ARTMargins

I'm standing in front of Velázquez's Las hilanderas, o la fábula de Aracne, from roughly 1657, as I have so many times before. A motley assortment of interpretations is before me, too: iconographic, formal, historicist. I find war and classes: Arachne against Athena; humans and gods; Jupiter and Europa; the purchasing class and the weaving class, in the twinned spaces of the tapestry factory of Santa Isabel, in Madrid; the clash between the line drawn by the gazes that draw me in or draw me to the different spaces (the woman in the middle plane looking out; the bull's one eye, reaching out from the tapestry) and the spiral that winds from the uncarded wool hanging, massive, unformed, on the wall; through the whirl of the thread's production in the first plane; up the steps and into the matter of the tapestries that form the canvas's third plane, hung on the virtual plane, the canvas, that's both a fourth, receding plane and the material support for the whole ...

In 1844, the year of Marx's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts, J.M.W. Turner presented Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, the first landscape painting to both articulate the ontological shifts brought about by new modes of extraction and production, but also to suggest concomitant transformation in perception. In this way, it collapsed the dialectical relation between perceiving subject and external landscape, suggesting the reciprocal relationship of reification. In 2013, the contemporary artist and filmmaker Zachary Formwalt produced a piece entitled Projective Geometry in which he read from Chapter 25 of Marx's Capital, the chapter on “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” This voice-over accompanies footage—each shot organized in rigorous single point perspective—of the railroad built by England, France, and Belgium extending from the Ivory Coast to the Cape. Formwalt also unearthed documents from archives in those Imperialist nation states and former/p...

What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?

This roundtable article investigates the “critical archive” as a material concept in the fields of artistic production, art historiography, curatorial practice, and criticism. We invited twelve critics, artists, art historians, and curators to respond to a series of questions related to the idea of the archive as a critical agent in the field of art. The roundtable examines different historical and institutional permutations of conceptions of a (self-) critical archive and its possible impact on our understanding of the relationship between art and historical evidence.

In the 1960s, Japanese artists and filmmakers directed their fury against the sterile urban landscapes which surrounded them. The “Theory of Landscape,” developed by Matsuda Masao as well as many other filmmakers, artists, and writers, posited that our lived landscape is an expression of dominant political power. This article uses the lens of Landscape Theory to analyze three Japanese political avant-garde films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, all of which mark frustration and anger through a reworking of the mundane urban environment that surrounds them: Wakamatsu Koji’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), Oshima Nagisa’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), and Terayama Shuji’s Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971). These three films, whose narratives are fundamentally integrated with the discourse of Landscape Theory, use forms of violence to create gaps and fissures within the coldly modernized Tokyo landscape. While the forms of violence they use might diff...

What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?

What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one another? Could you describe a specific work or text that might serve as an illustration of class struggle or as an exploration of the problem of representing it? Let us say that visual art, broadly speaking, does express the worldview of the dominant class. What kind of art then expresses the worldview of, say, hedge fund managers? Does the dialectic of the visible and invisible still hold for conceptual and post-conceptual art? What alternative critical apparatus would you propose, since neither Lenin nor John William Cooke seemed to care much for art. Why should we?

Focusing on a series of exhibitions of modern art from the 1950s to the early 1970s, this article traces the frictions between two related, yet separate endeavors during the first postwar decades: on the one hand, the historicizing of modernism as a specifically European story; and on the other, the constitution of an all-encompassing concept of “World Art” that would integrate all periods and cultures into a single narrative. The strategies devised by exhibition organizers, analyzed here, sought to maintain the distance between World Art and modernism, and thus deferred the possibility of a more geographically expansive view of twentieth-century art. Realist art from the Soviet bloc and elsewhere occupied an uneasy position in such articulations between World Art and modernism, and its inclusion in exhibitions of modern art often led to the destabilizing of their narratives. Such approaches are contrasted here with the prominent place given to both realism and non-Euro-American art...

This project comes out of a conversation between Mohaiemen and rPajović on the relative absence of Non-Aligned Movement co-founder, and former President of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, from the three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017, dir: Mohaiemen) Through a series of conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki, the shadow play of Pajović's text re-integrates the Yugoslav bloc into Two Meetings and a Funeral. While Pajović's text concludes with a hopeful view of the potential of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mohaiemen's images and superimposed quote from Tito express an ironic doubling back. Indira Gandhi's Indian coalition of 1971, while maneuvering for Bangladesh independence from Pakistan, encountered Tito's confident comment that such problems of “tribalism” were only happening in Asia. Yugoslavia had solved the “Balkan problem”– spoken confidently twenty years before Tito's nation would spl...

In September 1978, Zagreb's Gallery of Contemporary Art staged the first survey exhibition of conceptual and performance art in Yugoslavia: The New Art Practice, 1966–78. Forty years on, the phenomenon continues to attract a substantial amount of scholarly and curatorial attention, largely because of its globally-renowned affiliates, such as Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković and Mladen Stilinović, among others. But academic work has been hesitant to address the deeper political, economic and institutional factors that underpinned the New Art's emergence and secured its prolific development. This article proposes that the New Art both came out of, and responded to, a complex and contradictory moment in Yugoslavia's history, when the country began to integrate itself deeper into the Western capitalist world system. It follows the emergence of the OHO group in Ljubljana and two particular episodes in the youth centers of Zagreb and Novi Sad alongside a brief, but decisive, p...

This article contributes to a recent debate around the question “What Is Contemporary Art?” It brings into discussion certain key aspects of the activities of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA)—a network of contemporary art centers established by the Open Society Institute in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. The author draws upon distinctions between this new type of art institution and the Union of Artists (the organizations which represented the interests of artists under socialism), highlighting distinct artistic, aesthetic and economic characteristics of each institutional model.

This article contributes to a recent debate around the question “What Is Contemporary Art?” It brings into discussion certain key aspects of the activities of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA)—a network of contemporary art centers established by the Open Society Institute in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. The author draws upon distinctions between this new type of art institution and the Union of Artists (the organizations which represented the interests of artists under socialism), highlighting distinct artistic, aesthetic and economic characteristics of each institutional model.

This article traces the roots and development of the Beau Geste Press, which developed extensive international networks through its publishing activity in the 1970s. The article suggests that these links developed because an idea of “openness” was applied to artistic practices, resulting in a shared aesthetic language that enabled cross-border collaboration. I propose the term “translocal” as a way of understanding how artists in different contexts communicated and attempted to build a system parallel to the art world.

This text examines the first official exhibition of the Yugoslav Association of Fine Artists, and the theoretical, socio-political, and institutional contexts of the Socialist Realist period in Yugoslav art (spanning roughly the years between1945 and 1954). Post-war artistic and cultural environment, the first exhibition, and critical aesthetic debates around Socialist Realism exemplify Yugoslavia's struggle to make sense of, and implement, Socialist Realism as an official artistic, cultural, and political category. Its development paralleled the state's own wrestling with notions of socialist governance and its proper implementation. Difficulties with Socialist Realist aesthetic and the ensuing paradoxes in its adaptation in Yugoslav art are at the core of the dialogs, theoretical discourses, and critical responses to the first exhibition. My analysis uses accounts and reviews of the exhibition, as well as official writings and arguments presented by the state and cultural ...