TkH, 23: The Commons / Undercommons in Art, Education, Work … (2016)

“The fifteen pieces in this issue are the result of a somewhat peculiar endeavor. Between May 29 and June 1, 2014, we held a conference at Frankfurt Lab under the title of The Public Commons and the Undercommons of Art, Education, and Labour. Its title reflected our concerns about diagnosing the current predicament of higher education in the arts and humanities, artistic production, and cultural work. To summarize briefly, two turns have lately merged that characterize the transformation of work, knowledge, and subjectivation processes across the arts field and the Academy: the educational and the curatorial turn. While the educational turn has yielded a new academic (professional) valorization of artistic praxis (in the so-called creative or practice-based PhDs), coupled with a proliferation of degrees and a prolongation of financialized, debt-stricken study (also as a temporary deferral or relief from the market and its projective temporality), the curatorial turn has corresponded to a neoliberal style of managing both art and education, reducing time and attention, critical and transformative (poetic) engagements with one’s own art and study.” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Harutyun Alpetyan, Gigi Argiropoulou, Stefano Harney, Gal Kirn, Boyan Manchev, Randy Martin, Fred Moten, Isabel de Naverán, Norbert Pape, Nina Power, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Jason Read, Jan Ritsema, Ana Vujanović, and Josefine Wikström.

Edited by Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Kunst, and Stefan Hölscher
Publisher TkH (Walking Theory), Belgrade, and Institute for Applied Theatre Science, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, April 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Serbia License
ISSN 1451-0707
72 pages

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OnCurating, 19: On Artistic and Curatorial Authorship (2013)

“This issue of On Curating brings together a range of interviews and essays, inspired by the symposium, “Why Artists Curate”, held by the Kunstbüro der Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in cooperation with Columbus Art Foundation in July 2011. The feedback from this conference prompted a discussion on authorship in contemporary art, from artists, curators and artist-curators.”

With essays by Marc James Léger and Dorothee Richter, and interviews with Artur Zmijewski (Anne Koskiluoma and Anna Krystyna Trzaska), Kristina Lee Podesva (Sophia Ribeiro), Raqs Media Collective (Chloé Nicolet-dit-Félix and Gulru Vardar), Mary Jane Jacob (Monika Molnár and Tanja Trampe), Valerie Smith (Jacqueline Falk and John Canciani), Gavin Wade (Michael Birchall and Nkule Mabaso), Fucking Good Art (Sheena Greene), Ute Meta Bauer and Yvonne P. Doderer (Annemarie Brand and Monika Molnár), Tania Bruguera (Ashraf Osman and Daniela N. Fuentes), and Marion von Osten (Charlotte Barnes).

Edited by Michael Birchall
With a Foreword by Winfried Stürzl
Publisher OnCurating.org, Zurich, June 2013
95 pages

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Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005)

“Andrea Fraser’s work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to ‘trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.’ It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique—as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men’s room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser’s interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks—institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. Fraser’s writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003—including the performance script for the docent’s tour that gives the book its title—both documents and represents her work.

The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser’s artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical ‘artistic practice’ as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, ‘Isn’t This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao),’ reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book’s 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.”

Edited by Alexander Alberro
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262062445, 9780262062442
xxxvii+291 pages

Reviews: Kirsi Peltomaki (Afterimage, 2005), Melissa Gronlund (Frieze, 2005), Louis Byrne (Art Book, 2007), N.A. Hayes (PopMatters, 2008).

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