n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from the North, East, West and South. | Read more..

Wright

Digging in the Epistemic Commons

Toward an extraterritorial reciprocity: beyond worldart and vernacular culture

  • Wright S
    One of the leitmotivs of n.e.w.s., I take it, is precisely the idea of shifting, displacing, moving with an eye to all the cardinal points of the compass. Though real “geographic diversity” is mentioned in the project presentation, geography - like the sort of conceptual mobility also foregrounded in the write-up - provides a metaphor for understanding the condition of art today and its blithe refusals to acknowledge its disorientation and recalibrate its sextant.
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * autonomy * collaboration * constitutive mobility * elusive implication * extraterritorial reciprocity * territoriality * vernacular art * worldart, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Édouard Glissant, Maurice Blanchot

The pursuit of error

  • Wright S
    The pursuit of truth seems to have been pretty much a constant in the official history of all human endeavor: science, ethics, politics, education, even aesthetics and romance all take their bearings from the implicit and apparently self-evident horizon of Truth. Even liars adhere to the supremacy of the truth they strive to travesty or conceal. Yet, ensconced as it may be in common sense, that apparent self-evidence is somewhat troubling. For the paradox, of course, is that if we need truth as our guiding beacon then it can only be because we are errant bodies in a world replete with error.
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * error * lies * somos todos erroristas * travesty * truth * verist, International Errorism

What everybody knows: protocols of rumour

  • Wright S
    Exhibitions are all right for those of us who like that sort of thing, but like other artworldly activities, they’re pretty harmless. As art seems to have exhausted much of its potential, why not turn our art-critically honed tools to more corrosive phenomena – the kind that suit no one’s purpose, like that all-pervasive, horizontal network of open-source speech-acts of confident uncertainty known as rumour?
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * anonymity * authorless * collective speech acts * corrosivity * indeterminacy * open source * panic * performativity * rumour * textual promiscuity, 1984, A. Chorus, Adorno, Edgar Morin, Gordon Allport, Hans-Joachin Neubauer, Jochen Gerz, Lamia Joreige, Leo Postman, Leonard Cohen, Mia Jankowicz, Ovid, Petra Bauer, R.H. Knapp, Radio Mille Collines, Rosler, Sigmund Freud, The Joseph Affair, The Speculative Archive, Ultralab, Veena Das, Walid Sadek

The Fate of Public Time: toward a time without qualities

  • Wright S
    For some time now, I’ve been meaning to respond to Lee Weng Choy’s thoughtful posting on the need for “slowing things down.” There is something intuitively urgent about that appeal for calm, which I felt needed to be fleshed out. Has something happened to time, I found myself wondering, or is it just our overwrought egos and zealous scheduling that need to be put on depressants?
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * commodification * cracks * globalisation * immaterial labour * mobilisation * public sphere * public time * real time * urgency * we, André Gorz, Aristotle, Basekamp, Jacques Ranciere, McKenzie Wark, Montaigne, n.e.w.s, Robert Musil, Svetlana Boym, W.G. Sebald, Zaki Laïda

Plausible (Art) Worlds

  • Wright S
    Web Article
    Submitted
    Andrea Fraser, Basekamp, Hans Vaihinger, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Becker, Jorge Luis Borges, Kant, Michel Foucault, Nelson Goodman, Pierre Bourdieu, Plausible Artworlds, Scott Rigby

The Delicate Essence of Artistic Collaboration

  • Wright S
    Journal Article
    Submitted

Data's Demon

  • Wright S
    I’m very much of two minds about the whole issue of “data-mining,” as Lev Manovich puts it – or “data-recovery” as others might say inasmuch as we have all contributed to that ever-expanding mother-lode – with which Renée Ridgway has invited us to engage in her recent, thought-igniting post.
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * biopolitics * cognitive mapping * data * data-mining * dataesthetics * performativity, Adorno, Alfred Kinsey, Alfredo Jaar, André Breton, Bruce Cahan, Bureau d’études, Conflux Festival, Edgar Allan Poe, Georges Bataille, Horkheimer, Jackson Pollock, Lev Manovich, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Lombardi, Michel Foucault, Rabih Mrouhé, Regine Debatty', Renée Ridgway, Temporary Services., Thomas Pynchon, Trevor Paglen, Urban Logic

Competition of Ideas: "rethinking the social and economic conditions of art"

  • Wright S
    A Paris-based organization is hosting a "competition of ideas," the object of which is to rethink the social and economic conditions of art, explicitly breaking with twentieth-century conventions.
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * artworld * economies * essay * ideas, Association Forum de l'Essai sur l'Art, Concours d'idées, Jacques Serrano, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, n.e.w.s

