On The MASA

Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006, video still.

By Hito Steyerl

The film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), a Third Cinema manifesto against neocolonialism, has a brilliant installation specification. A banner was to be hung at every screening with text reading: “Every spectator is either a coward or a traitor.” It was intended to break down the distinctions between filmmaker and audience, author and producer, and thus create a sphere of political action. And where was this film shown? In factories, of course.
Now, political films are no longer shown in factories. They are shown in the museum, or the gallery—the art space. That is, in any sort of white cube.
How did this happen? First of all, the traditional Fordist factory is, for the most part, gone. It’s been emptied out, machines packed up and shipped off to China. Former workers have been retrained for further retraining, or become software programmers and started working from home. Secondly, the cinema has been transformed almost as dramatically as the factory. It’s been multiplexed, digitized, and sequelized, as well as rapidly commercialized as neoliberalism became hegemonic in its reach and influence. Before cinema’s recent demise, political films sought refuge elsewhere. Their return to cinematic space is rather recent, and the cinema was never the space for formally more experimental works. Now, political and experimental films alike are shown in black boxes set within white cubes—in fortresses, bunkers, docks, and former churches. The sound is almost always awful.Read more...>

Saâdane Afif, "Untitled (This the Way You & I Measure the World, 2004)“, 2008

By Ina Blom

One of the more inspiring catalogue contributions of late in my view is an essay that seemingly does not deal with art at all but with a renewed conception of politics. The text in question, written by Bruno Latour for the exhibition project “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy”, proposed that the sober-minded reliance on so-called hard facts known as “Realpolitik” be supplanted by a “Dingpolitik” – that is, a form of politics that would see facts not as simple, une-quivocal truths but as complex things, assemblages of meanings, opinions, theories and actions that would have to be acknowledged for their ability to separate and divide as much as for their ability to form common platforms for seemingly inevitable decisions. The essay played up the fact that in a number of languages (including my own) the word thing is also the word for the political assembly, the place where delegates meet. As assemblages, things could then be seen to make up highly different types of assemblies: disregarding the question of the human vs. non-human form of the “delegates”, they emerge as places of nego-tiation and politics, the very places where sociality itself can be traced. Each assemblage potentially attests to a specific kind of assembly, or, if you will, a particular type of multitude. But, by the same token, an assemblage may also attest to the need or desire for dissembling – of resisting accord, unity, harmony, resemblance. Sidestepping the tendency to always look for simple facts, the challenge raised by the concept of “Dingpolitik” is precisely that of paying attention to the various places of assembling and dissembling.Read more...>

Today's rather refreshing conference was held between Liam Gillick, British artist presenting German pavilion, and Ahmet Ogut, Kurdish artist presenting Turkish pavilion. The discussion was coordinated by Tim Griffin, the editor of Artforum.
The peculiarity of this conference was the decision to confront precisely these two artists. Usually, we have almost immediate association of Gillick with the rest of the relational artist. But this time, confronting his work with the one of Ogut's, gave a new and refreshing prospective to his art practice. This was also a great opportunity to point out the importance of Ogut's work, for he's still little know in the western art scene. The fact that the whole auditorium was completely full was just one of the indicators how much was interesting this kind of confrontation.Read more...>

By Andrew Gallix
Félicien Marboeuf, a fictitious author who never wrote a book, is the inspiration for a new exhibition. Andrew Gallix celebrates artists who have turned doing very little into an art form

More than 20 artists will pay homage to Félicien Marboeuf in an eclectic exhibition opening in Paris next week. Although he's hardly a household name, Marboeuf (1852-1924) inspired both Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. Having been the model for Frédéric Moreau (Sentimental Education), he resolved to become an author lest he should remain a character all his life. But he went on to write virtually nothing: his correspondence with Proust is all that was ever published – and posthumously at that. Marboeuf, you see, had such a lofty conception of literature that any novels he may have perpetrated would have been pale reflections of an unattainable ideal. In the event, every single page he failed to write achieved perfection, and he became known as the "greatest writer never to have written". Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, wrote John Keats.Read more...>

Boris Groys

Speech Disorder
By Claire Bishop

WHENEVER PEOPLE LAMENT the homogenization of global biennials, a special case should be made for Havana’s. Located in a country suffering the longest economic blockade in modern history, the Havana Biennial has, since its inception in 1984, placed post-colonial theory and Southern-Hemispheric relations at the forefront of its activities while consciously eschewing the mediation of Western centers. However, for all the innovations this independence has produced—the Havana Biennial could be said to stand historically as the model for today’s discursive, transnational biennials—the flip side is a paranoid control of cultural expression that takes the form of government censorship. As a result, the event’s most recent edition, which took place this past spring, was a disappointingly mute affair; innocuous artistic expressions of antiglobalization sit unproblematically within the anti-imperialist discourse of the Cuban authorities. The bulk of the work in the main exhibition venue at Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña was grindingly mediocre, with very little of the social, interdisciplinary, and research-based art that has come to be a hallmark of Western biennials. Instead, dated forms of installation art abounded (rooms filled with tires, leaves, sand, etc.), as did an aesthetic that the Mexican performer Silverio pithily summarized as “overproduced with no budget.” Still, some smaller venues in the city hosted rewarding displays of work by older artists, such as Luis Camnitzer at the Centro Wifredo Lam, and a León Ferrari survey at the Casa de las Américas; the latter was far more faithful to the vision, range, and political commitments of this senior Argentinean than the concurrent retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Read more...>