Archives for Year: 2017

Hegel And The Buddha in Popular Culture and Art, Part 1 (Dion Peoples)

The following is the first of a two-part series.  The second installment can be found here. In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art…

Against Art By Other Means – The Case Of Goran Đorđević, 1972-85 (Branislav Dimitrijević)

In January 1980, the leading daily newspaper in Belgrade, Politika, published a small announcement for the opening, on January 29 at 6 pm, of an exhibition at the Students’ Cultural Centre (SKC) by the artist Goran Đorđević, entitled Against Art. The gallery also distributed a small invitation card, while omitting…

The Socially Engaged Art Of Francis Alÿs (Hania Afifi)

At 09:00 AM on Sunday June 23, 2002, the 12-person Peruvian brass band, Banda de Santa Cecilia, began playing solemn subdued rhythms in front of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in midtown Manhattan, signaling the start of Francis Alÿs’s The Modern Procession. The band was accompanied by several dogs,…

The Ontology Of Doodling and Everyday Image-Work (Sergio Figueiredo)

“Consider what is at stake in our world today, registered in the basic fact that the anthropocene coincides with electracy. We notice immediately that prayer and engineering do not suffice, and no one doubts they are trying. We desire effective change but are not able, we cannot despite our will and knowledge. Here…

The “Fatal Woman” In Feminism And Modernism (Eric Galowitsch)

In French, femme fatale means a “fatal” or “disastrous” woman. She is often one who attempts to attract or snare men. The definition of femme fatale from the Merriam Webster Dictionary is either/both a seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations and/or a woman who attracts the male by…

The Museum As Battlefield – The Case Of Hito Steyerl, Part 2 (Wigbertson Julian Isenia)

The following is the second of a two-part series.  The first installment can be found here. The museum as a public space What is the public in a contemporary context? How is this idea of the public constructed historically and how can we analyze it from its perspective of its geopolitics?…

The Museum As Battlefield – The Case Of Hito Steyerl, Part 1 (Wigbertson Julian Isenia)

 The following is the first of a two-part series. If we lose public and semipublic space, we lose everything. Artists give up their authorship when necessary, and it is the same for institutions. We need to find ways to get out of the art context, especially during historical moments like…

“When Did Beauty Become So F…n’ Ugly?” (Davor Džalto)

    In Jonathan Parker’s movie Untitled (2009) we find an insightful (and also cynical) description of some of the major features of the contemporary art world. One of the main characters, Josh (Eion Bailey), is a successful commercial painter who is nicely positioned within the contemporary art market. Josh…

Perennialism and Primitivism In Psychedelic Religions, Part 3 (Roger Green)

The following is the last of a three-part series.  The first installment can be found here, the second here. Although Mercante tracks gender differences, when visitors are foreign, education level, and occasionally social class, he does not address ethnicity among members.  This makes his work difficult to comment on from the…

Perennialism and Primitivism In Psychedelic Religions, Part 2 (Roger Green)

The following is the second of a three-part series.  The first installment can be found here. An economic approach that more astutely tracks what’s at stake in emergent ayahuasca religions might combine Luis León’s idea of ‘religious poetics’ with anthropologist, Michael Taussig’s ficto-criticism of Latin American economies.  I cite these…