After the Great Refusal offers a Western Marxist reading of contemporary art focusing on the continued presence (or absence) of the avant-garde’s transgressive impulse. Taking art’s ability to contribute to a potential radical social transformation as its point of departure, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, including relational aesthetics and interventionist art, new institutionalism and post-modern architecture.

Those who think of contemporary art as a cultural activity tend to rely on performance to bring a degree of variation to the exhibition format. Given its nature as an event, performance can lend a program a rhythm. Contradictory Statements, Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter’s proposition for Fri Art, involved a series of appropriative strategies as well as a method of what you could call programming performance. In doing so, it deviated from the prevailing tendency, which establishes a dialectical opposition between performance and exhibition – in much the same way that the living oppose death.

The reader presents a cross-section of the voices that populate the ongoing debate about, on the one hand, how and in what terms curating functions as a critical cultural practice, and on the other, what methodologies and histories exist with which we can critically analyse curatorial work today. This collection of essays was first published in 2007 by Revolver, in Frankfurt am Main and ICE, Institute for Curatorship and Education as the first ICE Reader…

Dark Data presents the work of six artists who explore pervasive forms of data collection, mass-surveillance, and hypervisibility visited upon Black life through technologies of predictive policing, data-mining, algorithmic violence, and artificial intelligence. The project situates these emergent data technologies within a broader lineage of anti-Black surveillance and quantification. Dark Data highlights a host of artistic and social tactics exercised by Black practitioners to actively respond to these conditions through experimental archival strategies, inventive modes of technological encryption, and gestures of digital worldmaking. The term “dark data” refers to information assets that are collected and stored by corporations and governments but ...

Criticism serves a multitude of functions within the sphere of art—from being a tool for evaluation, to an active co-producer. Some artists have had uneasy relationships with their critics, while others have embraced critique as an artistic discipline in its own right. Over the course of the summer, PROVENCE reached out to an array of artists and writers, asking what role criticism plays today. The following manuscript queries how the format of the contemporary review can be challenged.

Repeated attempts to dismantle the aura of value and rarity surrounding art objects have been, for the most part, unsuccessful. Why is that? The majority of these attempts throughout the twentieth century have consisted of infiltrating the economy of care, custodianship, conservation, and considered attention granted to art objects upon entry into the art establishment. While the introduction of impostors into this ecosystem in the form of real-world doubles (such as Duchampian readymades) served to short-circuit the aura of authenticity within spaces of art, over time these impostors nevertheless began to perform the function of ritualizing a general sense of disbelief with ...

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 ...

We tend to think of architects as professionals rather than workers. Architects design, create, delegate, follow a special calling, but they’re not often seen as “working for a living”, and they’re certainly not much like the workers who actually construct or extract the resources for the buildings they design. And yet, architectural work in the twenty first century has become ever more precarious. As with other white collar workers, architects are becoming increasingly accustomed to short-term contracts, overtime without pay and other traditional hallmarks of exploited labour. In light of this new reality, for this episode we’ll be talking to architectural ...

There are two short works that date back to the late 1960s that should be reread and approached today. The extreme encounter that I would like to address as an artist is that between Clement Greenberg, the most famous American art critic, and Mario Tronti, the most radical Italian political philosopher. I thus put two works together on my table: “Recentness of Sculpture” by Greenberg, from the 1967 American Sculpture of the Sixties catalog (with its original silver cover), and “Lotta contro il lavoro!” by Mario Tronti, from his famous book Operai e capitale, published in Turin in 1966. I believe ...

I’m like a person who makes things. You do it one after another, unending. It goes on for such a long time: something new, and something else, and something something. Here come a lot of different varieties of strategies and arrangements, all interesting, all interlocking, mutatis mutandis. Such a lot of things!

Bartleby, (1972) Directed by Anthony Friedman Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story written by Herman Melville. It first appeared anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 editions of Putnam’s Magazine. There have been three or more film versions, two English (1972 and 2001) and one French (1976). The figure of Bartleby has been influential upon post-war political philosophy, particularly in a post-workerist (post-operaismo) and refusal of work tendencies, Melville’s story is discussed by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Full Unemployment Cinema will be showing the 1972 English ...

After being destroyed, many monuments and artifacts take on another life through representations. Disappearance no longer proves synonymous with forgetting or loss, but rather forms the condition of possibility for a specific mode of image production.