The National Gallery of Canada

Like all e-flux subscribers, I receive the usual three e-flux announcements a day, sometimes with an art-agenda announcement riding shotgun, other times with an e-flux Architecture doing the same. As an aspiring reader I have learned to distinguish between the three, and that those labelled e-flux generally announce an exhibition, not stand on the other side of it going, See! See!

So what to make of yesterday's announcement, whose subject line reads: "Geoffrey Farmer's A way out of the mirror, a success at the Venice Biennale 2017"?

Clicking on the message I see that it was issued by the sponsoring institution -- the National Gallery of Canada -- whose immediate measure of "success" is derived from a "Global Art Market Newswire" article. Are there not more thoughtful sources to cite? Why cite a market publication when you can cite a source that places criticism before publicity? I ask because there are many. Why not shine a light on Momus? Or is it too Canadian?

Following the announcement's opening quote comes a recognition of the artist who, we are told, played a "large part" in making "Canada's participation at the 57th Venice Biennale...one of the most successful since its inaugural exhibition in 1952." This "large part" includes the work itself ("laboriously crafted projects of epic proportions," the NGC tells us in the following paragraph), but also the potential humiliation of the artist who has no choice but to suffer an infamously capricious director and a curator whose inability to shepherd the project can be measured in part by an inability to prevent quotes like the following from being issued:

“In A way out of the mirror, Geoffrey Farmer imagined belonging to the nation-state, in terms at once celebratory and mournful; not as a well-bounded or monolithic identity but as fluidity and loss. Transforming the pavilion into an open-air stage for his fountains, he also opened a space for renewal and reflection that literally exploded the intersections of personal and national histories.”

I mean, forget the grammatical train wrecks here (I am guilty of them too) -- it is this very conflation of "personal and national histories" that had the artist called out by indigenous communities for whom "intergenerational trauma" is non-transferable to those whose privilege both created its conditions and protected those same privileged people from its residential schools. And yes, this too is something the curator should have foreseen and dealt with in consultation with the artist. Is there not a way for the NGC to "choose" the artist and the curator together, as opposed to this more recent habit of having the artist choose the curator? Having the artist and curator on equal footing would allow for a more balanced relationship, no?

The announcement ends with the NGC announcing that Canada's 2019 Venice entry will be announced next month. Which means the NGC and its consultants are currently sitting around the table trying to agree on who this artist and curator might be -- and whether or not they say yes. Let's hope that in choosing the artist and curator the artist and curator can find a way to work together that benefits not just the both of them, but also improves the institution that brought them together to so proudly share with us their work.

"Towards a New Universalism"

Paragraph 6 from an e-flux Journal #86 text by Global Art Culture's Dr. Familiarlove, Boris Groys: 

Migration is the one truly universal, international phenomenon of our time. And it is also perhaps one of the only phenomena that radically differentiates our era from the nineteenth century. That is why migration has become the main political problem of our time. It is safe to say that it is primarily attitudes towards immigration that structure the contemporary political landscape—at least in Western countries. The anti-immigration politics of contemporary New Right parties is an effect of what can be characterized as the territorialization of identity politics. The main presupposition of the ideology of these parties is this: every cultural identity has to have its own territory on which it can and should flourish—undisturbed by influences from other cultural identities. The world is diverse and should be diverse. But the world’s diversity can be guaranteed only by territorial diversity. The mixture of different cultural identities on the same territory destroys these identities. In other words: today the New Right uses the language of identity politics that was developed by the New Left in the 1960s–80s. At that time, the defense of original cultures was directed against Western imperialism and colonialism, which tried to “civilize” these cultures by imposing on them certain allegedly universal social, economic, and political norms. This critique was understandable and legitimate—even if it was one-sided. But in our time this critique has changed its political direction and its cultural relevance.

I, Supercommunity

Last month the editors of e-flux launched a rolling anthology called Supercommunity at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Click below for a collaborative text by Allora & Calzadilla and Ted Chiang.

