Hal Foster Research Articles

Das Humboldt Lab. Museumsexperimente zwischen postkolonialer Revision und szenografischer Wende by Johanna Di Blasi

Reviewed by: Das Humboldt Lab. Museumsexperimente zwischen postkolonialer Revision und szenografischer Wende by Johanna Di Blasi Mark W. Rectanus Das Humboldt Lab. Museumsexperimente zwischen postkolonialer Revision und szenografischer Wende. By Johanna Di Blasi. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019. Pp. 292. Paper €34.99. ISBN 978-3837649208. This volume focuses on the Humboldt Lab Dahlem (2012–2015) as an experimental platform for exploring the futures of ethnographic collecting, curating, exhibiting, and collaborative research. Johanna Di Blasi examines the role of the Humboldt Lab in developing conceptual models and practices for the integration of the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin-Dahlem (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) into the institutional structure of the Humboldt Forum prior to its projected opening in 2020 (65–66). As a Probebühne for the Humboldt Forum, the Humboldt Lab developed a collaborative, transdisciplinary space, which subsequently resulted in thirty projects and engaged 300 anthropologists, curators, and artists in testing alternative curatorial practices and new exhibition designs (73). Di Blasi’s study, based on her dissertation, not only references the ongoing debates regarding the development of the Humboldt Forum but also intersects with broader discourses in cultural anthropology, art history, and museum studies regarding the contested historical legacies and contemporary roles of ethnological museums and related issues of decolonization, repatriation of collections, participatory museums, institutional critique, and socially engaged art. Although neither the Humboldt Lab nor the Forum were designated as “museums,” [End Page 651] the Lab was an attempt to navigate a path forward from the museums in Dahlem and their ethnographic collections to the new institutional context of the Humboldt Forum, located behind the façade of the Berliner Schloss. Di Blasi focuses on two processes developed by the Humboldt Lab project. First, the author explores the pivotal role of the transdisciplinary teams of researchers, curators, and artists in developing projects that might rethink the presentation and mediation of ethnological collections. Here, Di Blasi situates the Humboldt Lab within the context of the historical trajectory of museum experiments and artistic interventions, such as Fred Wilson’s Colonial Collection (1990) and Mining the Museum (1992–1993) and suggests expanding the notion of “decolonizing the gaze” to “demusealizing the gaze” (“Demusealisierung des Blicks”) (9). Second, Di Blasi argues that the design strategies and scenographies developed for the Humboldt Forum and Humboldt Lab, by consultants Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA), Martin Heller (Heller Enterprises), and other consultants, reflect the accelerated commercialization of exhibition designs that have been shaped by the aesthetics of the experience economy, including multimedia environments and infotainment (203–212). While scenographic exhibitions (associated with theatrical staging and interactive, multimedia displays) are well-established tools for visitor engagement, Di Blasi argues that a primary focus on creating themed environments has played a problematic role in the Humboldt Lab by limiting the potential to engage audiences in more critical modes. In chapter 1, Di Blasi reviews ongoing debates regarding artist-curator collaborations in ethnographic fieldwork and in museums—e.g., Hal Foster’s article “The Artist as Ethnographer” (1995)—which will also be familiar to researchers in cultural anthropology, art history, and museum studies. This discussion references wide- ranging interventions and paracuratorial practices by artists that aim to destabilize the collecting and exhibition practices of museums in the West, e.g., by decontextualizing and recontextualizing artifacts and art works (17–31). In chapters 2 and 3, Di Blasi discusses the notion of a lab as a platform for collaborative experiments, the organization of the Humboldt Lab, and its relations to the development of the Humboldt Forum. Chapter 4 presents several case studies of artist projects presented in the Humboldt Lab, including Zhao Zhao’s Waterfall (2013) and Mathilde ter Heijne’s Pulling Matter from Unknown Sources (2015). In addition, Di Blasi provides an insightful analysis of the Humboldt Lab’s controversial cancellation of Dinner Performance (2014), which was developed by the artist collective Politique Culinaire and based on the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the administrative and institutional issues that emerged from conflicts related to scenographic designs and the practices of research-based curating at the ethnological museums in Dahlem. Di Blasi argues...

