Volume 25, Issue 2

The essays assembled in this volume were initially presented at the concluding conference of the International Doctoral School “InterArt Studies” held at the Freie Universität Berlin from June 25-27, 2015. The school bore the label “international” not just because its students hailed from five different continents. Rather, it was called that because it was born out of the collaboration with the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies, Literature and the Arts, later joined by the Doctoral School of Goldsmiths College, London, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, New York. During these nine years (2006-2015) of research, it was generously funded by the German Research Council.

Eine Anmerkung zum Titel: Warum sollten wir Israel retten wollen? Palästina ja. Es liegt in Ruinen, belagert und unter militärischer Besatzung, verwüstet durch Armut, Arbeitslosigkeit und systematische Demütigung. Palästinas bloße Existenz als ein Volk, eine Nation und ein Ort hängt an einem seidenen Faden. Die Bedrohung für Israel ist hingegen eine moralische. Das Land ist in Gefahr, seine Seele zu verlieren, all die Ideale zu verraten, auf denen seine Gründung beruht, und selbst endgültig ein Apartheidstaat zu werden. Dieser Beitrag handelt von einer doppelten Rettungsaktion, einer sowohl moralischen als auch materiellen, spirituellen und physischen Rettung. Er ist von jüngsten Arbeiten sogenannter „Rettungs-Künstler“ Aus Gründen der besseren Lesbarkeit wird für die Bezeichnung von Personengruppen in der Übersetzung durchweg das generische Maskulinum verwendet, das die weibliche und männliche Form gleichermaßen impliziert. A.d.Ü. (salvage artists) inspiriert, deren Arbeiten häufig auf der Wiederverwendung von überflüssigen Materialien, Abfall, Müll und Ruinen basieren, ebenso wie auf Projekten, die eine Re-Imagination und Neugestaltung der Gemeinschaft zum Gegenstand haben. Rettungs-Kunst richtet sich häufig auf „das Gemeingut“ (the commons), auf die fragilen öffentlichen Räume der Versammlung und Zusammenkunft, die auch als Bühne für Inszenierungen von staatlicher Gewalt und Widerstand dienen. Sie ist besonders eng mit dokumentarischen, bewegten und nicht bewegten Bildern verbunden, die der Realität in all ihrer Komplexität einen Spiegel vorhalten und geteilte Erinnerungen und Archive bewahren. Mein Interesse gilt Künstlern, die oft aus sehr verschiedenen, sogar gegensätzlichen Beweggründen in diesen gemeinsamen Bemühungen engagiert sind.

The essay takes up Eve Kososky Sedgwick’s influential call for a reparative reading or practice, understood primarily as a performative and literary reading practice, in an attempt to inform what I call a reparative critical image practice. Montaging my own experiences learning from filmmaker Harun Farocki during the Labour in a Single Shot workshop (Cairo 2012) together with reflections from my work with the video-installation Leap into Colour (Cairo, Beirut, Copenhagen 2012-2015), the essay speculates how the reparative critical image undergoes a process of rematerialisation. The essay explores how the image migrates between different contexts, compressions, codecs and formats, and how this route, or line of flight, is enfolded into the image’s texture. I argue that montaging these layers of intensities can create a collaborative, historically dense, fabulous image, held together by affect .

The starting point of this essay is the text written by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant entitled “The Cunning of the Imperialist Reason,” in which they discuss the pertinence of transferring concepts regarding race from the American context to the Brazilian context. The authors maintain that this transfer is a ‘false friend’ because the same words are used to signify different things. In this article, I argue that certain uses of postcolonial theory in Brazil might also function as ‘false friends,’ particularly in the use of complex notions of Mestizaje within the art world. The key point of departure for this essay is the following contradiction: abroad, Brazil attracts a great deal of international interest due to its postcolonial condition, and the power of its discourses of racial hybridity through concepts such as cultural anthropophagy which challenge eurocentric paradigms. But, internally, postcolonial studies have attracted little or no interest, especially in academic circles. Why? We will use the exhibition Mestizo Histories (2015) as a case study for this purpose.

