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Humanities

Art in a False Present
Art in a False Present

Anselm Franke (ed.), Tom Holert (ed.)

Neolithic Childhood

The impression that “Neolithic Childhood” is a monographic project, dedicated to a single personality from history, is deceptive. Einstein himself was deeply wary of the monograph genre. In the early 1930s, he wrote that it served the “normalization” of art, because it ensured that “a person and their work are too sharply separated and that both are removed from significative relations.” 1 He emphatically shifted those “significative relations”—the social, political, economic, religious, epistemological, anthropological, and psychological contexts that determine a...
  • avant-garde
  • art history
  • 1930s
  • ethnology
  • art theory
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

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 in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Current Texts

Sandra Frimmel

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma of the series: a (large) part of the artistically trained viewers see these shorthand works as abstract forms, without understanding the text, and only the few who can read (Russian) shorthand perceive a text, which for them doesn’t necessarily have to be art. I Hate the Avant-Garde was created in 2017, after a sketch made in 1987 in reaction to a changed situation in the reception of nonconformist art. With the beginning of perestroika, unofficial art that had hitherto been excluded from the state-run art scene—that is, from the official infrastructure of museums and exhibition spaces, and from art scholarship...

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  • avant-garde
  • democracy
  • writing

 

Fragility is the only thing I really know about me
Fragility is the only thing I really know about me

Claire Denis

“Fragility is the only thing I really know about me”

I am not a very balanced person. I am fragile and sad – almost as described in Triste Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss. I feel both those adjectives, I grew up with them. I was aware of my fragility even when I was very young – a baby, learning to walk, living somewhere in Africa and already feeling that the number of white persons was very small compared to the number of black persons and also noticing that most of the...
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  • subjectivity
  • autofiction
  • identity
  • film d'auteur
Current Texts

Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

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  • performativity
  • migration
  • gender
  • identity
  • queer theory