Editors’ letter
The recent publication by TIME magazine of its “100 most influential people in art” illustrates a broader trend, namely the transformation of publishers into something like event production companies. Magazines in this model serve less as forums for critical discourse than as vehicles through which to publicize their diversified income streams. Celebrating high-profile individuals who can be relied upon to communicate the honor to their followers (or have galleries to do it for them) is an efficient means of embellishing publishers’ brands and promoting the sponsored events (like the “TIME100 Impact Dinner” due to take place next week) on which they are increasingly dependent.
This isn’t to cast the first stone. All publishers need to make money, the world is changing, and there are always conflicts (e-flux Criticism, following an older model, often covers exhibitions at the same institutions that take out the exhibition announcements on which it depends for revenue, for instance). But the example does lay bare the extent to which the cultural cache that has accrued to “legacy” publications over decades of journalistic excellence and critical independence is presently being extracted to substantiate (or at least lend a veneer to) commercial activities that bear little relation to its original mission. Again, the exchange of cultural for financial capital is hardly a new development. The question is whether the former is being replenished—by the commissioning of new writing, by the development of new ideas and perspectives—at the same pace at which it is being extracted. This varies, it is fair to say, from one publication to the next.
The most obvious indicator of its continued health (writes this editor) is the publication’s editorial independence, the separation of its opinions from its revenues. Much else can in that case be forgiven. So it might be worth restating what editorial independence means to us, by reference to the diversely opinionated reviews and features that e-flux Criticism has recently published. In giving a platform to different—sometimes conflicting—takes on different artists and exhibitions, the aim is not to develop a perfectly consistent editorial line that aligns with the organization’s brand but instead to constantly challenge and unsettle it.
This involves publishing reviews that might not only contradict the opinions of the editors (whose job is to defend the freedom of writers to articulate their position rather than impose their own), but also be damaging to the short-term commercial interests of the publication (while preserving the reputation for independence that brings people to its pages in the first place). And this also involves challenging rather than merely reinforcing the convictions of its readers, who might by those means be forced to articulate better defenses of their own beliefs (or change them). That is the aim, at least. Because if publications don’t preserve that freedom, we risk a sealed and stagnant intellectual culture, from which dissenting voices are excluded in favor of mutual back-slapping. As the world outside that circle burns.
Recent e-flux Criticism
In September, we published Gökcan Demirkazik on how the Berlin staging of the nomadic Kyiv Biennial differed from prior iterations, and whether the comparisons it drew between a “Middle East of Europe” and conflict zones elsewhere were warranted. In doing so he praised the attempts of both artists and curators to speak by allusion and analogy, while drawing attention to the invisible but unignorable constraints on their freedom.
Also reflecting on the relations of institutional art to freedom of speech and solidarity, an essay by Patrick Langley—excerpted from the publication Korean Biennials Today—traced the country’s remarkably rich (and deeply political) history of biennials from the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s through to the unsettled present. Those tensions were apparent at the Gwangju Biennale, which opened this month amid furor over the withdrawal of China in protest at the participation of Taiwan. Starting out from the historic association of Gwangju with popular resistance, Stephanie Bailey admired the exhibition’s reflections on how change might be effected at various speeds and scales. A few hundred miles south, the concurrent Busan Biennale—with a strong focus on sound art—was noisier, messier, and more explicit in its model for a dissonant politics, writes Adeline Chia.
Quinn Latimer, meanwhile, relished the disobedience and desire at the heart of Carlos Motta’s rebellious take on nonconforming bodies and the systems that would subjugate them, seeing in it a template for unruly culture. At the conclusion of a year-long program at MASP dedicated to reframing the histories of Latin American art, Juan José Santos observed the urgent need to maintain and develop transnational cultural identities as xenophobic nationalism gains ground, in Brazil and elsewhere.
An ascendent fascism loomed over an exhibition of photographs taken by the writer Ella Maillart during her travels through Asia in the years preceding World War II. In their combination of excitement and fear, love and despair, these images documented their own changing time even as they speak to ours, wrote Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. The curious operations of time—and how images might cut across or through it—have long inspired the work of Raqs Media Collective. On the occasion of the collective’s first major retrospective in their native India for over a decade—at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation—Kamayani Sharma considered their unique combination of mysticism with historical consciousness.
These same concerns run through an exhibition set in a Hamburg church burnt out during the Allied firebombing. Given the times we are living through, wrote Jesi Khadivi, it is perhaps unsurprising that artists should be preoccupied with both the destructive and the regenerative properties of fire. A blockbuster exhibition by Tomás Saraceno looked to the nonhuman world for models of culture and community that might at least mitigate the unfolding catastrophes. Mitch Speed admired the idea, but questioned the execution.
In Tokyo, Chris Fite-Wassilak wished that a collaboration between the architect Jun Aoki and the storied minimalist Richard Tuttle might have been a little more spectacular to meet the demands of the day. Reporting on an annual festival pairing Vienna’s galleries with international curators, George MacBeth found much to appreciate but likewise asks, in respect of the curatorial theme, what exactly “LOVE” has to do with it.
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