Did the descent of the standard film camera lenses from Renaissance Western monocular perspective place early Muslim filmmakers at a disadvantage when it came to a genuine formal contribution in the medium of cinema, since these filmmakers came from a tradition that until only a century or so ago (the age of cinema) was, especially in its Arabic regions, still resistant to, rather than ignorant of, Renaissance perspective? Cinema would appear to disadvantage Muslim filmmakers steeped in...
Issue #48
“Pieces of the Planet” Issue One
October 2013
With:
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Jalal Toufic, Oxana Timofeeva, Hu Fang, Walid Raad, Walter Benjamin, Rijin Sahakian, and Home Workspace Program Participants
Once there was an idea of a vast human family ready to realize humanistic ideals and internationalist partnerships like the United Nations, and some people called it Globalism. But then the idea got bundled with a way of carrying the sentiment of internationalism over to economics, turning jurisdictional partnerships and trade relations into pretty much the same thing. And its name sounds less like a principle than a process—a making global, a globalization of the earth. And since at least...
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9 Essays
October 2013
This is a script for a film we shot last summer in Russia and Kazakhstan. The film is still being edited. The script is comprised of excerpts from poems, philosophical texts, scientific writings, academic papers, and historical studies by and about Cosmo-Immortalists , a surge of thinking that emerged in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It linked the Enlightenment with Russian Orthodox and Eastern philosophical traditions to create an idiosyncratically concrete...
The title of this essay paraphrases the famous expression “Socialism with a human face,” which refers back to 1968, to the events in Czechoslovakia known as the Prague Spring, but also to the Soviet 1980s, the time of the late Soviet Union prior to perestroika, when the idea of changing the very nature of so-called “really existing socialism” from the inside according to human/democratic values was still popular among dissidents. Apparently, it was not a renewed and more refined socialism,...
立春 Lìchūn: Start of Spring
The cat is too clean to want to be human.
Dear Navigator,
I don’t know your real name, but I’m sure “Navigator” is an appropriate substitute that both reflects the place where I hold you in my heart and conveys the respect I’ve silently maintained for you these many years. If you permit, I’d like to continue addressing you by this name. Actually, I hear we’re almost the same age, and this makes me all the more eager for us to share a...
A few years ago, in November 2007 to be precise, I started a project on the history of the arts in the Arab world. I remember the month because I’d received a phone call that month from a woman by the same name.
November calls and asks me whether I am interested in joining a retirement plan just for artists, something she referred to as the Artist Pension Trust.
Until that point, I’d not even heard of retirement funds just for artists and I’d certainly not heard of the Artist...
I have no desire to disparage American art, which is a child, and therefore merits being loved and protected.
—Andre Villebeuf in Gringorie, Paris
Those who have been to the United States bring back nothing from visiting American museums but memories of Italian and French works found there.
—Lucie Mazauric in Vendredi, Paris
Critic Clement Greenberg tells the story of American avant-garde art in the years since World War II—a time when New York school painting and...
We are always happy when we receive responses to the essays we publish in e-flux journal that are as rigorous as Rijin Sahakian's excellent reply to Nato Thompson's “The Insurgents, Part 1: Community-Based Practice as Military Methodology.” It should be pointed out that Sahakian refers here only to the first part of Thompson's essay, and the second part will be published in our November issue. It is also worth mentioning that neither the author nor e-flux advocate the activities of US...
This issue of e-flux journal is developed in parallel with Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut, led this coming year by Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle as an experimental school open to all. The program’s opening in September was postponed due to the anticipated US strike against Assad’s forces in Syria and the deterioration of security in Lebanon that would have followed. However, the strike never materialized and a number of local and international students arrived in...