This just in from e-flux:

Released on October 8, the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal included an editorial note entitled "No list of demands," responding to the perceived absence of strong messaging offered by the movement. The note specified that:

"The exhausted political machines and their PR slicks are already seeking leaders to elevate, messages to claim, talking points to move on. They, more than anyone, will attempt to seize and shape this moment. They are racing to reach the front of the line.

 But how can they run out in front of something that is in front of them? They cannot.

 For Wall Street and Washington, the demand is not on them to give us something that isn't theirs to give. It's ours. It's on us. We aren't going anywhere. We just got here."

It is a sophisticated defense of a movement deliberately weak in language and growing strong in numbers. While the movement has made declarations, the statement suggests that nothing will be demanded of those who have perpetuated and legitimized a system that has repeatedly worked to consolidate a society's wealth in the hands of 1% of the population. In place of heroic ideology, an ostensible silence evades recuperation and maintains an opening through which collective sentiment can take the time to formulate its own terms without having to acknowledge the current regime as a necessary precedent.

Here it becomes clear that, in place of making demands, the project of the demonstrations will be to gradually reconstitute society itself through its sheer numbers—a claim to both the right and the capacity to project a new world in broad, open-ended terms.

In this issue, Jan Verwoert finds in the work of Stano Filko a means of articulating totality by claiming the world as his medium and mode of address; Jalal Toufic posits the elusiveness of messianic time against the possibility for contemporary events; Antke Engel looks at the chronopolitics of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz's work No Future / No Past; Sotirios Bahtsetzis considers nihilism, repetition, and notions of taste in a depoliticized and fiscalized society; Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall reveal mobilization in architecture as both an economic imperative and a mannerist response to classical ideals, and Joshua Simon concludes his three-part "Neo-Materialism" series by recognizing how the commodity speaks the language of our world.

—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle


In this issue:

Jan Verwoert—World as Medium: On the Work of Stano Filko
"So, when it articulates a world, a diagrammatic drawing or simple gesture in principle has the same status as a fully designed room installation. Even the smallest thing can show the big picture. These are conditions of autonomy produced within a material practice: Filko creates the freedom to define the value of any artifact or sign according to his own terms, that is, according to the terms of the world systems that he constructs."

Jalal Toufic—The Contemporary Is Still Forthcoming
"There can be no museum of contemporary art since while now we can have museums but not contemporaneity, with the coming of the messiah we are going to have contemporaneity but no museums—there is going to be no need for a museum in the redeemed world, a world where one finds only what is willed to eternally recur."

Sotirios Bahtsetzis—The Time That Remains, Part One: On Contemporary Nihilism
"The perverted, late capitalist version of such an engagement with art—the disinterested attitude, Kant's definition of aesthetic experience—always demands its pre-validation not by the historical Other (for Kant the ahistorical, subjective-universal judgments posed by the genius), but by contemporary society's proper neosovereign rule: that is, the globalized and institutionalized managers of taste, the individuals nurtured by a depoliticized and fiscalized society. It is through this perversion that the contemporary "homo aestheticus" is born."

Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall—Eupalinos and the Duck: Conceptualism in Recent Architecture
"Today, skyscrapers are designed to be viewed not at 120, but at 500 kilometers per hour from an airplane. Whether or not they sing is of little importance, because they are too distant to be heard. Furthermore, they are less products of an architectural culture of late capitalism than they are the products of a few major capitalist players."

Antke Engel—Queer Temporalities and the Chronopolitics of Transtemporal Drag
"This ethics remains bound to violence—the violence of crime and normalcy—and thus confronts the punk archive with the challenge of facing heteronormativity, postcolonialism, and the impossibility of remembering that these produce."

Joshua Simon—Neo-Materialism, Part Three: The Language of Commodities
"The commodity is the form in which things come to be in this world. Beyond any concept of alienation in relation to labor, we can see that the commodity's material is constituted by our very social relations. This composition gives the commodity a subjectivity that is not particular to any one of us, but is rather one in which we all participate in forming."

Letters to the Editors: Responses to Jon Rich's "The Blood of the Victim" by Jessica Kornheisl and Natasha Llorens