Peggy Lee’s disquieting 1969 hit song, with its expression of neverending lack, echoes on through a disenchanted world. A German antifascist philosopher laments the uprootedness and indeterminacy of the postwar condition—the scratch that can’t quite be itched. Ruins abound in contemporary art and curation as so many bits of shrapnel lodged in the culture. Fantasies of lost homelands and vague feelings of saudade for a world gone by are instrumentalized by contemporary reactionaries and neoreacti...
Index #5
We are all rightly suspicious of the categorical impulse that seeks to sort things out—once and for all. Yet, as we each entropically accumulate objects (in our homes and on our hard drives), it gets hard to manage without some kind of taxonomy. This ambivalence is well captured by an artist such as Bas Jan Ader, whose film Primary time (1974) consists of a cropped figure neurotically arranging and rearranging a bouquet of "ower stems according to the primary cadmiums we might associate with a classic Piet Mondrian (first red, then yellow, then white).
This fifth issue of the e-flux Index, containing the whole breadth of pieces published by e-flux.com in August and September 2024, comprises nine new categories of its own. These are titled: Is That All There Is?; What a Body Can Do; The Physicists’ Laugh; Dens, clubs, hives, and cells; The Tourist; Flickers; Promethean Shame; Proxies; and Inextinguishable Fires. In the exploratory spirit of Jan Ader, more than that of Carl Linnaeus, each of these categories represents an attempt at daisy cutting samples from the dynamic, complex meadow of discourse across the arts, architecture, education, theory, and politics. This deviant taxonomy is not designed to reduce or abstract away from the complexity of critical discourse and artistic activity in the present moment, but rather to do justice to this very heterogeneity.
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9 ChaptersMarch 2025
Is That All There Is?
With: Hunter Bolin, Boris Groys, R.H. Lossin, Yuk Hui, Xenia Benivolski, Elena Vogman and Pramodha Weerasekera
What a Body Can Do
With: Evan Calder Williams, Aubrey Knox, Kenny Fries, Thotti, Jörg Heiser and Boris Groys
Idle bodies. Bodies at work. Bodies subjected to micromanagement, and those that resist them. Museums were constructed for “minds on legs” needing neither hydration nor rest breaks, yet are now subject to artistic interventions for rehumanizing these spaces. A disability arts movement breaks with the stigma of “the poor cripple.” A film theorist explores the tactile and haptic dimensions of the moving image, and the disembodiment of its chthonic spectators. In the political domain, rhetorical #g...
The Physicists’ Laugh
With: Luis Camnitzer, Barbara Hammer, María Iñigo Clavo, Ina Valkanova and Artavazd Peleshyan
A peek under the microscope at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). How is its dominance ensured through sidelining certain questions? A growing movement of Indigenous writers and artists counters the occidental dismissal of ancestral and Indigenous knowledge production with a call for an “ecology of the world,” and for greater epistemic diversity. One experimental filmmaker analogizes her preferred approach to queer filmmaking according to the particle–wave duality of quant...
Dens, clubs, hives, and cells
With: Harry Burke, Ana María Gómez López, Sol Perez-Martinez, Precarious Workers Brigade and Lauren van Haaften-Schick
Is there an art to not being governed (like that)? One recent biennale finds an answer in the self-governing pirate settlements of Madagascar. Elsewhere, radical 1970s pedagogues and the “self-avowed magicians” of the Amsterdam counterculture alike suggested the answer might be found in a new style of educational relationship to our environments. For the young protestors of the 2010s UK student movement the art of not being governed was driven home under truncheon blows: inside the “pedagogy of ...
The Tourist
With: Debra Lennard, Andrea González Garrán, Sanna Almajedi, Juan José Santos, Rouzbeh Akhbari, Coco Fusco, Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, Julio Llópiz Casal, Hamlet Lavastida, Celia Irina González and Solveig Font
Tourists go home! What is at stake in fantasies of smooth, frictionless travel? Of being “bound to nothing speci#c?” Europeans continue to dream of a cross-border Transhelvetican Canal connecting the Rhine to the Rhône, while in Central Asia ambitious “sanction-proof” maritime routes like the International North–South Transit Corridor (INSTC) rub up against the obstructions of geopolitical reality. Lyrical, participatory artworks such as David Medalla’s Stitch in Time celebrate the chance and pa...
Flickers
With: Dehlia Hannah, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Maya Deren, Bernard Stiegler, Irit Rogoff, Virginia Woolf and Furqat Palvan-Zade
The lights keep going on and off. To meet the reductions in European energy consumption necessary to avoid accelerating climate catastrophe, a winking “modest proposal” suggests engineering blackouts to “unplug Frankenstein’s monster.” Meanwhile under wartime conditions of actually existing involuntary power shortages, shadows begin to appear in the work of Ukrainian artists. Elsewhere, in her critique of the early cinema, a pioneering Modernist writer finds herself fighting in the dark with the...
Promethean Shame
With: Jonas Staal, Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich, Isobel Harbison, Henk Slager, Jacob Dreyer and Stephanie Sherman
“Après moi, le déluge” (after me, the flood)—so drawled Louis XV, in a remark that has come to embody the shorttermist indifference of privileged ruling classes then and now. Here we find imperial hubris, colonial overreach, and the unforeseen consequences of unilateral terraforming. Starting from the corpse of an early East India Company colonist rotting on the shore of Ascension Island, we elsewhere journey to the ruins of the Ford Motor Companies rubber plantations in the Amazon jungle, and e...
Proxies
With: Trevor Paglen, Orit Gat, Gary Zhexi Zhang and Vijay Masharani
The post-truth is out there, and everything is not quite what it seems. In the first part of a major investigation, we learn of a community of Ufologists coaxed into mania by a sustained secret programme of psychological operations (psy-ops) that spread throughout the 1980s. In New York, an exhibition of photographs also brings our gaze to enormous telescopes in Northern California desperately scouring the universe for signs we are not alone. Something unexpected meanwhile lurks behind the twee ...
Inextinguishable Fires
With: Étienne Balibar, Sophie Lewis, Leo Goldsmith, Naeem Mohaiemen, Azadeh Mashayekhi, Rend Beiruti and Nathan Brown
As Brecht wrote in Mother Courage: war always finds a way. What can be recovered from the rubble of our increasingly bellicose historical moment? A French philosopher here eloquently establishes the “universal cause” of a unilateral ceasefire to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Elsewhere, in a city where hostilities have now ended, we read of how urban development has been recalibrated by the experience of thirty years of conflict. In New York, Harun Farocki’s unflinching analysis of modern...