This summer issue of e-flux journal examines the shifting relationship between theory and art over the past thirty years. On the issue’s cover, a satirical ode to aesthetic obedience under socialist realism provokes the question: When the horizon of emancipation once promised by critical reflection becomes merely the contours traced by the muse, what shadows are we now retracing when we make, curate, or write about art? Across the issue, contributors explore how theoretical frameworks have been mobilized—at times fruitfully, at times cynically—within contemporary artistic practices. As dominant paradigms of critique have waned, “theory” has come to stand in for politics, history, mediation, and even form itself.
To make art has always been to engage in a constant play between intuition and intellect, to disrupt artificial separations between “mental” and “manual” labor, productive and reproductive, fine arts and craft, and to engage in theoretical practice. It is with global, financialized capitalism, however, that we more clearly see forms of production become part of “creative” capitalist populism. When contemporary art is research-based or relates to concrete political relationships, it often relies on theoretical modes that are strained in the face of the contradictions of artistic discourse—for example, by institutional demands to be both accessible and challenging, familiar yet vanguardist. In place of a robust theoretical framework or an effective model for concrete action, we may encounter a rote reliance on familiar jargon, names, and claims vaguely referencing bodies of critical work. Is the wall label its own type of theory, or just a caption to a post? Is contemporary art post-historical, or one of the few locations where history can be named beyond enemy lines? Are we (still) working too much, and (still) doing so under regimes of “creative” production?
More than two decades after “Global Conceptualism,” Luis Camnitzer reflects on the landmark 1999 exhibition that he curated with Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, examining what it revealed about the distinction between conceptual art as aesthetic style and conceptualism as survival strategy—particularly in authoritarian contexts where communication might take precedence over contemplation. For Camnitzer, the task that the exhibition set out to accomplish remains unrealized: How can conceptualism serve as a pedagogical tool to navigate the current conditions of algorithmic control and information overload? Conceptual art, as Eunsong Kim argues, is often the modality through which contemporary art exploits labor and perpetuates class warfare. Using Maurizio Cattelan’s recent gimmick of artist as “comedian”—exemplified by his work in which he taped a banana to a wall, which sold for $6.2 million—Kim reflects on how symbols (like bananas) become evacuated of their colonial histories within the art sector to serve aesthetic domination, arguing that aesthetic autonomy cannot exist without labor autonomy.
Postcolonial theories are made mainstream through academic and art institutions, writes Francisco Godoy Vega, but in the process they become filtered and domesticated. Looking at Indian subaltern studies, French négritude, and Latin American colonialism and how they’ve been translated and circulated in Spain, Vega argues that decolonial artistic practice emerges from the tension between institutional validation and community knowledge. Yet rather than remain stuck in the morass of a praxis that is yet to arrive, writes Jaleh Mansoor, we must push through, even if on the other side similar problems remain unsolved. Surveying how art and theory have been “entwined if not mutually constitutive” since at least the late nineteenth century—from Alphonse Allais and the Incoherents to recent conceptual experiments—Mansoor argues that artists have worked to theorize a social field that was otherwise difficult to conceive.
Also in this issue, we excerpt Marina Vishmidt’s forthcoming book Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition, an engagement with the relations between artistic and theoretical production as they relate to political struggle. Acting from the perspective of infrastructure rather than a singular institution, argues Vishmidt, is about conditions of possibility. “For the time being,” she writes, “the reflective shimmer of a politically radicalized art necessarily feeds off what it critiques, until, I would propose, it can learn to operate transversally with struggles in the infrastructure.” Dominique Routhier makes the case for a communist or abolitionist theory of art against shortsighted takes which confuse reactionary compliance for critical engagement. Against vexingly persistent elitist and transhistorical conceptions of art as existing outside the material conditions of its production, Routhier offers a “categorical” critique of art via abolitionist theory.
Silvia Federici is best known as an activist and theorist of radical feminism and the commons. But as Stevphen Shukaitis writes, it is little known that her PhD thesis was a profound engagement with György Lukács’s aesthetics. Written in the years following mass repression in Italy, when a cycle of revolutionary movements came to a close awaiting the next, Federici’s critique of Lukács serves as a “reminder that theory is not born fully formed but forged in struggle, often against the disciplines it seeks to inhabit,” writes Shukaitis. Isadora Neves Marques begins her text with a question begging for an answer: How to be responsible irresponsibly? She traces how the onus has been placed on artworks and the artists who make them to answer for financialized capitalism, biopolitics, and the turn to what Anna Kornbluh has theorized as “immediacy.”
Raqs Media Collective considers the hunger of the senses to reach outward and touch what cannot be seen, see what is beyond our reach, and theorize what is not yet known. Measurement becomes ecstatic and lyrical, a matter of tastes and bodies experimenting amidst the elasticity of time. Zairong Xiang looks at the modern toilet as the panoramic sign of our regular and fundamental functions. Both a founding gesture of conceptual art and among the many registers available to bodies in space, Xiang opens the aperture even further, until the universalizing gestures of modern fetishes cross progress with our own backsides. Finally, Liam Gillick hits the bars to debate the prompt for this issue, taking a night out in Midtown Manhattan as a measure of distances and collisions between labor and leisure, fed through art-historical territorial disputes and a phantasmagoria of attention.
