Sternberg Press / Institut für Kunstkritik series – serie

On the specificity and generality, materiality and immateriality, production and reproduction of artistic labor.Artistic Labour Now sheds light on the specificity of artistic labour in view of an increasingly globalized and digitized art economy.In these collected essays, art historians, critics, artists, and writers consider emergent possibilities for the production and distribution of art created by recent developments in virtual reality, blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies within today’s immersive media landscape. In this expansive new sphere, notions of value, labour and economy in the broadest sense must be renegotiated, as the lines between specificity and generality, materiality and immateriality, production and reproduction are blurred.In Artistic Labour Now, contributors examine modern and contemporary artistic labour to contemplate the relationship between the value-form of the unique artwork and the subject position of its maker from numerous angles, including Marxist theories of value, feminist theories of reproductive labour and contemporary theories of affective and immaterial labour. ContributorsChristian Berger, Sabeth Buchmann, Huey Copeland, Aria Dean, Simon Denny, Larisa Dryansky, Sylvia Federici, Isabelle Graw, Josh Kline, Michelle Kuo, Jaleh Mansoor, Friederike Sigler

Critical writings that index the material and linguistic problems of making art.Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Helen Marten probe the critical spaces between image and language, material subject and conceptual idea. Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, writing, and video, Marten has emerged as one of the leading voices of her generation, investigating how we exist within and retranslate the world around us. Driven by both informational logics and emotional heat, her object-making compels a peculiar engagement with language—its wounding or wailing power, its sly metamorphosis, its seduction. She explores this submerged side of materiality where dark intent lies, questioning the linguistic framework of theoretical doubt as the place where mistakes are embraced to become generative. Marten envisages the artist to be like a busy dog, sticking its nose into the indexes of social or technological space and shuffling things about, coaxing or relegating artefacts to the peripheries like an aggravating archaeologist. This iterative flexibility holds great appeal, but also a certain danger—to find exposed and sticky the granular indecency of material, its mechanistic hierarchies, its feral stink of policy or corruption. Exploring theories of the mercantile and the digital, her writing examines craft as syntax and touch as a rejection of heteronormativity: instead, pleasure in material promiscuity is felt as a “fundamental itch.” With additional texts on fellow artists including Cady Noland, Sigmar Polke, Hervé Télémaque, Laura Owens, Matthew Barney, Charline von Heyl, and Lubaina Himid, Marten explores accumulative textual venture as an inventive mode of saturation.Approximation, models, collage and inlay; dust, vectors, animals, snow, blood and diagrams—the essays compiled in Mud Physics consider the human figure as one that hauls itself through an immense field of daily signs, sorts agitated language into piles, and emerges via the triumphant urgency of the imagination.

The significance of Jean-François Lyotard's innovative 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux and the “curatorial turn” in critical theory.

In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated Les Immatériaux at Centre Georges Pompidou. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a “curatorial turn” in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory. In Spacing Philosophy, Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein analyze the significance and logic of Lyotard's exhibition while contextualizing it in the history of exhibition practices, the philosophical tradition, and Lyotard's own work on aesthetics and phenomenology. Les Immatériaux can thus be seen as a culmination and materialization of a life's work as well as a primer for the many thought-exhibitions produced in the following decades.

The significance of Jean-François Lyotard's innovative 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux and the “curatorial turn” in critical theory.

Forthcoming from the MIT Press