Curating the Complex & The Open Strike

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of "planetarity" to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old "realist" tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society's divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see—and feel—the planet?
Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art's power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists' urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art's necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

"Planetary Realism is a deeply necessary book to add to our toolkit of struggle against a corporate world intent on destroying our planet for nothing but profit. Berry's book is a wake up call to artists and all those whose imaginations have not been destroyed by the consensensual silence surrounding the life or death issue of climate catastrophe. She dismantles the concept of art's autonomy to describe how artists all over the world are becoming artworkers for Planet Earth." — Peter Kennard, London-based artist and activist, and Emeritus Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art

"Through this superlative and vigorously argued version of a realism for today—meticulously attuned to planetary predicaments and the art and culture that inhabits them—Berry gives us means to map ways of being more hospitable, disobedient, migratory, alive, in the present." — Matthew Fuller, co-author of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility, and Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and editor. She supervises thesis only and practice based PhDs in the School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art, London, and teaches in Media Communication and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a member of Mute magazine's editorial collective Mute and is a peer reviewer for the journal Theory, Culture & Society.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971–2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.

Drawing from literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist's inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz's personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist's writings. Vaillant provides behind-the-scenes commentary and context—a time capsule of pleasure featuring Andy Warhol, Des Esseintes, Josef Frank, David Bowie, Vito Acconci, Eileen Gray, Alex Kapranos, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, Emma Bovary and Roger Cook, among others.

Edited by Alexis Vaillant.

Retrospective monograph: a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

In Daschner's textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.
The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner's longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships

Edited by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu.
Texts by Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen; foreword by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; interviews by Rike Frank.

The fifth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, on the theme of diffusion and dissemination.

In a 1955 pamphlet entitled Seven Years of Musique Concrète, Jacques Poullin wrote:
"[...] sound projection in a concert hall is a logical extension of the concerns of the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète and requires its technicians to properly study multiple aspects of the problems of sonorisation that are often neglected and to date have been almost exclusively the preserve of 'public address' technicians".

From the very beginning, fixed media electroacoustic music in its various guises faced a significant challenge: that of how it could be shared with the public. Even before it was distributed in the form of records, musique concrète, having first been transmitted on radio, soon turned to the concert stage. From the time of its birth, a twofold question was posed: What strategy of diffusion could be used for this music which involves no live performers? But also, how could it make use of existing systems of sound amplification without losing its singular nature, making sure to preserve its own particularities? Identified very early on, these questions have lost none of their pertinence some seventy years later.

Under pressure from the cultural industries and faced with a largely commercially-driven standardisation of formats, it is important today to reaffirm both the singular nature of experimental electroacoustic practices, and the possibilities these practices open up beyond standards and rules.

This calls for an exploration of the vast domain of sound creation in which, here and there, ideas, concepts, and sometimes new works appear that fully embrace the question of the deployment of sound, its dissemination and its expansion. An exploration focussed on the listening experience—a fundamentally musical experience—but adopting a critical approach which may sometimes call into question traditional ways of sharing and listening to sound, the status of listener and creator, and which may even challenge the acoustic integrity of venues and the legitimacy of diffusion systems.

Such are the questions to be addressed here. Sketching out the contours of what is quite obviously a huge subject, this volume, drawing upon a wide variety of points of view, experiences, and ideas, hints at an entire critical apparatus that remains to be developed and consolidated, but is crucial given the primordial importance of the theme of dissemination. For dissemination is the transitional stage par excellence, the uncertain stage that sits between creation and reception while at the same time determining both. It is a critical stage, yet one that is often neglected or, as Poullin says, left to a technical intermediary who may impose conditions entirely exogenous to questions of music and listening.

For these reasons, it seems more necessary than ever to return to the experience of sounds, to once again listen attentively to their trajectories, their diffraction in space, their emergence and their disappearance. To get to grips with the mysteries of their deployment so as to reaffirm that this deployment is essential to them.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.
Contributions by Marja Ahti, Scott Arford, Nicolas Debade, Michael Gatt, Tim Ingold, Rolf Julius, Jules Négrier, John Richards, Marina Rosenfeld, Hildegard Westerkamp, Randy Yau.

Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

In the fourth title of the acclaimed DecadentEditions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film. Forty minutes in, we realise we’ve been watching a film within the film. The ‘real’ characters leave the cinema and find themselves reenacting what they just saw, as a chance encounter invites a suicide pact. Is it life imitating art, or the other way around? Dennis Lim is a film curator, teacher, and writer. He is currently the Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.