In what follows I put forward an idea of contemporary art practice as a form of myth-science, itself defined as a kind of fictioning of reality. The article draws on and develops ideas first put forward in O’Sullivan 2014. The term mythscience is borrowed from Sun Ra and Afrofuturism more generally (see Kodwo Eshun’s discussion, “Synthesizing the Omniverse”, in Eshun 1998, 154-163). The artist Mike Kelley, in an essay on Olaf Fahlstrom (Kelley 1995), links the term more particularly to expanded contemporary art practice. Most of what follows has been developed in relation to the collaborative ‘performance fiction’ Plastique Fantastique (and especially in conversation with David Burrows) and thus, in acknowledgement of this parallel research programme, interspersed throughout the text are images from our practice and, in particular, a performance itself titled ‘Myth-Science’. “Myth-Science” was performed in 2014 at the “Webewoche” exhibition/event, Stroom den Haag, The Hague and at the “Schizo-Culture” exhibition/event, Space Gallery, London (see http://www. plastiquefantastique.org/performance25.html). Plastique Fantastique, for this performance, involved myself and Burrows alongside Alex Marzeta and Harriet Skully. I hope that this local ‘scene’ might resonate on a more global level, but also that my comments will not be read as being solely tethered to this particular collaboration (indeed, my article intends the mapping of a more general trajectory in art). The article ends with a brief Coda on Felix Guattari’s concept – from Schizoanalytic Cartographies – of ‘fabulous images’ that offers another inflection on my theme. ...theres some thing in us it dont have no name... it aint us but yet its in us... (Russell Hoban, Riddly Walker)

The propensity for speculation within modernity is well established. It ranges from the artifices of the “as if” – the thrills of imagining that everything that is might also be different, codified by Robert Musil as an inherent “sense of the possible” – to the daring betting on the “what if,” invoking better futures with an utopian spark or grim prospects to hedge oneself against. The twin inclinations to imagine the different and to project the future are the hinges of the modern imagination. In the early eighteenth century, three powerful media of speculation came into being almost at the same time: the calculus of probability, paper money, and literary fiction. In different ways, they enabled agencies of correlating what is and what is not – whether in terms of risk assessment, circulation of capital, or social self fashioning. By the beginning of the 21st century, these media of speculation seem to have reached a point of excess. With big data, probabilistic speculation is about to accustom us to read “what if”-questions in an altogether indicative mode, just as big finance has succeeded in reversing the hierarchy between value assets and the media of liquid capital. This then raises the question of what happens to the third medium of speculation in our late modernity, that of fiction? This article attempts to diagnose the fate of fiction in an age of hypertrophied speculation, how practices of fiction-making migrate, how the functions of fiction transform, and eventually how our present notion of fiction is due for a conceptual makeover.

This essay examines new means of measuring creditworthiness, reputation and character online and briefly considers the implications for contemporary art. New technologies for determining creditworthiness abound; for instance, companies in the so-called fintech (financial technology) industry, provide new methods for granting credit to the underbanked, using big data analytics and psychometric testing. Similarly, Rachel Botsman and others envision a future in which reputation becomes a kind of currency, following its bearers from platform to platform. Together, the world of consciously projected reputation-images online and the fintech industry’s inconspicuous measurement of creditworthiness form a conscious/ unconscious couplet of character measurement apparatuses. Character, in these data analytic worlds, acts as a lived fiction, a representation of futurity online that determines in advance one’s level of access to markets and social spheres. How might these emerging conditions change the ways in which artworks understand – and perhaps resist – the demand to be “good” characters online? Some possible artistic responses to this world of character measurement include questioning the correlative logics of measurement itself and testing the limits of creditworthy character traits, in order to demonstrate that credit must always rely on a set of locally shared assumptions as to what might be considered “desirable” behaviour.

The scope of this paper is to inquire into a moment of friction between reality and possibility; the present and the future; the actual and the fictional, in a context pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The point of departure is an artwork by the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar. My encounter with his work evoked an aesthetic experience of hesitant uncertainty parallel to particular encounters with a mechanism invoking such uncertainties in real life, namely the passport control.

This article probes the grey area between lies and fiction in order to interrogate the effects such strategies have, both within and outside of the sphere of art. For better or worse, art works that experiment with the methodologies of fiction and deception have the capacity to generate real effects. In this article I propose to focus on two broad classes of effects: those that are somehow critical, that turn our attention back on the truth-framing devices that allowed for deception to emerge in the first place, and those that are inventive, that somehow secrete a new universe of reference. The kinds of epistemological choreography used by artists such as The Yes Men and Dora Garcia do not only expose rhetorical devices and truth-framing mechanisms, they also leave a ‘residue’ of their false content long after their truth-claims have been dropped. In this article I will argue that such works have a germinal as well as a parasitic relationship to truth and are involved in a world-making which is ontologically anterior to codifications of true and false.

