Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Paul Chan

This empty center, formed inside the cast of historical and existential experiences that has settled and hardened into the likeness of an identity, is neither seen nor heard, but felt, like cold wind against the skin. Within this void emanates the spectral presence of the unfinished, the half-formed, and the unimagined, as a reminder of just how far one is from being complete and wholly self-sufficient. And it is only through social bonds that this essential incompleteness becomes exposed as the secret all singular beings share, and must stubbornly hold onto, in order to remain uniquely and fully present in the world.

Diedrich Diederichsen

I pick up a musical instrument and produce a sequence of tones. These tones enchant my surroundings and me as I produce them. At some point I grow tired, the tones cease, and the enchantment passes. My favorite quotation about this phenomenon can be heard on the Radio Hilversum recording of Eric Dolphy’s last concert, which took place in 1964, just before he died because no one could treat his particular type of diabetes, one that occurs only in people of African descent. Dolphy said: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it again.” What I produced has vanished without a trace; it created no value—nor, however, did it depend on a providential nature and the miracles of the land of milk and honey. It was me.

Liam Gillick

It requires precise and close observation of the production processes involved in order to differentiate between knowledge workers and current artists. If the question “Why work?” is the original question of current art, it is necessary, in order to counter the accusation that artists are in thrall to processes of capitalization beyond them, to look at a number of the key issues around control.

Hu Fang

I hate the idea of performing. That’s why I call myself an Artist of Life.

Bilal Khbeiz

He spent the last two decades of his life in freefall. During those years, he tried to invite attention to his private life and to his body. Many saw objectionable things in him despite the fact that he achieved unequalled fame as a black man in racism-plagued America. He even skinned himself, literally, to a point where he was more white than white. The boy who sang for the loss of his loved one seemed in his later years asexual. The consummate performer, a firecracker on stage, spent his last days in a pile of shaved skin and bone and the muscular remains of memories.

Sven Lütticken

Even Constructivist forays into production in the early 1920s depended on a specialist sphere of practice and discourse whose confines they sought to escape—a sphere that would soon be destroyed by Stalin. On the other hand, a properly reflexive work of art can never be only about its status as art, about “art itself.”

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

In opposition to the most common symptom of the colonized—the belatedness with which one’s own culture projects itself as an echo of the grand narratives—these particular artistic engagements are witnesses furthermore to the importance of documenting and disseminating the neglected chapters of art history. It might seem that the role of the artist and that of the museum have changed places. The objective of this (self-)historicizing artistic strategy is to record the parallel histories that are subjectively preserved and exist as the fragments of memories and semi-forgotten oral traditions.

Dieter Roelstraete

In a recent conversation with a writing and curating colleague, we both agreed that a strange, and strangely immobilizing, mist had descended upon our little pocket of this world—a fog seemed to have enveloped the hearts and minds of those customarily expected to both shape the present (if only in theory) and imagine the future (if only in practice). The resulting experience of disorientation is nothing new, of course, but perhaps the thickness of this particular miasma is such that we really have no idea where we’re going anymore.

Anton Vidokle

Curatorial work is a profession, and people working in the field are not free agents but are rather employed to perform a task on behalf of an institution or a client. It’s a job, both for those affiliated with institutions and for so-called independent curators. With the job come institutional power, a degree of security, and a mandate for a certain range of activity, which may involve a certain sense of institutional authorship, but emphatically, to my mind, does not include artistic claim to the artwork on which this activity is predicated.

Billed as a variety show, the program notes for the “Clifford Irving Show” posed the following question: “Where do authors go when characters interrupt the story?” This question affirms that a character is not an author’s invention, but has agency that determines plot, a commonplace notion that is repeatedly borne out in literature, as well as in autobiography, as you well know.