Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums, eds. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddesieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 38–73. Text online at →.
Ibid.
Disclosure: With Andrea Fraser and Henk te Velde, I’m supervising Jonas Staal’s PhD at PhDarts in The Hague. My partner, Binna Choi, is director of Casco, which sponsored the Ideological Guide travel grants.
Both my partner and I were unable to install the guide app on our phones during our Biennale visit. I had finally bought my first ever smartphone, but didn’t have a working internet connection yet; my wife’s phone was too old and did not have the right operating system. I am thus writing on the basis of my use of the guide after the visit in order to arrive at some general considerations (that would no doubt have been enriched if I’d gotten the thing to work in Venice).
In use the term “anachronism” here in the non-pejorative sense, that of “anachrony,” as it has been developed by Georges Didi-Huberman.
See →.
On the absolutist state, see Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 2013 (1974)).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 (1983): 37–46.
The band moved its publishing entity to the Netherlands, thus avoiding having to pay tax on their songwriting royalties. See →.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin, 2005): 164.
Gopal Balakrishnan analyzes the situation in terms of a looming “stationary state”; Foster and McChesney in terms of stagnation. See Balakrishnan, “Speculations on the Stationary State,” New Left Review 59 (Sept.–Oct. 2009): 5–26; John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
Marina Vishmidt, “Situation Wanted: Something about Labour,” Afterall 19 (Autumn/Winter 2008): 22.
A further complication is that modern art has been largely metropolitan rather than völkisch or national; “for the avant-garde, Paris is closer to Buenos Aires than to Lyon; Berlin more akin to Manhattan than to Lübeck.” Franco Moretti, “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch,” in Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 34. The British Pavilion is de facto the London Pavilion and the French Pavilion the Paris Pavilion.
Harry Mathews and Georges Perec, “Roussel and Venice: Outline of a Melancholic Geography,” in Harry Mathews, Immeasurable Distances: The Collected Essays (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1991), 91.
Ibid., 90, 91, 95.
Steven Wright, “The Autonomy Archipelago,” The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide 2013. See →.
See →.
Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal, “Suppressing the Extreme-Right: Mark Manders as Unifier of the Dutch Cultural Elite,” The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide 2013. See →.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Que Faire?,” Texte zur Kunst no. 81 (March 2011), 150.
The project’s website is at →.
Sabu Kohso, “Apocalyptic Capitalism and Planetary Omnipresence,” lecture at the Studium Generale of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, March 13, 2013.
Sabu Kohso, “Fangs Hiding in the Green: Between Revolution and Disaster, The World and the Earth,” in various authors, Fukushima Mon Amour (New York: Autonomedia, 2011), 52.
Ibid., 53.
Kohso, “Apocalyptic Capitalism and Planetary Omnipresence.”
“States and Cities have often been defined as territorial, as substituting a territorial principle for the principle of lineage. But this is inexact … State and City, on the contrary, carry out a deterritorialization because the former juxtaposes and compares agricultural territories by relating them to a higher arithmetical Unity, and the latter adapts the territory to a geometrical extensiveness that can be continued in commercial circuits.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994): 86.
See “Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968–1974,” MoMA, 2011; Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: HKW/Sternberg Press, 2013); Wouter Davidts, Guy Chatel, Stefaan Vervoort, Luc Deleu—T.O.P. Office: Orban Space (Amsterdam/The Hahue: Valiz/Stroom, 2012).
Robert Smithson, “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium” (1970), in The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 135
See the sections “Prior Theory” and “Founding Documents” in Ocean Earth, 1980 bis heute, ed. Peter Weibel (Graz: Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, 1993), 2–18.
Anonymous, “Welcome… To Which Iraq?,” The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide 2013. See →.
See →.
Anonymous, Tchernobyl. Anatomie d’un nuage (Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1987).
“La belle preuve—on avait tout arrangé pour cela!” Denis de Rougemont, Lettres sur la bombe atomique (New York: Brentano’s, 1946), 19. See also Denis de Rougemont, Journal d’une époque (1926–1946) (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 562–571.