Review: The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch, and Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction, by Mari Lending

Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch, eds. The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018, 306 pp., 115 color illus. £75.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781350038417; £24.99 (paper), ISBN 9781350038400 Mari Lending Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018, 284 pp., 48 color and 73 b/w illus. $49.95/£40 (cloth), ISBN 9780691177144 “For better or worse, all my figures are men and all my texts are canonical, but the men do not look so triumphant in retrospect, and today the canon appears less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through.” These lines, written by Hal Foster, appear in his 2002 article “Archives of Modern Art,” which traces major shifts in the memory structure of European art between 1850 and 1950. Rereading this history through a series of oppositions (Baudelaire/Manet, Valery/Proust, Panofsky/Benjamin), Foster examines the “institutional relay” between the artist's studio and the space of the museum. Art in the nineteenth century was a “mnemonic elaboration” of earlier work. Yet this relation between the atelier and the museum was hardly a one-way street: Baudelaire's idea of artistic practice, for instance, “already presumes the space of the museum as the structure of its mnemonic effects.” Each theorist's position is reread through a “dialectic of reification and reanimation”—that is, the shifting relation between art museum and art studio could reanimate European art, reify it into a spectacle, or both. Foster ends by asking how our own archival moment, the age of digital reproducibility, is transforming art's memory structure. His answer is compelling: “If the old museum, as imagined from Baudelaire through Proust and beyond, was the site for the mnemonic reanimation of visual art, the new museum tends to split the mnemonic experience from the visual one.”1 Decoupled from its archival/mnemonic function, the new museum highlights the exhibition and exchange value of art in unprecedented ways. The two volumes under review here offer insight into the now-lost memory structure of the nineteenth century by rethinking architecture's relation with technical reproductions—printed images and plaster casts. Meticulously researched and produced, these two books reveal a curatorial approach to architectural history, one that foregrounds …

Da curadoria de artista a alguma outra coisa

O texto especula a permeabilidade entre práticas artísticas e curatoriais, a partir de uma série de projetos que poderiam ser entendidos comopropostas ambivalentes, cruzando o terreno entre essas atividades. Se um artista pode ser um curador, que escolhas essa condição ambígua determina?A serviço de que decisões e situações, para além da própria carreira, pode-se operar essa prática? Trata-se de um relato em primeira pessoa que se lançasobre as perspectivas reais de entendimento de possíveis tipologias da curadoria associada ao campo das artes e mídias. O texto aborda pensamos decríticos como Claire Bishop, Elena Filipovic, Hal Foster, Hans Ulrich Obrist e outros, em pensamentos que buscaram expandir o campo de atuação de artistas em relação a práticas curatoriais. Considerando um grande número de artistas atuantes nas confluências desse campo no Brasil, como os brasileiros raziela Kunsch, Giselle Beiguelman, Fernando Velazquez, Marcus Bastos, Roberto Traplev, Kika Nicolela, Bruno Mendonça, Sonia Guggisberger, Claudio Bueno, Gabriel Menotti ou Daniel Lima, o texto enseja um novo ambiente para essas práticas, que envolvem novas configurações de espaços do tipo artist-run spaces (espaços autogeridos) ou exposições preparadas exclusivamente por artistas. Sem afirmar dogmas, arriscar genealogias ou pre-definir terrenos de atuação, o texto resvala pensamentos associados à frase “Não sabendo que era impossível, foi lá e fez”, como o devaneio de um curador que acabou sendo sem saber que era ou podia ser.

O espaço humano-animal na arte contemporânea: leituras em Hal Foster e Isabelle Stengers

Este escrito procura refletir – em caráter ensaístico – o espaço da temática humano-animal em meio as manifestações contemporâneas da arte, face às proposições de Hal Foster (2014) e Isabelle Stengers (2018). Para isso, partiremos dos textos O artista como etnógrafo, do primeiro, e A proposição cosmopolítica, da segunda, utilizando-nos de ambos como lente epistemológica e reflexiva para abordagem do tema.

Interdependent Study

A long-time contributor to the Whitney Independent Study Program, Hal Foster discusses how the program has evolved over the years and how his approach to criticism has evolved along with it.

