On The MASA

Theorist Sylvère Lotringer talks to Nina Power about art and the market, the failings of capitalism and how radical thinking can help us survive 'the system'

Sylvère Lotringer: I was happily surprised that we can still talk about the avant-garde in art. We are now inhabiting another time-space. Everything is happening too fast and in too many places at the same time for any group or movement to make any such claim. The conference that I attended was trying to extract from this Modernist concept some elements that could still apply among more socially creative political groups and movements, especially at this time when the capitalist system seems to be faltering. The idea of the Italian Autonomia movement – which I documented in an issue of Semiotext(e) in 1980 and republished recently – was that we could reinvent politics, and create something more fluid and non-institutionalized. We are now republishing The German Issue, first released in 1982, as part of the same attempt to bring out the communal part, the creative social impulse that was left behind as we entered the strange anomie that we are experiencing today, in which shallow individualism, cynicism and rapacity thrive in a complete vacuum. Read More...>