e-flux journal editors Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, and Kaye Cain-Nielsen discuss 10 years of e-flux journal. Excerpt from the editorial of e-flux journal issue #95—WONDERFLUX: In November 2008, the editorial for issue #00 said: Historically, more than any single institution, art publications have been primary sites for discourse surrounding the artistic field. And yet most recently, the discourse has seemingly moved elsewhere—away from the formal vocabulary used to explain art production, away from traditional art capitals, and away from the printed page. At times, new discursive practices even replace traditional forms of art production. Given the current climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal, ...

e-flux journal editors Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, and Kaye Cain-Nielsen discuss 10 years of e-flux journal. Excerpt from the editorial of e-flux journal issue #95—WONDERFLUX: In November 2008, the editorial for issue #00 said: Historically, more than any single institution, art publications have been primary sites for discourse surrounding the artistic field. And yet most recently, the discourse has seemingly moved elsewhere—away from the formal vocabulary used to explain art production, away from traditional art capitals, and away from the printed page. At times, new discursive practices even replace traditional forms of art production. Given the current climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal, ...

In Splendide Hotel – 1887 there is one sole room and it is transparent, containing apparitions of all literary, musical, scientific and abstract sorts. From an internal monologue to quantum physics to the gramophone and bioluminescence, within this little book there is a collection of nearly all the references serving to rebuild this hotel within the Cristal Palace to reveal 1887 as the birth year of our universe.

Sometime in 1971, Harald Szeemann visited Turin in preparation for the documenta exhibition he was curating for the following year. Among the people he tried to meet in the city was Alighiero Boetti, but when Szeemann visited Boetti’s studio, the Italian artist wasn’t there. All indications are that somebody took the curator through the studio and showed him around, and that, mistakenly, Szeemann forgot a small piece of paper with a list of artists’ names. Several weeks might have passed before Boetti returned to Turin (that year he took two long trips to Afghanistan) and found the piece of paper ...

Do you know that canvas you see in every permanent collection in every art museum around the world that has been slashed by an artist called Fontana? There are many of them, each a slightly different size, with a different length slash. When encountering them I peer through the slash to the dark shadow, ‘concetto spaziale,’ adjusting my eyes to the light that reaches the gallery wall. I wonder how many canvasses Fontana slashed, and how they would look displayed from the longest to the shortest? The book aligns and extends these voids from page 1 to page 150. A selection ...

Catastrophe arrives, traditionally, in the manner of an accident: from the Latin accidens, meaning accident or chance; from accido, to fall out, come to pass, happen, occur. The accident is, in short, that which happens to us: it comes from without, and takes us by surprise.3 “We are passive with respect to the disaster,” writes Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, “but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” To experience catastrophe is to enter into the condition of passivity. This passivity is directly linked to the externality of the catastrophe: that it appears to arrive from outside the system. That ...

With the term chrononormativity, Elizabeth Freeman describes a timeliness that is following a normative regime. A “deviant chronopolitics,” she says, is one that envisions “relations across time and between times” that upturns developmentalist narratives of history (Freeman, 58, 63). Lorenza and many others have become agents in a deviant chronopolitics and the cripping of art history. Crip Magazine collects artifacts of this transhistorical crip (sub)culture. It relates to historical struggles, aiming to create trans-temporary connections and communities across time. Desire, time traveling, and fragmented bodies are some of the themes that connect the different pieces in this volume…

Against Art History critically evaluates decolonial art exhibitions and curatorial frameworks. It asks to what extent art history can be decolonial, when its disciplinary and architectural foundation, the museum, is an inherently colonial institution. Shirazi thus examines whether new curatorial frameworks, such as in Exhibitions Without Objects (EwO) which internationalise the modernist canon of non-Western arts, undo or amplify the violence perpetrated by Euro-American historical narratives.

Agnes Martin: Life & Work explores the life, origins, and art of one of the most internationally celebrated painters to emerge from this country. It reveals how Martin gained renown in the male-dominated art world of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a pivotal figure between two of the era’s dominant movements: Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Delving into Martin’s signature style composed of tranquil grids and stripes, the book investigates the origin of Martin’s method, which she perfected over the better part of four decades, following her belief in the transformative power of art. “I would like [my pictures] to represent beauty, ...

“As I see it, creativity includes things like opening a hotel in Kabul,” Boetti said in an interview in the 1970s, adding, “an undertaking that would be crazy even in Italy! But there you realize it’s a true challenge: even presenting yourself as something other than an artist, when you have no anchorage and must completely reinvent yourself, physically and as a character. For instance, over there I always wear a jacket and tie with dark glasses, and I’m very dry and stand-offish with people…” The One Hotel opened in Kabul in the autumn of 1971, during Alighiero’s second trip to ...

The original idea for Almanac was to make a diary or “book of hours” that would reflect on my father’s life, and his passing. I chose a format concentrating on marking time: the 52-week calendar, the equinox and solstice, the punctuation of the beginning, middle, and end, etc. While the graphic and symmetrical imaging of sacrificial altars, movie screens, and deco lighting propose an odd symbolic orientation, the pairing of projected platonic shapes and Dore’s images of Dante’s journey, allow different ways to engage with the world. A mock-up stage is set for a tragic/comedy — a guide through the everyday and ...

An Anti-Catalog was the work of the Catalog Committee of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). A landmark publication of the 1970s, its purpose was to protest the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition, which was titled “Three Centuries of American Art.” The Whitney show featured John D. Rockefeller III’s collection of mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art–a collection that featured only one African American and one woman artist. The Catalog Committee, which consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians, spent almost a year producing an eighty-page book containing articles and documents. Originally conceived as a critique ...