E-flux Index n° 02

71 contributions de 74 auteurs, artistes, architectes et enseignants, publiées par e-flux entre février et mars 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.

E-flux Index est un grand recueil imprimé bimestriel des écrits les plus significatifs sur l'art, la culture et la théorie, provenant de l'ensemble des plateformes en ligne d'e-flux. Il combine des essais de fond issus d'e-flux Journal et d'e-flux Architecture, des critiques d'expositions, de livres et de films d'e-flux Criticism, des articles et des entretiens avec des étudiants et des enseignants d'e-flux Education, et des articles d'opinion d'e-flux Notes, en les organisant de manière thématique pour « indexer les arts » et archiver le présent.

Voir aussi E-flux journal.

liste de souhaits

Contributions de Hallie Ayres, Nick Axel, Stephanie Bailey, Xenia Benivolski, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Gail Brager, Lukas Braskisis, Evan Calder Williams, Luis Camnitzer, Gaby Cepeda, Adeline Chia, Jasmina Cibic, Phil Coldiron, Salmaan Craig, Benjamin Crais, Mark DeKay, T. J. Demos, Tom Denman, Ben Eastham, Mariana Fernández, Sylvie Fortin, Victor Galdino, Orit Gat, Gerhub, Boris Groys, Maddie Hampton, Lyn Hejinian, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art, Vanessa Holyoak, Leigh House, Suzanne Hudson, Dylan Huw, Florian Idenburg, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Isabel Jacobs, Tom Jeffreys, Juan José Santos, Christina Kiaer, Damjan Kokalevski, Anna Kornbluh, Ekaterina Kulinicheva, Michael Kurtz, Andres Lepik, Ye Liu, Antonia Majaca, Natasha Marie Llorens, Claudio Medeiros, Chris Murtha, Isadora Neves Marques, Charles Tonderai Mudede, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Jason Read, Dominique Routhier, Noah Simblist, Anya Sirota, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Sorokina, Jamila Squire, Jonas Staal, Łukasz Stanek, The New School Art Modality, Xu Tiantian, Oxana Timofeeva, Alberto Toscano, Ecosistema Urbano, Anton Vidokle, Elena Vogman, Xin Wang, Ben Ware, Seth Wheeler, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Zairong Xiang, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Zhen Zhang, Arseny Zhilyaev.

paru en juillet 2024

édition anglaise

20 x 25,5 cm (broché)

512 pages (ill.)

épuisé

thèmes

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