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Isabel Mehl: Feedback Systems: Artwriting as Critique?
Feedback Systems: Artwriting as Critique?
(p. 175 – 184)

Isabel Mehl

Feedback Systems: Artwriting as Critique?

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  • criticism
  • aesthetics

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Isabel Mehl

Isabel Mehl

is a writer and an art critic. Since 2016 she is part of the research training group “Cultures of Critique” and researches on the function of fiction for art criticism. Her texts have been published in frieze, Texte zur Kunst, and elsewhere. Dialogue is at the core of her work – collaborators include: art historian Oona Lochner, artist Grażyna Roguski and Susan Funk (as DJ DUO). In 2012 she co-founded the Feminist Working Collective (FAK) and co-edited their publication Body of Work. She is developing a radio play for WDR with opera singer Pauline Jacob and musician Georg Conrad; and plans an anthology on digiphrenia with critic Masha Tupitsyn.
Other texts by Isabel Mehl for DIAPHANES
Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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