Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency

Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency

Language: English

Pages: 208

ISBN: 1784781452

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.

Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What cannot be connected, this is exactly what my work as an artist is.”16 Thomas Hirschhorn, Spinoza Monument, 1999. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Hirschhorn announces his signal mix of information and devotion in the terms kiosk and altar; here again he aims to deploy both the publicity of agitprop à la Klucis and the passion of assemblage à la Schwitters.17 Yet, rather than an academic resolution of this avant-garde opposition, his purpose is pragmatic: Hirschhorn applies these mixed.

“precariat” is seen as a product of the post-Fordist economy, though, historically, precarity might be more the rule and the Fordist promise of relative job security and union protection more the exception.5 It is a tricky category. What might be lost in a discursive shift from proletariat to precariat? Might the term normalize a specific condition, a “society of risk,” that is subject to critical challenge and political change?6 Can the precariat be freed from its victim status and developed as.

The one beneath the law, the other above it. Yet the two are also alike in this exceptional exteriority, and often represented as such, in the guise of each other: the prince as wolf, the beast as king (imaged most famously in the Leviathan of Hobbes). For Derrida as for Agamben, these pairs pose a riddle that points to how power is founded in a primordial yoking of violence and law, that is, in the sheer violence of self-authorization. Faced with a situation in which precarious life seems the.

“excrement-philosopher” who refused to rise above mere matter, who failed to elevate the low to the high.19 For Bataille, on the other hand, Breton was a “juvenile victim” who was involved in an Oedipal game, an “Icarian pose” that was taken up less to undo the law than to provoke its punishment: despite his celebration of desire, Breton was as committed to sublimation as the next aesthete.20 Elsewhere Bataille termed this aesthetic le jeu des transpositions, and he dismissed this “game of.

Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: New Museum, 2007). 24Rirkrit Tiravanija in Obrist, Interviews, Volume 1, 890. 25See Raphael Rubinstein, “Provisional Painting,” Art in America (May 2009). For an excellent analysis of how such provisional work conforms to a casual economy, see Lane Relyea, “Your Art World: or, The Limits of Connectivity,” Afterall 14 (Autumn/ Winter 2006). Here again there are parallels in recent novels, such as How Should a Person Be? (2012) by Sheila.

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