A Study on the Emergence and Reproduction of Posthuman

본 논문의 목표는 포스트휴먼의 등장과 따른 그 신체에 대한 인식을 살펴보는데 있다. 우리는 신체에 대한 인식을 포스트휴먼에 한정하지 않았다. 들뢰즈와 가타리의 이론들을 훑어보면서, 우리는 신체 각 기관의 기능이 근대의 이성에 의해서 규정된 것임을 알게 되었다. 신체의 기관은 어떤 역할이든 할 수 있다. 이 사실은 신체의 기관이 어떤 것으로 규정될 수 없다는 것으로 이해될 수 있다. 또한 우리는 기존의 신체의 질서에 반기를 들고, 신체 기간들의 자유로운 조합을 시도한 초현실주의에 주목했다. 특히 할 포스터는 한스 벨메르의 작품에서 근대가 신체에 부여된 질서가 해체되는 모습을 발견했다. 포스트휴먼은 강화된 신체를 가졌다. 그리고 그 신체의 기관들은 우리가 생각할 수 없는 수많은 역할을 할 수 있다. 우리는 이론적으로 제기된 문제들을 사례로 확인하기 위하여 드라마 〈여우각시별〉의 포스트휴먼 재현양상을 살펴보았다.The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of posthuman and its perception of the body. We did not limit our perception of the body to post-humans. By looking at the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, we learned that the function of each organ of the body was defined by the reasoning of modernity. The organ that is the body can perform any role. This fact can be understood by realizing the body’s organ cannot be defined as something. We also paid attention to Surrealism, which rebelled against the existing order of the body and attempted a free combination of body parts. In particular, Hal Foster discovered that the order given to the body by modernity was dismantled in Hans Bellmer’s work. The posthuman has an enhanced body. And the organs of the body can play a number of roles that we cannot conceive of. To confirm the theoretical issues raised by the case, we examined the representation pattern of the posthuman in the drama “Yeowoo Gaksibyeol”.

El giro documental en algunas producciones literarias y cinematográficas de hijos de desaparecidos en Argentina

En los últimos años, es posible detectar que, en la literatura argentina, un giro documental ha venido a completar, ya que no a sustituir, el giro subjetivo al que una década atrás se refirió, entre otros autores, Beatriz Sarlo. En el cine argentino, algunos de los rasgos de este giro aparecen antes en relación con lo que Hal Foster llamó “retorno de lo real”. Este trabajo busca reflexionar en torno a las transformaciones que, en este sentido, tienen lugar tanto en la literatura como en el cine contemporáneos, a partir del análisis de una serie de libros y películas producidos por hijos de personas desaparecidas durante la última dictadura militar.

AS SUTILEZAS DA VEROSSIMILHANÇA E AS VARIAÇÕES DA REALIDADE

Relembrando algumas lições de Victor Giudice, ministradas durante uma oficina de ficção, a autora faz uma reflexão acerca do papel da verossimilhança na elaboração do discurso realista nos diferentes contextos das principais manifestações da literatura realista, desde o romance do século xix até as narrativas hiper-realistas da pós-modernidade. O ensaio tem por objetivo analisar o conto “O Museu Darbot” como exemplo de arte contemporânea hiper-realista, no sentido que Hal Foster confere a esta denominação, isto é, como arte que adota um modelo de representação que é, concomitantemente, referencial e simulacral.

