71 contributions from 74 authors, artists, architects, and educators published by e-flux between February–March 2024.
"It's always too late, whenever you take a photograph."
This laconic remark, which I heard during a recent artist's talk in Berlin, bubbled up from a discussion upon the often-tragic
indexicality or
nonindexicality of contemporary photographic practice.
JPEGs taken for wonders. Smoke plumes without embers. Footprints crossing the beaches of abandoned resorts. Hands that point at nothing in particular, and the gullible eyes that follow the lead of pointing index fingers. There is indeed something awkward to the snapshot's belatedness. Its untimeliness. The ways in which, the second the shutter clicks—or that our thumb melds with the appropriate region of our phone's liquid plasma displays and the resultant file is uploaded to a distant server—the instant we sought to "capture" has passed by and something else enters the frame. Someone blinks, the rubble dust envelopes the scene, the light changes, the hoodie we saw underground bearing the phrase "THEIR DESTINIES WOULD INTERTWINE" disappears behind an arriving subway's blur, the wind cajoles a neighboring branch we hadn't before noticed into the family portrait. Photography then remains, contrary to the terms in which it is sold to us by Silicon Valley manufacturers who stress its total
immediacy as an instrument for perceiving the world, a stubbornly untimely pursuit.
Can we not also say, "It's always too late, whenever you start to index"?
This publication carries on its spine—with a slight nod toward
Sol Lewitt's famous declaration on conceptual art that "irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically"—a commitment to "indexing the arts."
This should not, however, be taken as a hubristic drive to simply
capture the moment. Instead, in its effort at critically revisiting a two-month period of discourse across the tesselating, alternating intersecting and diverging fields and subfields of contemporary art criticism, architecture theory and critique, social criticism, film, theory, political analysis, polemics, philosophy, and art pedagogy, the
e-flux Index likewise situates itself in the gap between the instant and its recording instrument—in this case, language.
The
Index is untimely by its very commitment to thematically commingling different publishing temporalities and genres of writing (from long-form essays commissioned years in advance to reviews to open letters). We hope that this very asynchrony is capable of revealing the preoccupations that are threaded through the most insightful current writing on art, but also the many ways in which language and critique can work to evade and
resist capture altogether. e-flux's entrance into the slower-moving world of book publishing began with an anthology of texts addressing the somewhat undertheorized question of "what is contemporary art?" in 2009.
This interrogation of the stakes of "contemporaneity," as well as the refusal to leave this question unasked, as though its answer were somehow self-evident, continues to inform the approach taken here by the
Index.
This issue features 71 contributions from 74 authors, artists, architects, and educators published by e-flux between February–March 2024. These have been recomposed into eleven different sections. These sections, or snapshots, are titled as follows, A Brand New Day; Bad Circulation; The Traveling of a Concept; The Earth Is an Image; Leaving Without a Suitcase; The Technocapitalist Gentry; The Poetics of Relation; The Fox News Expanded Universe; Transgenerational Witnessing; Anything can come after anything else…; and Only the Sun Works.
