Gabriel Winant, “Exit Right,” Dissent, November 8, 2024 →.
Winant, “Exit Right.”
See for instance Volksfronten/Popular Fronts: Art and Populism in an Era of Culture Wars, ed. Ekaterina Degot and David Riff (Hatje Cantz, 2019).
Andrea Fraser, “Performance or Enactment,” in Performing the Sentence, eds. Carola Dertnig and Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein (Sternberg Press, 2014), 123.
Fraser, “Performance or Enactment,” 123–24.
It should be noted that the English “proposition” has several meanings that blend into each other quite easily, ranging from the logical and grammatical to practically any kind of proposal. When BAK published online texts in Dutch about its Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, “proposition” was translated not as “propositie” but as “voorstel” (proposal). In other contexts, “proposition” can be rendered in Dutch as “stelling” (also translatable as “statement,” “claim,” or “thesis”).
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press, 1975), 52.
Terry Smith and Mary Kelly, “A Conversation about Conceptual Art, Subjectivity, and the Post-Partum Document” (1999), in Smith, One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, ed. Robert Bailey (Duke University Press, 2017), 86.
Terry Smith, “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art,” e-flux journal no. 29 (November 2011) →.
Nizan Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017), 123.
Mel Ramsden, “On Practice,” The Fox, no. 1 (1975).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (Free Press, 1978), 25, 184, 186.
Maria Hlavajova, “Editors’ Note,” in Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, ed. Hlavajova and Wietske Maas (BAK and MIT Press, 2019), 10–11.
Foucault’s preface to Anti-Oedipus, quoted in Hlavajova, “Editor’s Note,” 11.
See Inflexions, the journal affiliated with SenseLab →.
“How Do You Make Yourself A Proposition? A Whitehead Laboratory—Dec 1–3 2016,” SenseLab – 3e →.
Sher Doruff, “Introduction: On the Potential of Fielding the Proposition,” Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts (DAS Publishing, 2021), 21.
Doruff, “Introduction,” 21–22.
Constant Nieuwenhuys, “Manifest,” Reflex, no. 1 (1948).
Asger Jorn, “Against Functionalism,” Internationale Situationniste, no. 1 (June 1958); Guy Debord, “Remarques sur le concept d’art experimental” (1957), in Textes et documents situationistes 1957–1960, ed. Gérard Berréby (Allia, 2004).
Constant, “De dialektiek van het experiment” (The Dialectic of the Experiment), in Constant, exh. cat. (Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1965). English translation →.
See Deserting from the Culture Wars, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken (MIT Press, 2020).
Rancière famously opposed the poetic or representative regime of the arts (revolving around “a classification of ways of doing and making”) with the aesthetic regime (“based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products”). Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Continuum, 2004), 22.
One crucial step beyond fact-checking is the tracing of networks of unchecked wealth and power, for instance as performed by the Reactionary International research consortium →. Such projects must themselves be embedded in movements that propose non-fascist counter-propositions.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 184.
Alberto Toscano, “The Culture of Abstraction,” Theory, Culture & Society 25 no. 4 (2008): 58.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 40.
Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Free Press, 1966), 99.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Free Press, 1967), 159.
See also Sven Lütticken, “Posthuman Prehistory,” in Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Sternberg Press, 2017).
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 185–86.
One pertinent example is the long-running exhibition series “Past Disquiet” (2016–present), with recent iterations at the Palais de Tokyo and Framer Framed.
See, with a focus on Berlin and Germany, Emily Dische-Becker and Julia Bosson, “The Conditions for Inner Exile,” Diasporist, December 19, 2024 →.
On countercommunities, see Daniel Loick, Die Überlegenheit der Unterlegenen: Eine Theorie der Gegengemeinschaften (Suhrkamp, 2024).
Not Surprised Collective, “Stedelijk Museum Fails to Loan Artwork by Ahmet Öğüt to Protect Students in Amsterdam,” Creative Reset (blog), Institute of Network Cultures, June 28, 2024 →.
The most widely circulated version of this story is in Herzen’s autobiography My Past and Thoughts; see Dwight Macdonald’s abridged English version, trans. Constance Garnett (Knopf, 1973), 568. Herzen knew Bakunin but was not present in Dresden in 1849, and there is no trace of the story in contemporaneous correspondence between the two.
Guy Debord, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art” (1963), trans. Ken Knabb, Libcom →. In the 1970s, Debord would be involved in the French publication of Bakunin’s collected works through the publisher Champ Libre.
“Agreement of Transfer of the Work of Art Bakunin’s Barricade,” cargocollective.com →.
For documentation of protests at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (which did not involve any barricades, but largely revolved around a Palestine monument that kept being torn down), see the volume Between Palestine and Us: Testimonies of the 2024 Student Uprising in Amsterdam (Spookstad, 2025).
Ahmet Öğüt, “Updated Public Statement,” ahmetogut.com, August 2024 →. See also the artist’s further statement from October 2024, expressing disappointment with the museum’s stance insofar as it was “completely against the core idea behind the Bakunin’s Barricade, to the point that as an artist, I have no option but to publicly demand the removal of my work from the collection display. Though the Museum legally owns the work, I expect it to respect both the integrity of the artwork and my role as its author.”
See Sven Lütticken, “Organizational Aesthetics: On Certain Practices and Genealogies,” in October, no. 183 (Winter 2023).
Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Continuum, 2010), 133. Rancière’s account of art under the aesthetic regime combines conceptual cogency and analytical nuance with such moments of closure derived from, in this case, a reductive and totalizing account of the nature of art’s political promise.
Andrea Fraser, “The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram,” e-flux notes, October 17, 2024 →.
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (Routledge, 2006), 76–77.
Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 37.
Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić, Toward a Transindividual Self: A Study in Social Dramaturgy (Archive Books, 2022), 262.
See Dora García: Inserts in Real Time. Performance Work 2000–2023 (M HKA and K. Verlag, 2023).
A prescient example was the late Mieke van der Voort’s General Estates (2008–9), in which players became denizens of a fictional island and were asked to assume different roles as inhabitants in a “general state” of collective crisis.
The exercise, titled “Juggling Participation: Power-over, Power-to and Power-with,” was organized as part of a PhDArts colloquium, November 22, 2024 →.
See Angela M. Bartholomew and Steyn Bergs, “Tactics of Mischief—From Image to Infrastructure: Interview with David Garcia,” Kunstlicht, no. 38 (2017).
Jonas Staal, Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (MIT Press, 2024). The Climate Propagandas Congregation of December 14–15, 2024 was effectively the closing event of BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, led by Maria Hlavajova, which has been defunded. Starting in 2025, BAK continues as BAK Basecamp, or Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries, with Jeanne van Heeswijk as artistic director.
W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 no. 3 (1946): 469.
