Herman Melville, Mobu-Dick: or, the Whale (Waking Lion Press, 2009), 7.
See the interview with Marcel Duchamp following his "retirement" from making art.
Stephen Wright, "Users and Usership of Art: Challenging Expert Culture" (2007), transform, →.
Rancière's definition of the police is cited by Wright, ibid.
Wright's text does not focus as much on the artist's troubled identity as on artistic reception; I have therefore taken some liberties in applying his thinking to the question of practice itself.
For more about OWS and the concept of the archive, see my forthcoming text "Occupology, Swarmology, Whateverology: the city of (dis)order versus the people's archive," in the online version of Art Journal. And about the concept of art's missing mass, see my book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011).
I am referring here to Karl Marx's oft-quoted remark from The German Ideology that "in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."
For an excellent reference to this process of corporatized education, see Edufactory Journal, →.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke UP Books, 2009), xiii & 1.
Ibid, 4.
Jane Bennett is not the first thinker to take materiality and its affect on art, science, or politics seriously. Certainly Theodor Adorno's concept of negative dialectics grapples with the category of nonidentity, applying it not only to the realm of ontology, but also to aesthetics, and in ways that exceed in their critical force such currently fashionable writers as Jacques Rancière. But Bennett explicitly distances herself from this approach, arguing that Adorno still holds out hope of reconciling the unspeakable otherness of things with human knowledge (Ibid, 14), and that Rancière admits only those who can engage in human discourse into the realm of political participation, thus leaving aside other beings, forces, animals, and things (Ibid, 106). By contrast, Bennett's vibrant matter acknowledges the full-on agency of the non-human in itself, without need for human definition, acceptance, instrumentality, or intervention. Still, I suspect that despite her resistance to Marxism, Bennett's ideas are strangely closer to those of Walter Benjamin, perhaps more so that she might acknowledge. I am thinking here of Benjamin's positive appraisal of surrealist photography in which everyday things dulled by familiarity reassert themselves through uncanny estrangement. But also his interest in the politics of dreaming and fantasy, let's call this the vibrancy of the historical unconscious, or of the archive from below.
All quotes are from Doug Ashford and Angelo Bellfatto, "Sometimes We Say Hopes, or When We Want to Say Hopes, or Wishes, or Aspirations," in Interiors (Bard CCS and Sternberg Press, forthcoming), originally presented as a conversation at The New Museum, April 29-30, 2011.
Ibid.
Aleksandra S. Shatskikh, Vitebsk: the Life of Art (Yale UP, 2007), 137.
See →.
Nicholas Mirzoeff writes about an attempt to "occupy" the recent UN Climate Change Convention in Durbin, South Africa by indigenous people who call for the "decolonization of the atmosphere," a tacit recognition of the planet's rights, in "Occupy Climate Change," Occupy! Gazette 3 (December 15, 2011): 32, 34.