The Afronaut and Retrofuturism in Africa

The Afronaut and Retrofuturism in Africa Paul Wilson (bio) In a 1964 newspaper article addressing his fellow citizens, edward makuka nkoloso, founder of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy, declared, "I see the Zambia of the future as a space-age Zambia."1 For nkoloso, sending an astronaut into space would affirm the nation's status as an independent state, equal or even superior to Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Although his do-it-yourself space program eventually disappeared without any governmental support, recent art projects that purport to document this and other space programs in Southern Africa have given the African astronaut, or afronaut, a renewed cultural relevance. Such projects nurture a desire for an African space age that is at once nostalgic and utopian, intertwining the optimism of decolonization and the Space Race, and anticipating a future free from the geopolitical or racial inequalities of the past or present. As such, they do not merely recall the past or propose a future but explore the anticipatory dimensions of redirecting, revising, and repurposing futures from the past. Although the afronaut first emerged as a cultural trope in the African diaspora, these recent artworks relocate it within postcolonial histories of Southern Africa.2 The artworks share elements of retrofuturism, a [End Page 139] fascination with or desire for a retrofuture: that is, a future imagined in the past. Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, for instance, reconstructs the fragmentary history of the Zambian space program in a photobook and exhibition titled The Afronauts (2012). Her warm and evocative photographs visualize the program not as it was, but as it might have been in an ideal past. The United States-based, Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo also addresses the Zambian effort in her short film Afronaut (2014). Although the film is set in the past, she revises the story to reflect contemporary ideas about race and identity. The Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda presents an account of another space mission in his photographic installation Icarus 13, The First Journey to the Sun (2007). This putative documentation of a space flight from Luanda to the sun claims to take place in 2006, but many of the visual elements that Henda uses to signify futurity, such as the soaring monument to Agostinho Neto in Luanda, reference specific moments in Angolan history. Retrofuturism in these artworks raises critical questions: What are the cultural politics of longing for a future imagined in the past? What is to be gained by appending "retro" to futurism in Africa? Retrofuturism is a subset of a broader global art practice in which artists use archival materials to explore and reinterpret history. This so-called historiographic or archival turn has spurred a contentious debate in the art world since its emergence in the late 1990s. Dieter Roelstraete writes, "art's obsession with the past, however recently lived, effectively closes it off from other, possibly more pressing obligations, namely that of imagining the future, of imagining the world otherwise."3 His claim resonates with theories of modern art but presumes that an artist's interest in the past is antiquarian rather than dialectical. Other art historians characterize the practice more favorably. Mark Godfrey claims, for instance, "the artist is a historian who can open up new ways of thinking about the future"; and Hal Foster asserts that "archive art" can turn "belatedness into becomingness" and "'excavation sites' into 'construction sites.'"4 Inke Arns argues that artists can mine the past for unfulfilled possibilities that can be used to "extrapolate a possible future."5 However, located as they are in the final paragraph of their respective texts, these rhetorical gestures toward the anticipatory dimension of artistic engagements with the past remain underdeveloped. Consequently, retrofuturism can seem overly nostalgic, uncritical of the past and unconcerned with the future. [End Page 140] Discussions of retrofuturism in science fiction and cultural studies revolve around similar questions about its historical and political inclinations: Is its primary orientation toward the past or toward the future? Does it reactivate dormant utopian impulses and inspire new ways of envisioning the future, or does it indulge in what Rob Latham describes as the "dubious...

A Questionnaire on Monuments

“A Questionnaire on Monuments” features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: “From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any of the following questions: What histories do these public symbols represent, what histories do they obscure, and what models of memory do they imply? How do they do this work, and how might they do it differently? What social and political forces are in play in their erection or dismantling? Should artists, writers, and art historians seek a new intersection of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers? How might these debates relate to the question of who is authorized to work with particular images and archives?”

W przestrzeni wymiany. Obrazy Jacka Goldsteina i fotografie Olivera Wasowa

The paper, focused on the works of two American artists of the 1980s, Jack Goldstein and Oliver Wasow, is an attempt to consider the process of crossing boundaries between two different kinds of art. That phenomenon was a characteristic feature of the late twentieth-century art, including also The Pictures Generation to which both artists actually belonged. Both Goldstein, in his paintings from the 1980s, and Wasow, in his photos from the same period, used mediated images and simulated the effects achieved by the advanced technology of nature watching and picture transmission. In consequence, among several features common to the works under scrutiny, one realizes in the first place a significant change in the defining of the medium understood not just as a material and technological aspect of the work, but as a dynamic and complex structure connecting different forms and spaces of artistic expression with the spectator’s experience. Challenging the autonomy of art and the separate identities of its kinds, rooted in the historical avant-garde, leads to a revision of the modernist idea of the medium, as well as to reconsidering the ways in which its changing status influences the semantic potential of paintings and photos. Moreover, the spectacular paintings of Goldstein and photos by Wasow, made and taken in relation to the rapidly changing technology of image transmission, provokes questions about their critical potential: do they denounce the spectacle-making techniques or, as fetishized merchandise, do they just take part in it? The frame of reference are analyses conducted by American critics and art historians who redefined the concept of the medium in contemporary artistic practices, examined the role of photography, and considered the subjection of the late twentieth-century art to the logic of spectacle, such as Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and Hal Foster.

Queer Emergencies, 5.26.2017

Hal Foster (2015) asserts that art should address emergencies. While he speaks of visual and performance arts, I extend his claim to poetry. As such, I use my positionality of queer individual as an entrance point to using poetry to address queer emergencies. Starting with Hegel’s (1975) articulation that the lyric form of poetry starts with our own subjectivity and shows a “coming to consciousness” (Culler, 2015, p. 2) through thought and reflection, this poetry addresses a pressing queer emergency of our current political moment (Chechnya), while also extending its reach to/through the intersections with other queer emergencies of today’s climate. Through this inscription of the present, I strive to illuminate the personhood of queer victims, the intersections of current queer emergencies, and the temporal and real proximity of emergency to those of us who might feel safe based on other identity intersections.

