Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Bernardo Ortiz Campos

This text is an essay, and as such, it is also an exercise in speculation. To speculate here means to take the following question seriously: why would an art magazine only publish photographs in black and white?

Adam Kleinman

This could be one of the ways in which men write history; however, this mode is still bound to the exigencies of chance, contingency, and context, which is to say that there is no super-agency to guarantee outcomes. One possible way to reject this system would be to quite literally break it, attacking the object’s physical substance itself. Here though, instead of literary criticism, we would have the violence of iconoclasm. On the other hand, if it were possible to break time, then the idea of an object standing up to time’s test would be much more complex.

Elisabeth Lebovici

That’s the whole point of selecting artists for a show. To me, an exhibition means to exclude. Some say that an exhibition is about selecting, about inclusion, but not for me. This principle has enabled me to reassemble the pieces of a history that is not a canonical one. In doing that, I’ve attempted to place our reading of the present into question.

Sven Lütticken

Rather than building a wall between art and thingness, the work of art should be analyzed as just such a sci-fi monster. If objects are named and categorized, part of a system of objects, thingness is resistant to such ordered objecthood. If we grant that a work of art is both more and less than other types of things, this should not be regarded as an incentive to exacerbate and fetishize those differences, but rather as a point of departure for analyzing the complex interrelationships of artworks with these other things—and for examining certain works of art as problematizing and transforming this very relationship.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

The specific cases that will help us understand the objectives and mechanisms of archiving—not only in the former Eastern Bloc but also in the Middle East and in South America—typically employ the notion of the archive as a form, and find in this undertaking an argument for declaring the museum and the archive to be synonymous.

Monika Szewczyk

For what follows, I would like to offer a simpler working definition of realism so as to carve out some space to consider the reality of work and the prescient evocation of distance from China in Sekula’s fable. It might sound dogmatic or Marxist or even Maoist, but I’ll have to take my chances: let us understand realism as the highlighting of contradictions that govern the world. So I’m working here, working on a hunch: the general avarice towards work in the art world forestalls any possibility of working through these contradictions. As a result, we may be stuck in a loop, enslaved to an idea of not working that all too quickly exhausts the real potential of art.