When the committee of the Commune met—it was a heterogeneous committee, composed of old people, people who should have had a higher and more complex experience but who, like all old people, had only a different experience—when the committee met, attention naturally fell on the pipe. The clue. But what the devil, who knew anything about it! And then a clue is a clue and that’s it! An element of particular knowledge, not a foretaste of an exhaustive knowledge of the event.

The art of modernism, the avant-garde, and conceptual practice inherently demonstrate an awareness that art sublates itself for the sake of counter-aesthetic reconsideration. Such self-destruction is viewed as an inevitable turning point in social history. However, post-conceptual contemporary practice forgets about that turn and often makes no effort to specify why its nonartistic practices should reconfirm themselves on the territory of art.

Some may be surprised that cultural workers are willing to operate in the shadow art world, contributing to the entrenchment or expansion of empire. But there is another more critical question: Are game developers and science-fiction artists merely predicting the wars of the future, or are they actually writing those wars into existence?

“Sexual pleasure and sexual modes are not the question,” Wittig noted in 1989. For the French philosopher, who lived from 1935 to 2003 and wrote both fiction and nonfiction, heterosexuality is not a name for a kind of human desire at all. For her, pleasureful things are, by definition, not heterosexual—and heterosex may or may not entail having sex. Instead, “heterosex” is the name of a phallocentric social contract that humanity must violently overcome if it ever wants to be free.

Rather than depicting dramatic moments of struggle like the riot or the strike, Native Son investigates the nearly imperceptible shifts that occur in everyday battles that precede and inform those moments, the basic building blocks of a revolution, and the individual subjectivities that compose and carry it out.

In moments of constraint, uncertainty, or political crisis, the relationship between the histories of football and art become visible. Artistic modalities have refunctioned the game, smuggling new forms of politics and aesthetics into its spaces, transforming matches, terraces, and stadiums. Tactical innovations, supporter culture, grassroots organizing, and artistic experimentation have regularly converged to make football not merely a spectacle, but a medium through which new forms of life, solidarity, and resistance might be rehearsed.

If we think of modern African artists as agents of cultural translation who enunciated modernist positions through appeals to Indigenous identities, contemporary African artists are transnational and agentic actors who engage with the global art world through various modalities. We should be interested in how their art reflects an expanded awareness of their location in Africa, if they live and work there, or in the Euro-American contexts that they often relocate to in an effort to gain greater visibility for their work.