Cutting Slack: paradoxes of slackerdom

  • Wright S
    To examine these questions – and / or others – about the political potential and conceptual subtleties of slacking by using the prism of art, or at any event on a blog whose positioning within the attention economy is clearly art-related, raises another paradox that cannot be sidestepped. For art, at least in its own conventional self-understanding, is unrepentantly productivist
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * degrowth * laziness * performativity * productivism * slack off * slacker, 01.org, Adorno, Allan Kaprow, Andy Abbott, Artway of Thinking, Bataille, Bernard Brunon, Bernard Herman, Bertrand Russell, Bob Black, Brend, Buddha, Cathy Lenihan, Charles Bukowski, Charlie Roderick, Chris Carlsson, Critical Art Ensemble, Critical Mass, Dali, de Certeau, Deleuze, Frankfurt School, Gaston Bachelard, generation X, Gilbert and George, Group Material, Henry Flynt, Hideous Beasts, Igor Zabel, Jeremy Rifkin, John Zerzan, Joseph Pieper, Josh Ippel, Karen Andreassian, Kasimir Malevich, Katherine Carl, Leisure Projects, M.A. Screech, Mackenzie Wark, Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, Mladen Stilinovic, N55, Nam June Paik, Neue Slowenische Kunst, Nietzsche, Nowtopia, Patrick Durkee, postanarchism, Reclaim the Streets, Richard JF Day, Saul Newman, Seth Price, Situationism, Slackers, Spinoza, SUPERFLEX, Taoism, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Thorstein Veblen, Todd May, Tom Lutz, Tony Judt, Voghchaberd, WochenKlausur

ERRARE HUMANUM EST: a forum on error and errorism

  • Wright S
    official announcement in the form of an invitation
    Web Article
    Submitted
    Brian Holmes, Eduardo Molinari, Federico Geller, Federico Zuckerfeld, Loreto Garin, Manray Hsu, Prayas Abhinav, Stephen Wright

Exit Strategies: Challenging Productivism in Contemporary Capitalism and Art

  • Wright S
    When you hear “exit strategies” what do you think of first? Iraq and environs? The neo-liberal mindset, its wanton growth-cures-all productivism? Or maybe, depending on the extent of your Napoleon complex, exodus from the intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream artworld? This project seeks to imagine gangplanks out of contemporary warfare, capitalism, and art, not necessarily in that order.
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * Ariadne's thread * artworld * coefficient of art * conceptual migration * exit strategies * exodus * globalisation * open labyrinth * productivism, André Gorz, Dedalus, Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul Biennials, Lee Weng Choy, Marcel Duchamp, Marx, Peter Schjeldahl, Thomas Berghuis, Vasif Kortun

Be for Real: the Usership Challenge to Expert Culture

  • Wright S
    One of the questions I struggle with most regarding art is whether or not to continue using the word at all. On the one hand, it designates an amorphous set of symbolic configurations and activities by and large so at odds with what I refer to when I use the term, I wonder if I would not be well advised to look for a different word. Yet on the other hand, I am loath to yield the monopoly on the use of that term to those whose usage I find so uncongenial.
    Web Article
    Submitted
    Alexander Alberro, Anton Vidokle, British Disabled People’s Movement, Emmanuel Kant, Jacques Ranciere, kultkuli, Lawrence Weiner, Martha Rosler Library, Marx, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Michel Foucault, Parachute, Philippe Artières, Proudhon

Diggers All! Copyright is for losers

  • Wright S
    This post follows up on an exchange initiated on n.e.w.s. a few months back by Branka Curcic under the heading of “The New Economy of Enclosure,” dealing with the pitfalls of the web 2.0 model and mindset, which she nicely summed up as the “private appropriation of community-created value.”
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * cognitive ecology * collaboration * commons * diggers * imitiation * invention, Adorno, Bernard Edelman, Bertrand Russell, Bureau d’études, CopyLeft, Creative Commons, Denis Olivennes, Descartes, Gabriel Tarde, George Herbert Mead, Grupo de Arte Callejero, Grupo Etcetera, Hadopi, Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, Jacques Bouveresse, Joseph Proudo, Jürgen Habermas, Kembrew McLeod, Maurizio Lazzarato, Negativland, Nomoola, Peter Strawson, Pierre Papon, Public Enemy, PUKAR, Rahul Srivastava, Sebastian Lütgert, Taller Popular de Serigraphia, textz.com, The Universite Tangente, Web 2.0, Winstanley, Wittgenstein

Plausible Artworlds

Ontological Walkscapes

  • Karen Andreassian's documentary work extends beyond the exhibition space. His interdisciplinary research records the political and geological landscapes of Armenia and the social transformation it faces in post-Soviet times. For example, in Voghchaberd Project (2003) Andreassian has created a documentary archive of a village close to Yerevan. This rural area, deeply affected by a landslide, faces an ongoing state of uncertainty. Using a hand-held camera Andreassian records the people within the disappearing landscape, and by placing them in an electronic space gives access to the different geo-anthropological layers of their lives. Ontological Walkscapes (2009) is a project realised by the artist in collaboration with Paris-based writer and independent researcher, Stephen Wright, and five students from the Department of Art History and Theory at Yerevan State University. Andreassian takes on the role of a walker, inspired by political walks that took place along Northern Avenue in Yerevan, following the forceful dispersion of post-election demonstrations in Yerevan's central Azatutyan (Freedom) Square. In Andreassian's political walks, students' personal stories are physically and mentally traced, creating a map of connected places. The project's extensive material -its papers, photographs and documents- are included in a book of the same title.
    Web Article
    2009

‘The Delicate Essence of Artistic Collaboration’

  • Wright S
    Miscellaneous
    2004