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)

Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Nihilism, Art, and Technology (2010)

Beginning in an analysis of three paradigmatic instances of the encounter between art and technology in modernism—the invention of photography, the step beyond art in Futurism and Constructivism, and the interpretation of technology in debates on architectural theory in the 1920s and ’30s—this book analyzes three philosophical responses to the question of nihilism—those of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger—all of which are characterized by an avant-garde sensibility that looks to art as a way to counter the crisis of modernity.

These responses are then brought to bear on the work of the architect Mies van der Rohe, whose “silence”—understood as a withdrawal of language, sense, and aesthetic perception—is analyzed as a key problem in the interpretation of the legacy of modernism. From this, a different understanding of nihilism, art, and technology emerges. These concepts form a field of constant modulation, which implies that the foundations of critical theory must be subjected to a historical analysis that acknowledges them as ongoing processes of construction, and that also accounts for the capacity of technologies and artistic practices to intervene in the formation of philosophical concepts.


Originally presented as a compilation thesis in theoretical philosophy, the work was published as a book by Axl Books in 2011.

Doctoral Thesis
Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, 2010
ISBN 9789174470734
92 pages

Publisher (Thesis)
Publisher (Book)

PDF (Thesis; without images)

Karel Teige: O humoru, clownech a dadaistech, I-II (1928-30/2004) [Czech]

Dvousvazková kultovní práce vůdčího teoretika české avantgardy je unikátní studií o dadaismu.

První svazek obsahuje kapitoly “pojednávající o humoru, o světském a neliterárním dadaismu a o poezii cirkusu, music-hallu a lunaparku”. Druhý svazek “kreslí svět moderní básně, svět, který voní; podává genezi dadaismu přehledem vývoje od Baudelairea až k Tzarovi, charakteristiku hnutí dada i surrealistické revoluce a v závěru pokouší se formulovat teorii a estetiku nové poezie pro všecky smysly, podloženou fakty korespondence a analogie mezi jednotlivými obory ‘umění’..”, to, co “je jádrem nové estetické teorie, která se zve poetismem”. S doslovem Jiřího Brabce.

O humoru, clownech a dadaistech, I: Svět, který se směje
Originally published by Odeon, Prague, 1928, 112 pp
Publisher Akropolis, Prague, 2004
ISBN 8073040425
114 pages

O humoru, clownech a dadaistech, II: Svět, který voní
Originally published by Odeon, Prague, 1930, 240 pp
Publisher Akropolis, Prague, 2004
ISBN 8073040530, 9788073040536
244 pages

review (Vol. 1, Andrea Jochmanová, Literární noviny, in Czech)
review (Vol. 2, Jan Nejedlý, Čro Vltava, in Czech)

publisher

PDF (Vol. I)
PDF (Vol. II)