In the French original: “possibilités d’union mondiale.” De Rougemont, Lettres sur la bombe atomique, 90.
De Rougemont, Lettres sur la bombe atomique, 90, 110
“Matta a toujours été attiré par les travaux des physiciens modernes sur la propagation des ondes et les radiations, et par les transformations gigantesques que les savants viennent de faire subir à la matière” Robert Tenger, “Note de l’éditeur,” Lettres sur la bombe atomique, 11.
In the French original: “À l’arme planétaire correspond donc une communauté universelle, qui relègue les nations au rang de simples provinces. Laissez-vous entraîner quelques instants dans ce jeu gravitant de symboles: la Terre, la Globe, la Boule, la Tête, la Bombe, et l’Unité considérée partout et de tout temps comme objet rond, pomme, sphère ou sceptre d’or, que ce soit l’Univers, ou l’Empire, ou l’Atome. Ici les extrêmes se reflètent.” Robert Tenger, “Note de l’éditeur,” Lettres sur la bombe atomique, 11. Matta always maintained that he had given André Breton the idea for the “Great Transparent Ones,” but whereas Breton interpreted them more literally as enormous invisible beings, for Matta they were wave-forms: “That’s what had interested Breton, the idea of ‘great transparencies’ that I spoke about. The great transparencies in these paintings were like waves – they were, for example, economic, social, and political upheavals. [C’est ce qui avait avait intéresse Breton, l’idée que je parlais de grandes transparances. Ces grandes transparences, dans ces toiles-là, c’est comme des ondes, c’est-à-dire que ce sont par exemple les bouleversemnets économiques, sociaux, politiques.]” (Christian de Maussion, “Mythomattaque. Entretien avec Matta,” L’Autre journal 9 &leftbracket;1986&rightbracket;: 39.) To this list, one surely has to add nuclear “events.” However, the illustrations for de Rougemont’s book reflect an anthropomorphic turn, characterized by emaciated figures Matta often referred to with the term “vitreur.” These “vitreurs” inhabit the universe of the Grand Transparents.
For McLuhan, of course, the notion of the Global Village had a specific meaning that became lost as the phrase turned into a meme; the Global Village was truly to be a return to the old tribal village on a global scale, as electronic media inaugurated a new age of orality and myth.
See Fred Turner, “The Politics of the Whole: Circa 1968—and Now,” in The Whole Earth, 43–48.
Stewart Brand, “The Sky Starts at Your Feet,” in Space Colonies, ed. Stewart Brand (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 5.
“Nationalliteratur will jetzt nicht viel sagen, die Epoche der Weltliteratur ist an der Zeit, und jeder muß jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen.” From the Gespräche with Eckermann, January 31, 1827. Goethe used this concept repeatedly in the late 1820s and early 1830s.
Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (Jan.–Feb. 2005): 83.
Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” Distant Reading, 48
The collector Eduard Pomeranz cheerfully admits to buying Paul Chan’s work mostly as a bit of art-market speculation, and being guided by algorithms in his purchases. See Almuth Spiegler, “Extrem berechnend und unglaublich berührend,” Die Presse (Vienna), May 23, 2012. Available online at →.
Alice Haddad, internship report, VU University Amsterdam, May 2013.
McKenzie Wark, “Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics.” See →.
Upcoming issues of e-flux journal will feature further essays developed around the Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennale, a project by Jonas Staal in the form of a free iPhone and Android app providing insight into the political, economic, and general ideological infrastructure of the Biennale. The guide offers critical reflections by prominent artists, curators, and theoreticians that help the user to explore the ideological framework of each national pavilion. Additional data provides further commentary on the political background, selection procedure, and financing of each of the exhibitions on display and their relation to each other. The Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennale is supported by: Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Center for Visual Art, Rotterdam; Farook Foundation, Dubai; PhDArts, Leiden; and Promoveren in de Kunsten, Amsterdam. The travel grant is a co-initiative of Casco, e-flux, and Kadist Art Foundation.