Issue #45 International Disco Latin

International Disco Latin

Hito Steyerl

2013_05_Mladen-Stilinovic_EnglishWEB.jpg
Issue #45
May 2013










Notes
1

Triple Canopy 16 (July 2012). See .

2

Alix Rule and David Levine, “International Art English,” Triple Canopy 16 (2012). See .

3

I have contributed extensively to e-flux journal in the past, thus losing any pretense to occupy any neutral and objective stance within the debate, and squarely positioning myself as a fully conscious coproducer of IAE spam.

4

See Taylor & Francis and other semi-monopolist pimps of publicly funded scholarly writing.

5

Tania Bruguera’s transgression against statistically correct English is, according to Rule and Levine, the excessive use of the word “reality.” Now, I am not surprised that “reality” doesn’t show up very often in the BNC, since over the past few decades the UK has been more obsessed with “realty.” However, to make the word “reality” a key term of a supposedly pornographic language is taking its denial a bit far.

6

Mladen Stilinovic, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, 1994–6. Embroidery on banner.

7

In private conversation.

8

In Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). I am fast-forwarding here over an intriguing branch of scholarship that investigates translation within globalization. Some of the findings of this scholarship are available at . The website’s researchers and the practitioners of this scholarship include writers like Gayatri Spivak, Jon Solomon, Boris Buden, Rosi Braidotti, Antonella Corsani, and Stefan Nowotny, among many other equally notable thinkers. Their research deals with power, language, and neoliberal globalization, often using case studies, such as refugee struggles, or specific angles on historical decolonization. This scholarship highlights the role of minor, emerging, and submerged languages in contemporary political realities. Ah! There goes the r-word again. X-rate this footnote!

9

Mostafa Heddaya, “When Artspeak Masks Oppression,” hyperallergic.com, March 6, 2013. See .

10

See the GulfLabor public statement at , and the Guggenheim’s response at .

11

See, for instance .

12

This is my fault, sorry! Working in this system also enables me to partially disregard the rules of “correct” English writing, which full freelancers might admittedly have to put up with to stay in the market.

13

Thanks to Joshua Decter, Richard Frater, Janus Hom, Martyn Reynolds, Christoph Schäfer, Zoran Terzic, and others for extensively debating this issue in private conversation with me. Nina Power helpfully suggested to rename artspeak as “bollocks,” with which I entirely agree, as in “International Disco Bollocks.”