Maureen Callahan, “The Overpriced World of Bad Art,” New York Post, April 27, 2014 →.
Sarah Maslin Nir, “The Sidewalk Fruit Vendor Who Sold a $6.2 Million Banana for 25 Cents,” New York Times, November 27, 2024.
I have previously written critiques of the formal category of the ready-made, and of how, in the tradition of Taylorism, the category elides labor. See The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, particularly chapter 2. I ask for a fundamental upheaval of the term “ready-made” and instead propose the temporary substitute “unmade.”
I thank Carrie Nakamura for prompting the frame of visual references and for encouraging me to delve further into its specificities.
All you can think about is Joy James who said, “The philosopher-king is an enslaver or enforcer as well as a thinker” (Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal), and Frantz Fanon who wrote, “I say that philosophy has never saved anyone … If philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men” (Black Skin, White Masks).
This year, the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg in Halle will commemorate the five-hundred-year anniversary of the German Peasant War, in which Thomas Müntzer and thousands of other peasants revolted against feudal authority and religious wealth that had been expropriated from the people. Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien connect the tradition of peasant uprisings in Germany to the 1985 uprising in the Philippine city of Escalante. Camacho and Lien’s oeuvre charts an aesthetic practice that emanates from contextual depth and engagement with transnational social movements. See Camacho and Lien’s Offerings for Escalante.
Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, “Bleeding from the Waist,” in Postapocalyptic Self-Reflection, ed. Laura Preston and Tanja Widmann (Westphalie Verlag, 2019).
Sylvia Wynter’s 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” argues that the plantation—the site of chattel slavery—is the “plot” of capitalism, and that wherever there is capitalism, there will be traces of the plantation system. This framework is apt for all discussions concerning the supply chain.