Medievalist Comics and the American Century by Chris Bishop

Reviewed by: Medievalist Comics and the American Century by Chris Bishop Marina Gerzić Bishop, Chris, Medievalist Comics and the American Century, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2017; hardback; pp. 224; R.R.P. US $65.00; ISBN 9781496808509. Chris Bishop's new book examines the literary and historic roots of American comics, and how these works of popular culture use medieval European characters to reflect modern American history. The volume features an introduction and conclusion, and seven chapters, each focusing on an individual comic title: Prince Valiant (1937); The Green Arrow (1941); The Mighty Thor (1962); Conan the Barbarian (1970); Red Sonja (1973); Beowulf: Dragon Slayer (1975); and Northlanders (2007). Bishop's introduction provides an excellent overview of the history of comic books and the concept of popular medievalism as a genre, and he states that his focus is chiefly to contextualize the texts studied, rather than interpret them. Medievalist Comics and the American Century is successful as an elaborated reception study of a selection of comics published in America from the late 1930s until more recent times (2007). Bishop's discussion of the comics is largely descriptive rather than analytical, providing detailed publication histories. To this effect, he outlines connections between publishers (such as the looming figure of tycoon William Randolph Hearst) and the authors (such as Hal Foster) and artists (such as Howard Pyle and Newell Convers Wyeth) who would go on to influence and popularize the idea of medievalism in the United States in the twentieth century and beyond. Surprisingly, Bishop does not overly engage with medievalism, declaring that, 'while [m]edievalism will inform the discourse' of his study, 'reception history' is '[his] primary objective' (p. 6), before quite flippantly reducing the difference between medievalism and neo-medievalism to mere semantics (p. 12). A more thorough engagement with both medievalist and neo-medievalist theory would have strengthened Bishop's work, especially in his final chapter on Northlanders. The first three chapters examine the immigration of Arthurian legends, Robin Hood, and Viking lore into the United States. Bishop presents Prince Valiant, DC's Green Arrow, and Marvel's The Mighty Thor as products of a rich engagement with this medievalist culture and history. He traces each work, from academic interest in the medieval, to transmission to the general public through immigrant culture, and then finally its adaptation and popularization in the comic form. [End Page 149] The next two chapters focus on Marvel's barbarian warriors Conan and Red Sonja. Bishop outlines how Conan the Barbarian was resurrected from pulp-fiction obscurity and buoyed along on the wave of interest in fantasy literature that started with J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Bishop frames Red Sonja as a response to America's feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, with major comics publishers such as Marvel and DC realizing they needed strong female characters. However, a backlash against feminism led to a (problematic) revision of Sonja's backstory (p. 140), an example of the 'Women in Refrigerators' trope that continues to be used in comic storylines today. The final two chapters focus on two titles by publisher DC. Bishop's interest in Beowulf: Dragon Slayer is primarily as an example of failed medievalist work compared with Prince Valiant, Green Arrow, Thor, Conan, and Red Sonja. It lasted a mere six issues, failed to excite the public's imagination, and has 'never taken root in the popular conscious of America' (p. 160). Northlanders, another failed medievalist work—Bishop terms it an 'unmedievalist' comic book(p. 164)—resulted from author Brian Wood's struggles with his publisher Vertigo. An imprint of DC, Vertigo wanted a series based on Silver Age comic character the Viking Prince, whilst Wood was more inclined to write a Japanese neo-noir gangster saga. However, in taking Tokyo gang stories and setting them in old Iceland, Bishop neglects to see Northlanders not as a failed medievalist work, but as a perfect example of a neo-medievalist text: it is set in a pseudo-medieval world, and playfully engages with, and interrogates, medieval history and culture. Bishop's writing style is clear and concise, and the book includes endnotes, a bibliography, and index...

A distância (in)correta

“Ele escreveu uma peça sobre negros” era o título explosivo do projeto inicial do dramaturgo e diretor Alexandre Dal Farra que deu origem à longa jornada do espetáculo que é tema deste texto. Mas diferentemente do que se pode tomar em uma abordagem inicial demasiadamente reativa, o título, intencionalmente, já colocava seu próprio projeto sob suspeita. Quem é esse “ele” que se arroga tal posição? Certamente um “ele” que se distingue de seu “objeto” – esse genérico e autoritário “negros” que termina a frase. De certa forma, sem que tivéssemos a menor ideia de onde o projeto nos levaria, já estávamos no encalço desse “branco” que figuraria no título definitivo do espetáculo que estreou em março de 2017 em São Paulo: Branco: o cheiro do lírio e do formol. Este artigo procura retomar alguns fios do processo relacionando-os à ideia de “distância correta” proposta por Hal Foster em seu texto “O artista como etnógrafo”.

