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 ...

This title will be available soon. I actually went to work in the mines in Carbonia to run away from a girl I had got back from prison camp on August 29 I had got back home from Germany I had a bit of a holiday at home I was really emaciated I was really down I stayed at home all the time I didn’t do anything I read some newspapers some books some stuff I found lying around I passed the time like that but then I needed money and I couldn’t find any work and so I went to ...

This title will be available soon. 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 Hap- pening 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 ...

This title will be available soon. 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…

This title will be available soon. Has the human capacity for thinking and feeling been captured by the ma- chine? 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 ...

This title will be available soon. 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 ...

This title will be available soon. 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 ...

This title will be available soon. 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 ...

This title will be available soon. 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 ...

This title will be available soon. 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 ...

This title will be available soon. There are not many manifest reasons to think about Hegel and love together. First of all, Hegel is hardly lovable to most people; many readers do not want to take the time to sort out those sentences. Second, the language of love is usually understood to be a direct proclamation or a lyrical expression of some kind. Third, love has a relation to images and motions, to what we imagine time and again or, rather, to a form of imagining and moving that seems to take us up into its repetitions and elaborations. So the ...