political block (of an impossibility of reacting if one wishes to react differently), this influences its real ability to modify the situation. Terrorism has been historically more successful when it was not...

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Current Texts

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? OPEN
ACCESS

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… OPEN
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Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

New releases

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Marie Sophie Beckmann (ed.), Petra Löffler (ed.): Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from below

Mathilde Arnoux (ed.), Maria Bremer (ed.): Westkunst, 1981

Mario Schulze (ed.), Sarine Waltenspül (ed.): String Figures

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira: Invented Skins

Arts

The Architecture of Disaster

Ines Weizman, Eyal Weizman

Before & After

How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?

History is increasingly presented as a series of catastrophes. The most common mode of this presentation is the before-and-after image—a juxtaposition of two photographs of the same place, at different times, before and after an event has taken its toll. Buildings seen intact in a “before” photograph have been destroyed in the one “after.” Neighborhoods bustling with activity in one image are in ruins or under a layer of foulwater in the next. Deforestations, contaminations, melting icebergs and drying rivers...

war
History of photography
forensic science
photographic images
photography

Arts

Artur Zmijewski

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s nobody saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, it’s not punk.’” OPEN
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Tyler Coburn

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall. ABO

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Arts

Malte Fabian Rauch

Camouflaged with a visual language

What Reena really wanted to know was why – in a night club, for example – do we chose, always and above all, that nothing happens?”

ABO

Arts

Clémentine Deliss

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo…

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colonialism
museum
Africa
sculpture
contemporary art
colonial history

Authors

Books

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud the Mômo

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

Liliana Gómez (ed.): Performing Human Rights

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...: The Cube and the Face

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

Fiction

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

Soham Gupta

Angst

In his photographs and texts, Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as yet unseen ways.

Through the grayness of this concrete city, streams of tin-box vehicles flow ahead languidly – and like at a river’s delta, distributaries of little hatchbacks and dented yellow taxis branch off from the main road, spreading in varied directions. From your roof, you can see the whole city, you can feel it’s pulse – yet, there is such a strange silence around you, it’s as if the noise below is far, far away, so far that you are actually longing...

ABO DE FR

Fiction

Axel Dielmann

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits… OPEN
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Tom McCarthy

The ironic self-awareness of the poet can only be that of his own inauthenticity, repeated or fed back into itself at increasingly conscious levels, and ‘to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic’. ABO DE

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE

The limp, voluptuous decadence of the place

Bruce Bégout

I’m not going to talk about my profession here. ABO FR DE

Fiction

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember?

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first abbreviation of experience. An epic stitched of words was an abbreviation of the war, the long years of which were reduced to a few nights of recitation; the written text that recorded the epic was a contraction of the oral narration which pushed aside its sensory richness, melody, life in a thousand details. In accumulating, every level of abbreviation reconstituted an infinite flow, a new dilation that would be contracted in its turn. From the plurality of pages to the index and the table of contents; from the plurality of books to card catalogues.

The abbreviated elements were further arranged, situated...

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Fiction

A. L. Kennedy

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

ABO DE FR

Authors

Discourse

Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...

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Discourse

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
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Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them. ABO DE FR

Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Discourse

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.«

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Discourse

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall.

ABO

Authors

Books

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Antoine d’Agata: Diagonale du vide

Liza Mattutat (ed.), Roberto Nigro (ed.), ...: What’s Legit?

Marietta Kesting (ed.), Susanne Witzgall (ed.): Human after Man

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Humanities

Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?

Zairong Xiang (ed.)

minor cosmopolitan

minor cosmopolitan takes the “ism” out of “cosmopolitanism.”

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism....

politics
art
art theory
cosmopolitics
globalization

Humanities

Felix Stalder

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially) meaningful narrative. ABO DE

Zoran Terzić

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as generically as programs. OPEN
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Alexander García Düttmann

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a forceful and violent blow? ABO DE

Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

Is it possible to regain a lost belief? Is it possible to do as we will with belief? OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities

Sylvia Sasse

The Spy Depicted

“Lifestyle must conform to the above-named circles of persons or be easily adapted,” “artistic talent,” “strong general education.”

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surveillance
gender
identity
subjectification
Russia
intelligence sercive
body

Humanities

Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.

Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where he is, where he comes from, what his home looks like, when he gets up and sleeps, etc. But do I really know him?

ABO DE