BAVO (eds.): Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Over-Identification (2007)

“Contemporary art seems to be caught in the blackmail typical for this self-acclaimed age of the End of History. On the one hand, the artist is elevated into ‘the One’ who relentlessly confronts society with its shortcomings and uses his creative intelligence to dream up new ideals. At the same time however, s/he is constantly reminded that this critical and utopian activity should remain ‘constructive’ – a coded way of saying that it should not fundamentally question the triumphant onward march of representative democracy and the free market. No wonder that art today threatens to be reduced to a purely empty exercise that, as Fukuyama claims, offers the last men an escape from their petty bourgeois existence.

The central question of Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification is whether, and how, art can escape this suffocating situation. This volume argues that the key to a way out of the trap of the End of History lies in the strategy of over-identification. Instead of succumbing to society’s pathetic demand for small creative acts, artists should over-identify with the ruling, post-historical order and take the latter’s immanent laws to their most extreme, dystopian consequences.

By ruthlessly closing off any space for creative, utopian thinking – which today is nothing but a farce anyway – it should confront society with its own closure. This strategy of over-identification is assessed in essays by Boris Groys, Alexei Monroe, Dieter Lesage, Benda Hofmeyr and BAVO.”

Publisher episode publishers, Rotterdam, 2007
ISBN 9059730615, 9789059730618
119 pages

Review (Eva Fotiadi, OPEN)

Editors
Publisher

PDF (no OCR, updated on 2024-2-19)

Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny (2007–) [Czech]

“Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny je periodikum zaměřující se na současné vizuální umění v širším kulturním a teoretickém kontextu. Cílem Sešitu je kultivovat domácí reflexi umění tištěním odborných textů z oblasti humanitních a společenských věd, které tematizují současnou situaci umění a živé kultury u nás i v zahraničí. Sešit z principu není metodologicky vymezen; rozhodujícími měřítky jsou kvalita, podnětnost a relevance pro reflexi současného vizuálního umění.”

Edited by Václav Magid
Editorial board: Claire Bishop, Claudia Joles, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Jiří Ševčík, Martin Škabraha
ISSN 1802-8918

Publisher

Issue 1-2 (2007, single PDF, texts by Patricie C. Phillips and Peter Bürger are missing)
Issue 4-5 (2008, single PDF, 75 MB, texts by Jonathan Crary and Steven Best/Douglas Kellner are missing, added on 2014-2-10)
Issue 8 (2010, single PDF)
Issue 9 (2010, single PDF)
Issue 10 (2011, single PDF, added on 2014-2-10)
Issue 11 (2011, single PDF, added on 2014-2-10)
Selected texts in PDF

Jim Ellis: Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (2009)

Best known as an iconoclastic, wildly inventive filmmaker, Derek Jarman was also an accomplished author, painter, and landscape artist. In Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, Jim Ellis considers Jarman’s wide-ranging oeuvre to present a broad perspective on the career and life of one of the most provocative, engaged, and important artists of the twentieth century.

Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations analyzes Jarman’s work—including his famous films Caravaggio, Jubilee, Edward II, Blue, and Sebastiane—in relation to his critiques of the government and his activism in the gay community, from the liberationist movement to the AIDS epidemic. While others have frequently focused on Jarman’s biography, Ellis looks at how his politics and aesthetics are intertwined to comprehend his most radical aspects, particularly in films such as War Requiem and The Last of England.

Here Jarman is revealed as an artist who keenly understood the role of history and mythology in creating a personal and national identity: as an activist, he sought to challenge old histories while producing new ones to carve out a space for alternative communities in Britain late in the twentieth century.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN 0816653135, 9780816653133
312 pages

publisher
google books

PDF