e-flux journal issue #4
March 2009
available online:
contact: journal [at] e-flux.com
Join us this Saturday for an informal round table discussion on the subject of publishing art journals, and the launch of issue #4 of e-flux journal.
Saturday March 7th, 7:30PM
e-flux
41 Essex Street
New York City
212 619 33 56
Saturday March 7th, 7:30PM
e-flux
41 Essex Street
New York City
212 619 33 56
At their best, art journals constitute a site of production operating in the overlap between the museum, the academy, and the artist’s studio. Each publication views the artistic field from a slightly different angle and in turn projects that vision back onto it. Having a rather short life span (about 3-5 years on average), they leave behind a rather unique document of a particular moment in thinking about art amongst a specific group of contributors and readers.
How do art journals reflect what is currently available or possible in terms of content and distribution?
What forms of practice or engagement do they propose?
And how do they produce and reflect readerships?
And, at the end of the day, why produce or publish (an art journal)?
Participants: Stuart Bailey (dot dot dot), AA Bronson (Printed Matter), K8 Hardy (LTTR), Gareth James (Scorched Earth), Silvia Kolbowski (October), Sina Najafi (Cabinet), Sara G. Rafferty (North Drive Press, former editor), Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle & Brian Kuan Wood (e-flux journal)
e-flux journal issue #4
In her extensive essay on Duchamp’s self-conscious studio practice, Elena Filipovic discusses how the artist treated objects in his studio as “objects of contemplation” while also remaining highly skeptical of public exhibitions: “All exhibitions of painting or sculpture make me ill. And I’d rather not be involved in them.” And yet when he did participate, he would attempt to absorb the entire exhibition into his own artwork. (see full essay here)
In Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Boris Groys considers the re-emergence of religion as a force that compels and explains the increasingly private, sovereign spaces of contemporary image production and proliferation. Where the Enlightenment introduced ethical, political obligations to the public sphere, we now find a discussion around the spirit to be beneficial for understanding the increasingly sovereign spaces of the internet and digital culture. (see full essay here)
In The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art, Dieter Roelstraete questions whether an increasing tendency in art towards a historiographic mode might overemphasize romantic notions that truth lies buried in history. Perhaps an archaeological art of reenactments, reconstructions, and recoveries distracts from the more pressing issues of the present and the future.
(see full essay here)
In the first of a series of four comics, Michael Baers offers a short introduction to his upcoming series of comics for the journal and reflects upon his current state of exhaustion, quoting Deleuze: “The tired person has merely exhausted the realization, whereas the exhausted person exhausts the whole of the possible.” (see full essay here)
Silvia Kolbowski edits President Obama’s inauguration speech to “remove references to religion, the celebration of militarism, delusions of national power, the phantasmatic projection of enemies, the glorification of the struggles of the poor, the puritanical elevation of suffering, the erasure of difference, etc.” (see full essay here)
And Dieter Lesage responds to Irit Rogoff and Tom Holert’s recent contributions to this journal on the role of the art academy, addressing the Bologna Process and its influence on art eduction throughout Europe. (see full essay here)