Artist and media critic Alessandro Ludovico interviews the three artists named Janez Janša. It’s no coincidence that they have the same name and not by chance that they share it with the former Slovenian Prime minister: they deliberately and officially changed the names they’d had from birth to Janez Janša. They also joined the right-wing SDS party led by their homonymous counterpart. After that they experienced a “visible disappearance” from having canceled their previous names but simultaneously having gained huge visibility thanks to their radical gesture. Changing your name is similar to dying: it affects more people other than just ...

This zine explores anarcho-surrealist imagination in midcentury and current-day USA, with particular emphasis on the Chicagoland scene.

Critical Pedagogies (June 2019 – July 2020) investigates the capacities of education to rehearse new forums for critical thinking beyond the pedagogical imperative.

What makes a city successful today? Over the past few decades, artists—and more broadly, clusters of creative people—have become central to narratives of urban revitalization and civic growth in cities around the world. In many locales, artists in search of cheap rent constitute the vanguard wedge of gentrification. Yet the so-called creative class includes whole categories of knowledge workers enjoying far less precarious conditions than artists, and it is their affluence that continually leads to the displacement of both working-class residents and artists alike. In the creative city, the branding of subcultural movements, the translation of the gritty into the quaint, ...

Launched in 2008, e-flux journal is a monthly art publication featuring essays and contributions by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today. The journal is available online, in PDF format, and in print through a network of distributors.

Koichiro Osaka’s text for this issue begins at the Sunshine 60 skyscraper in Tokyo. According to myth and a historical reading, the skyscraper is named for the sixty Japanese war criminals executed in 1948 in what was then Sugamo Prison. In 1978, the former prison became the tallest skyscraper in Asia. As Osaka explains, Sunshine 60 may be the largest war monument ever built. The building serves at once as a haunted gravesite and reassurance of the ongoing sunshine of fascism and capitalism. Also in this issue, Françoise Vergès describes a daily ritual in multiple urban centers where thousands of black ...

There is a certain plasticity of meaning inherent in any use of language. If that weren’t the case, poetry and literature would not exist. There would only be contracts, scientific formulas, shopping lists, and so forth. Journalism would be properly factual—there would be no fake news or disinformation. All utterances would document isolated events, never evoking larger patterns or tapping into hidden desires. But then the question arises: Even if language could be cleansed of all ambiguity and spin, what role would images play? If language is the problem, images can only be worse. Against a backdrop where postmodern slippages in ...

On November 7, 1929, the Museum of Modern Art “opened in a five-room rented space with an ‘historical’ exhibition of (European) Post-Impressionist art, titled ‘The First Loan Exhibition: Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh.’” MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, had the idea that modern works that passed a test called “Torpedo in Time” would, after some fifty years, be considered historical and transfer to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time, Gertrude Stein also famously quipped that the very idea of a museum of the modern was an oxymoron. In short, MoMA was more of a kunsthalle ...

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a “global” art world began to form. Sure, there were already a number of world’s fairs and established international biennials, but this would be different. From the 1990s onward, national boundaries would dissolve, centers and peripheries would level out, and the internet would host worldwide cultural exchange. In many ways this really did happen, but some other things also happened. As people and ideas began to move across borders, money did too. Faced with an unmanageable planetary scale, capital became a more efficient regulator of flows than laws or nations. Suddenly, capital rose ...

As the novel coronavirus pandemic spreads, we—the people of planet earth—are faced with a dizzying variety of responses: quarantine, containment, vigilant self-quarantine, paranoid self-isolation, and in some cases escape from the above. Suddenly, it is as if circulation itself has turned against us, making healthy freedom of movement in the world a dealer of death. So your flight is cancelled. Your trip is over. We are staying in place for the foreseeable future. Exhibitions, symposia, gatherings of all kinds are postponed. But not sporting events. Those will go on, but without any supporters in the stands. The players will play ...

We have never completely understood poetry. As a contemporary art publication, there’s no shortage of affection, admiration, or affinity for poetry, and e-flux journal has certainly published a few memorable poems over the years. But it always felt like a stroke of luck or a gift from the ether when someone brilliant would send us a poem. You won’t be surprised that this didn’t happen often. But now is the time to change that, and we’re honored to welcome Simone White as e-flux journal’s first ever poetry editor. Simone is the author of the collections or, on being the other ...

Where did the critical tradition of art go? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Because we know the answer. It went into spectacle. It went into finance. It got privatized, democratized, scrutinized, defunded, bureaucratized, then professionalized. The critical stick became a seductive carrot. But maybe we don’t have to see this only in terms of a fall from grace. Maybe this is the time for a long-overdue realism that an art field still in the thrall of modernist humanism struggles to avoid recognizing. Isn’t it strange how we are subjected to the most extreme aspects of this new order and yet ...