Contemporary Art and Anthropology: Shared Experiences

Over 20 years ago, in his essay The Artist as Ethnographer?, American critic and art historian Hal Foster, identified an “ethnographic turn” in art. Drawing on the work of anthropologist James Clifford, particularly his concept of “ethnographic surrealism”, the author confirmed and even amplified what would become a commonplace theme in the art world. Anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, along with the critical works initiated in the field of social science and humanities in the 1980...

Archival Art and Open Wounds: From Hofmannsthal to Installation Art

This article explores the “archival impulse” (Hal Foster) in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and several installation artists. Revisiting Hofmannsthal’s dramatizations of archival landscapes in his fictive travel report Augenblicke in Griechenland, I show how topographies of wounds introduce an aesthetics and ethics of participation. The article also explores striking parallels between topographies of wounds and contemporary archival art, in particular Thomas Hirschhorns’s video installation Touching Reality (2004), and Saskia Boddeke’s and Peter Greenaway’s exhibition installation Obedience (2015, Jewish Museum Berlin). These topographies expose the potential of archival art to engage with memory as a form of inscription, that is, with the archival impulse as an act of (re)inscribing inscriptions in an event of wounding.

Kurt Schwitters and 27 Senses: Resonances in Norway, England, and Time

In the 1990s, Hal Foster observed that ethnographic or politicized art practices were diverging from a neo-avant-gardiste precedent: an investment in the remobilization of historic experimentations such as those performed by the members of Dada. I argue in this article that, more recently, the artists Kenneth Goldsmith, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Karl Holmqvist, Jutta Koether and Eline McGeorge were testing Foster’s assessment of the ‘ethnographic turn’ and also what he refers to as the ‘archival impulse’ by reintroducing, from a curatorial standpoint, the potential of postmodernist breaks with linear thinking. Specifically, the collective considered the years Kurt Schwitters spent in exile as an inhabitable site and not an art historical narrative in need of retelling. Rather than seeking to explain paradigmatic shifts in the formal qualities of Dadaist assemblages through distanced reproduction, they embarked on an artists’ residency that would allow them to critically engage with the concept of Merz in idiosyncratic and ephemeral ways. I suggest that this allowed them to successfully arrive at what Foster calls a ‘productive tension’, evidenced in the subsequent installation of their group exhibition 27 Senses at Chisenhale Gallery in London, 2010.

Straight Pins, Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists’ books – that is, books that are art unto themselves – and books as ‘archives’. Here, I understand the ‘book’ as ‘archive’ in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets ‘archival art’: that is, art, in this case book art, that ‘draws on informal archives but produces them as well’ in an effort ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.

Against affirmation. Negation as a cognitive strategy in an art film

Using the category of negation, the article analyzes the art fi lms of Maya Deren and Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler exhibited at The Inner Lives (Of Time) in the National Gallery in Prague (5.10.2016 – 19.02.2017, in the Trade Fair Palace). Negation is discussed as a cognitive strategy, which echoes the theoretical concepts of Theodor W. Adorno and Hal Foster. Elements such as the subjective treatment of time, the suspension of logical implications, or poetic-oneiric visions, have been analyzed so as to demonstrate how their meanings help to question the socio- -cultural reality.

Bjarke Ingels and the Return of Representation: A Challenge to the Post-Critical

In the 2000s, the post-critical position emerged as a rejection of architectural criticism. Post-critics prophesied the merging of design and discourse, and the emergence of self-explanatory works of architecture. This paper argues that Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’s rise to global stardom disproves the tenets of post-criticality, since Ingels successfully raises all the “un-architectural” representational strategies from the dead. Similarly, Hans Ibelings’s notion of a contemporary “Supermodernism” is dismissed. In Ingels’s architectural production – particularly his way of metamorphosing photographic pictures into entire facades – we witness a resurfacing of postmodernist strategies first promulgated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Contextualism and replication emerge as two postmodern themes that continue to haunt architecture and urbanism, in spite of the “exorcism” performed by post-critics. Lastly, this paper suggests that we need to reexamine the notions of postmodernity and postmodernism through the theoretical lenses provided by Reinhold Martin and Hal Foster, respectively.