In the last weeks preceding the collapse of his rational powers, Nietzsche wrote, “I am a rendezvous of experiences”; the word is indeed rendezvous. He meant that he had spent his life running toward the world and that the world had been running toward him.This double attraction, this movement, had been central. The immense generosity of his mind had made him the meeting point of cosmic forces, of the social currents of his time, and of the ideas that he seemed so often more to capture than to create. This generosity was a form of love. He showed us in ...

With a radical imagination, the work of Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) refutes a common sense that bases technology in frigid thought. A mathematician, nuclear physicist, and expert in digital technologies, Kurenniemi established the electronic studio at the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University in 1961–62. He collaborated with the composer Terry Riley on the first Happening to take place in Finland, with the artists group Dimensio and protagonists of the underground music scene, such as M. A. Numminen and the band Sperm. In the late 1960s, he made non- narrative short films that he hesitated to call art; a kind of ...

Ana Prvacki: What does it mean to be “prepared” to greet? I am reminded of my grandmother and family in Romania preparing for guests in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It was an exhaustive effort. The house was cleaned, everything put in its rightful place, shiny and aired, the buffet elaborate and ornate (radishes were cut into little flowers, and parsley was laid out in patterns). And this was during the Ceaus‚escu era. There was barely enough food for the daily meals, but all the “good stuff” was brought out for guests, from meat and cocoa for cooking to ...

When approached about the idea of contributing to dOCUMENTA (13)’s notebook series, I proposed to its Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the idea of focusing on African Marxism. I thought it would be interesting as a way of liberating Marx from his Eurocentrism. I also thought it would be relevant to dOCUMENTA (13) because it revisits the exhibition’s founding years, which coincided with decolonization in Africa and other parts of the Third World, and with corollary landmark events that shifted world politics and created a new international order. Among these events was the 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia, where non-aligned and newly ...

Has the human capacity for thinking and feeling been captured by the machine? This is an issue that Franco Berardi Bifo identifies when he says that we have been learning words from the machine, not the mother, leading to a situation where language and affectivity have been separated. Extending this to intellectual and social behavior, he calls this state of affairs a catastrophe of modern humanism, where we no longer have sufficient attention spans for love, tenderness, and compassion. His concern is that we are becoming more and more distanced from affect through the ways in which it is rendered, ...

This study was begun in Venice, the birthplace of tourism, and the souvenir made for the tourist trade. But we will not consider objects; that is another discussion. Only stuff—material. If I am treated badly by some airline staff I may want to write a letter of complaint. If I write this letter with a pen or pencil and my own hand, in script, a secretary will throw it away without anyone having read it. She will know that it was written by a crazy guy. If I use a typewriter the result will be the same because by now the ...

The present issue of On Curating contributes to a critical re-engagement with New Institutionalism. This conceptual framework is used to encompass a series of curatorial, artistic and educational practices that, in various places around the turn of the Millennium, developed concrete ideas to change art institutions, their mandates and formats: art institutions were to function as sites of research and socially engaged spaces of debate. The fact that discussions about the function of and demands for change within art institutions have become increasingly topical in the context of the controversial and much criticized revised Swiss cultural policy for 2012-2016, and ...

The visitors from the big cities remark on how beautiful it is. And it’s true that the Benedictines had a knack for choosing the finest locations for their monasteries, and this one too, sitting alongside the long River Fulda amid verdant meadow, its large stone buildings nestled in among the smaller village houses, farms, and woods, makes a good impression. Slowly Ines shakes her head. No, no, no. It’s not beautiful, she says, it’s claustrophobic. I understand. I’m prepared for a haunted ruin of an old prison…

The black notebook marked “LAK 529” contains two periods of note-taking by György Lukács, written two years apart, which constitute part of the bequest that was recovered from the so-called Heidelberg suitcase. In 1973, with the help of a current biography, an employee of the Deutsche Bank in Heidelberg identified the owner of the material as Lukács, who had deposited them in 1917, prior to his return from Germany to Budapest. In addition to 1,600 letters and text fragments, this material also contained Das Gericht, which was presumably written in 1913 and dedicated to his first wife, Ljena Grabenko, as ...

My dear friend, Quite some time has passed since my last letter, and there are a few urgent matters that I would like to tell you about. One day, when I was writing the place-name “Kassel” on my smartphone, I made a mistake and the word was automatically corrected by the intelligent digital device to “Kabul.” This made me think of the conflicted relationship between the technologies of communication on the one hand, and intentionality and language on the other. In turn, that made me think about conflicts in general (that is, not just war), and then about the destruction of art ...

Symptom of the Present. Today, biology and the medical sciences are highly advanced in determining the physiology and neurology of sleep, and the emerging medicalization of sleep disorders has be- come a new site of “biocapital” accumulation. At the same time, our “twenty-four-hour society,” with its incessant production, communication, and consumption activities, makes sleep a problematic, uncertain element of everyday life, even perceived as a waste of time or as inertia in a mobile and pragmatic neoliberal social order obsessed by the idea of full employment of finite human existence.The anxiety around sleep (evidenced in the booming scientific research in ...

Recent writings about art have tended to focus on the intention of artists and the effect their artworks have on viewers, as well as the social consequences of these effects. Often, these writings do not speak about the artworks themselves, but about curatorial positions in art today, constituting a meta-artistic discourse. A question, then, might be how to reconnect with the visual, structural, and phenomenological analyses of the twentieth century without sacrificing the political and social dimensions of recent art theory. After more than a decade of these discourses, mainly dedicated to curatorial practices or to broader cultural studies and postcolonial ...