Shifter Magazine 16: Pluripotential (2010)

“We present scores, scripts, instructions, critical essays and more for Shifter’s 16th issue entitled ‘Pluripotential’.

Here we invoke a term, which describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body, to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies.

The skin that we are born with is transformed as a result of its life of touches, caresses and trauma and becomes flesh. While on the one hand each of us experiences a unique set of circumstances, our common knowledge also shapes this flesh. Analogously, the brain becomes the mind through its history of experiences: A British child growing up in Tokyo speaks fluent Japanese, something her parents having arrived later in life to Japan may never be able to do. The brain is prepared for a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic conditions, within certain biological limits of malleability. Furthermore, as Agamben has noted, ‘the child […], is potential in the sense that [s]he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning.’

These limits of malleability may fall within the paradigm of what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception, that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common, and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” Does art have the pluripotential ability to produce events in the cultural landscape, which in turn produce a redistribution of the sensible: a shift in public consciousness concerning how and what we see and feel, and furthermore a reconsideration of who constitutes the public ‘we’. Here the contradicting ideas of a homogeneous people, versus the singularities that produce differences within the multitude become relevant.

This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including ‘detournement’ and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways. It is therefore through these forms that we set out to explore ‘Pluripotential’.” (editors)

Contributors:
 Éric Alliez
, Bernard Andrieu, 
Eric Anglès
, Kader Attia, 
Elena Bajo, 
Lindsay Benedict
, Nicholas Chase, 
Seth Cluett
, Zoe Crosher
, Krysten Cunningham, 
Yevgeniy Fiks
, Dan Levenson, 
Antje Majewski
, T. Kelly Mason, 
Michele Masucci
, Daniel Miller, 
Seth Nehil
, Warren Neidich, 
Susanne Neubauer, 
Hans Ulrich Obrist
, Chloe Piene, 
Sreshta Rit Premnath, 
Linda Quinlan, 
Patricia Reed
, Silva Reichwein, 
Barry Schwabsky, 
Gemma Sharpe, 
Amy Sillman
, Francesco Spampinato, 
Tyler Stallings, 
Laura Stein, 
Clarissa Tossin
, Brindalyn Webster
, Lee Welch
, Olav Westphalen
, James Yeary

Edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Warren Neidich
Published in April 2010
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License

Magazine website

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Back issues 1-15

Gerald Matt (ed.): Interviews 1-2 (2007, 2008) [English/German]

Interviews 2

Conversations with 42 artists from Matthew Barney to Louise Bourgeois, Kunsthalle Wien, 2008.
The interviews within the “art system” presents a particularly suitable form of creating an equal platform of exchange between creator and distributor of art, a “medium”, which conveys authentic information from the artist to an audience interested in art as well as to art critique and theory. While integrating the narrative and personal, this way of self-positioning counteracts the image of the “speechless” visual artist – to a certain extent still being perpetuated today – and mirror the diversity of contemporary art production by a lively dialogue.

360 pages, 127 coloured and 10 b/w illustrations, foreword by Gerald Matt, ISBN 978-3-86560-364-7
Editor: Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald Matt
Publisher: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln
Year: 2008

publisher (English)
publisher (German)

Interviews

The interviews, published in the book, are selected from a larger number of conversations with artists in the course of the recent curatorial and art publishing activities from Gerald Matt, Director Kunsthalle Wien
Over several years, he was able, in most cases, to observe these artists’ work through repeated personal encounters and as they passed through the international exhibition circuits.

356 pages, 127 coloured and 10 b/w illustrations, foreword by Gerald Matt
ISBN: 3-86560-186-3, 987-86560-186-5
Editor: Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald Matt
Publisher: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln
Year: 2007

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PDF (Interviews 2, German)
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Nicolas Bourriaud: The Radicant (2009) [English/Spanish]

In his most recent essay, Nicolas Bourriaud claims that the time is ripe to reconstruct the modern for the specific context in which we are living. If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.

To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a “world art criticism” in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.

Translated from the French by James Gussen and Lili Porten
Publisher: Sternberg Press, March 2009
ISBN 978-1-933128-42-9
192 pages

Traducción de Michele Guillemont
Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2009
Colección: “Los sentidos”
Subcolección: “Artes visuales”
ISBN: 978-987-1556-12-0
226 pags.

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PDF [English] (updated on 2012-7-28)
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