Wie verändert sich die Form der Biennale, wenn Biennalen Teil eines weltumspannenden Systems von Kunstinstitutionen werden und der historischen Zeitlichkeit einer globalen Kontemporanität Der englische Terminus „contemporaneity“ wird hier und im Folgenden als „Kontemporanität“ übersetzt, wo es um die von Osborne problematisierte historische Zeitlichkeit einer globalen kapitalistischen Moderne geht, und als „Zeitgenossenschaft“ oder „Zeitgenössischkeit“, wo es sich um allgemeinere oder unspezifischere Ausprägungen dieses Konzepts handelt. A.d.Ü. unterliegen? Was geschieht insbesondere, wenn die periodischen Rhythmen nationaler Biennale-Narrative von der seriellen Abfolge internationaler Biennalen – die scheinbar endlos um Kontemporanität konkurrieren – umgeschrieben werden? Der Essay nähert sich diesen Fragen über die Debatte um die symbolische Bedeutung, die die dritte Havanna Biennale im Jahr 1989 als Zwischenstadium annahm. Er vergleicht drei historische Problematiken ‚des Zeitgenössischen‘ in Form von Modellen, mit denen die kulturelle Funktion von Biennalen gedacht werden kann: (i) die Kritik der Anthropologie oder der Co-Zeitlichkeit (the coeval), „Co-Zeitlichkeit“ steht hier als Übersetzung des Begriffs „coevalness“, der sich auf Johannes Fabians Kritik an der anthropologischen Praxis bezieht, die den Anderen nicht nur räumlich, sondern auch zeitlich in Differenz zum beobachtenden Subjekt setzt und so die geteilte Zeitlichkeit von Forscher und Erforschtem verdrängt (denial of coevalness). Da laut Fabien ‚coevalness‘ nicht mit dem dt. Gleichzeitigkeit gleichzusetzen ist, wurde hier auf einen Neologismus zurückgegriffen. Siehe Fabian 1983. (A.d.Ü.) (ii) die sozialistische Postkolonialität oder die Avantgarde-Konstruktion von Traditionen und (iii) die historische Kontemporanität einer global kapitalistischen Moderne.

In this essay, I examine frictions between the past, present and future which, in the tension between them, generate fictions which conflate not only Southern nostalgia with history but undergird American exceptionalism more broadly. These fictions generated by the rubbing together of past and present are not only nostalgic for a past that never existed but actively anti-historical, supplanting discrete periods in the history of the U.S. South (such as slavery, the Jim Crow Era, and the present day) with an intentionally confounded “temporal estrangement”. To trace the fault-lines at which nostalgia and history chafe against each other, I focus on the figure of the black waiter. As to my choice of the word black instead of African-American: as this article focuses explicitly on racial divides in American Southern history, I have chosen to use the word black rather than African-American. I see this move as a way to emphasize the lived consequences of racial difference for black Americans in the time period I analyze here – effects which, like the murder of Booker Wright, do not live in the hybrid space of the hyphen. My primary case study is Paula Deen’s legal deposition, taken in Savannah in 2013 after almost three years of legal proceedings. But in order to situate Deen’s fictions more fully within and beyond the context of the U.S. South, I read this deposition through and against two films, one largely-forgotten documentary , Mississippi: An Inside Story and one blockbuster , Forrest Gump.

The article examines analogies in the ways in which the culture industry, (star) commodities and financial products (such as derivatives) are shaping the imaginaries of the future in the present. Against the backdrop of the excitement about 21st of October, which became “ Back to the Future- Day” in 2015, and the announcement of the Nike MAG sneaker-launch, I seek to analyse whether and to what extent this projection of futurity on a commodity known from product placement in a blockbuster could be understood as a symptom for a deeper lack of futurity .

Human beings create images of themselves in all cultures and historical periods. They need these images to communicate about themselves and to understand themselves. Images of the human being are designs and projections of the human being. They are formed in order to visualize representations of the human being or individual aspects of a person. These representations are simplifications of human diversity and complexity. Images of the human being are irreducible. They arise because we communicate about ourselves and must develop similarities and feelings of belonging with other people. They are the result of complex anthropological processes in which social and cultural power structures play an important role. Owing to their iconic character, they reduce the complexity of the person and his or her being-in-the-world to select features and do not create a complete view of the person.