Fillip Issue 11 / Spring 2010
In Design And Crime (2002), Hal Foster wholeheartedly indicts contemporary design, criticizing its conflation of the aesthetic with the utilitarian, the object with the subject. For him, design appears to dangerously fuse art and life under its globally and commercially expansive reach. This fusion, he contends, discourages, if not prohibits altogether, the manufacture of an essential space, what he terms the “cultural running-room” necessary for a resistant and critical engagement with post-Fordist society, which is, from “jeans to genes,” so totally reified, so totally designed. While we might one day debate the specific merits and drawbacks of Foster’s polemic in the pages of Fillip, for now, it is simply enough to introduce his general argument, for it is within the arena of art and design that many of Fillip 11′s texts circulate, testifying to the relevance of Foster’s investigation eight years after the fact.Keith Bormuth’s treatment of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) for Fillip 11 lends striking support to Foster’s claims that design and capitalism make for an unholy and all-encompassing alliance, while Alexander Kitnick’s discussion of Sean Paul’s exhibition Sprachbarrierenstrasse identifies the critical potential in commingling art and design. For Kim Dhillon, however, it is the “interdisciplinary relationship between art and design [that] is blurred,” occasioning her close study of works that put text and typography into meaningful conversation with “graphic design, mass communications, and information” in the practices of Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Tauba Auerbach, and Frances Stark.
Inside this issue of Fillip, discussions on art and design further extend to the design of exhibitions, both as installations and as curated projects. Artist Haris Epaminonda and curator/director Jacob Fabricius, for instance, consider, among other subjects, the various formal approaches taken by the artist toward her book and installation series VOL. I, II & III, at the Malmö Konsthall in 2009. Gabrielle Moser and Milena Tomic, respectively, look toward two different exhibitions in Toronto, articulating what is, perhaps, “defective by design” in attempts to re-stage past performances and in representing the universal.
Fillip’s Spring 2010 issue also features writing by Lawrence Rinder on Jacques Rancière, painting, and politics, and Renato Rodrigues da Silva on the historical development of Neoconcretism in Brazil. Kate Armstrong, David Berridge, Jamie Hilder, Antonia Hirsch, Liz Park, Aaron Peck, and Arni Haraldsson also contribute long form essays and reviews to the issue. Michalis Pichler’s Statements on Appropriation, published in English and German, is both a study in artistic appropriation and an art work in text form.
Dear Silvia…July 2009, a pamphlet by Silvia Kolbowski inserted into Fillip 11, offers a month’s inventory of e-mail messages exhorting action on a wide variety of urgent social and environmental issues. This print piece compliments the artist’s audio work of the same name commissioned by Fillip for the Living Clay Art Writing Readings series at Whitechapel, London in 2009. More than a year into the “Yes We Can” presidency, Kolbowski’s project arrives just as we all begin to sense that we’ve heard that song before. Only this extended dance version of neoliberalism has a much younger, sexier beat, doubling as the soundtrack for President Obama, who is, according to Naomi Klein, capable of not only rebranding America, but of “resuscitat[ing] the neoliberal economic project when it was at death’s door.”
- Jeff Khonsary, Publisher & Kristina Lee Podesva, Editor
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Fillip gratefully acknowledges the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the City of Vancouver, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.
Image above:
Spring 2010
English/German 17 × 24.5 cm
, 120 pages
Design: The Future
www.fillip.ca
