In the framework of Resonance, an exhibition of the Goethe-Institut New York curated by Rivet and work by Agency, Faivovich & Goldberg and weareQQ, Diedrich Diederichsen was invited to deliver a talk that would tackle some issues of object-oriented thinking within the arts, as well as considering the potential for resonance among entities relevant to contemporary practice (human, non-human, animate or inanimate). Because of Hurricane Sandy, Diederichsen’s talk had to be cancelled, but this change of plans led to a conversation between Diederichsen and the curators, Rivet (Sarah Demeuse and Manuela Moscoso), about the topics he had planned to bring forward. ...

Three characters populate Agnieszka Kurant’s Cutaways, 2013, a short film premiering as part of exformation, the artist’s first exhibition in a United States museum. Played by Dick Miller, Charlotte Rampling, and Abe Vigoda, these characters were found, or more precisely reclaimed, from the cutting room, having been edited out of the final cuts of the feature films for which they were created: Pulp Fiction, Vanishing Point, and The Conversation, respectively. Kurant revives these figures not only by writing a brilliant new script for them but also by casting the original actors: twenty to forty years later, the roles are the ...

Let’s be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are revealed as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more interesting?

This Issue was produced under the auspices of the research program Dexter Bang Sinister at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, January 21 – October 28, 2012, curated by Rhea Dall. The program, devised by Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey together with writer-critic-curator Lars Bang Larsen, was based on Lars’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. In practice, a large part of the so-called research played out in the form of an exhibition set up to explore the notion of *black & white psychedelia*— halfway closing the doors of ...

This issue was produced as part of The End(s) of the Library, a series of exhibitions at the Goethe-Institut New York Library organized by Jenny Jaskey from October 30, 2012 to June 21, 2013; hence the German theme. The Serving Library was resident for three months at the end of The End(s), from April Fools’ Day on, in the form of a hang of objects from our collection of source material. if all went according to plan, the end of the library show was marked by the launch of this issue. *Wie ein Pfeil lief ich einfach durch.* With many thanks to ...

The images that we see around us everyday limit the horizon of our imagination and our ability to think up things beyond it. That concept is what Frederic Jameson calls the political unconscious. Crip Magazine aims to expand these limitations on the world of imagination. This issue includes contributions about crip pop culture, art and radical social movements, deals with pain, or opens up a transformative perspective on body issues and bodily relations. It is a collection of various kinds of crip materials (Crip Art Resources). We asked artists to work on historical artifacts and graphic materials (for instance magazine ...

Things would be much simpler if there existed a consistent means of evaluating art’s capacity to provide a concrete value for people. It’s a problem to which capital provides the most immediate solution—beyond the mundane routine of the art market, Brandeis University’s (ongoing) attempt to close their Rose Art Museum and liquidate its entire collection stands as a particularly unfortunate example of how a priceless collection of art, given the right circumstances (total financial meltdown), still finds its price. One is also reminded of the tragic decision by Middlesex University to close its renowned philosophy department in order to cut ...

The tension in contemporary culture formulated in terms of a hackneyed clash between premodern tradition and fully modernized enlightened subjects has proven to be a dangerous one—and it has easily given way to patently racist scenarios in which premodern tribal types (such as the EU citizens who happen to be Roma) invade fully modern Western metropolises. It seems much more useful, and interesting, to consider these conditions to be one and the same—two sides of a single, irreconcilable anxiety with regard to cultural tradition, the promises of modernism, and the shortcomings of both. From this singular vantage point, we can ...

Surprisingly few people have flinched at the way Osama bin Laden was disposed of. Even for the most wanted man in the world, one imagines that it would have been both ethically and politically more expedient to stage a trial before his execution, similar to the way it was done in the case of Saddam Hussein. But such an expectation would risk overlooking the degree to which, for states and individuals alike, much political activity now takes place outside of official channels and beyond the jurisdiction of formal legal bodies… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Radicalism as Ego Ideal: Oedipus ...

For the Summer 2012 issue of e-flux journal we are very pleased to present a special “Animism” issue guest-edited by Anselm Franke, curator of the exhibition by the same name. Even if you missed Animism on tour in Europe since it began at Extra City and MUHKA in Antwerp in 2010, you have probably learned of its encompassing mobilization of the systems of inclusion and exclusion defining “science” and “culture.” The various stages of the exhibition have shown the discourse of animism to be a crucial skeleton key for releasing the deadlocks formed by the repressed religious, teleological, and colonial ...

The internet does not exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get ...

A conversation with Yesomi Umolu, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Anselm Franke on the occasion of Journeys with the initiated, on view at e-flux and Participant Inc through January 13, 2019. The exhibition features artists Malik Gaines, Evan Ifekoya, Grada Kilomba, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Virginia de Medeiros, and is curated by Yesomi Umolu with Katja Rivera. Journeys with the initiated is part of the project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology, initiated by Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin with the support of S. Fischer Stiftung and the S. Fischer Verlag, and led by artistic directors Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke. The project ...