E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T

FROM THE EDITORS

Karen BeneZra

The texts and artist project in the present issue refl ect on the relation-
ship between aesthetics and social constructivism, or the appearance
and elaboration of new forms of social and political organization. Taken
together, they represent something of a departure from the kinds of
historical—often institutional and archival—reconstructions that we
often publish, by considering the names and visual forms of still inex-
istent modes of political subjectivity. At the risk of making an overly
broad generalization, we might say that rather than interrogating the
relationship between formal conventions and institutional norms
within the context of really existing socialism or third-world interna-
tionalism, the present issue of the journal looks, in Fredric Jameson’s
words, for “a yet undreamed of global communism” in the discursive
and visual semblance of the present.1

The two texts that comprise the Document section, both titled
“What Is Hamasteghtsakan Art,” by Armenian artist Arman Grigoryan
and art critic Nazareth Karoyan, consider the consequences of artistic
experimentalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Equally as signifi –
cantly, they refl ect on their own gestures of naming and historicization
in the context of Armenia’s transition from a Soviet state-planned econ-
omy to a free-market economy. As Angela Harutyunyan explains in her

Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), 37.

https://doi:.org/10.1162/artm_e_00241

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critical introduction, both texts concern the 3rd Floor art movement,
which, “coming together in 1987 in the context of Mikhail Gorbachev’s
programs of liberalization and reform, glasnost and perestroika,”
included a wide variety of artistic styles, media, and genres. If, as
Harutyunyan suggests, the word hamasteghtsakan can be translated
as “collectively created,” in her words, “the use of hamasteghtsakan as
a concept to delineate a set of artistic practices was never straightfor-
ward—at times, it was used as synonymous with Conceptual art, while
at other times it was used to refer to ‘postconceptual’ or even ‘postmod-
ern’ art.” As Harutyunyan notes, if Grigoryan emphasizes the creative
or interventionist aspect of hamasteghtsakan art, Karoyan questions
the subject implied, at once, by the obsolescence of modernism and the
sudden effects of globalization.

Emily Apter’s essay, “Regioning Difference: Translation and
Critical Cartography,” proposes “a model of regioning differences that
focuses on the politics of ‘area-ization,’ with special emphasis on
denominations of continental relation, orientation, and entanglement
that defy the monothetic rubrics that order planetary maps and secure
sovereign borders.” Apter signals the extent to which “geotopic region-
alisms” such as “global/local, Europe/non-Europe, North/South,
South-South, intra-Asian, tricontinental, zones of settlement and
unsettlement” that, in recent decades, have often presented non-
European or North American art through the lens of geopolitical deter-
minism, “are themselves constantly in translation, which is to say,
subject to revision and renaming.” In Apter’s essay, translation as a way
of categorizing this process of revision and renaming, then, is limited
neither to the seemingly autonomous movement of signifiers nor to the
movement and reorganization of imperial power, but instead describes
moments when what she terms the “regional unconscious” causes a
disturbance in the order of names and places, allowing us to “suddenly
perceive how knowledge and cultural legacies are politically parsed at
specific temporal and historical conjunctures.”

In “Contingency Plans: Art Collectives, Shared Pseudonyms, and
Theories of Collectivity,” Lindsay Caplan discusses two recent books,
Jacopo Galimberti’s Individuals against Individualism: Art Collectives in
Western Europe (1956–1969) and Marco Deseriis’s Improper Names:
Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. Caplan asks us
to consider these works in relation to a broader set of contemporary
assumptions about political commitment or “engagement” in art,

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in which artists’ emphasis on process over representation pretends
alternately to effect and prefigure new forms of political organization
and collectivism more broadly. Positioned against the backdrop of
de-Stalinization and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolu-
tion of 1956, Galimberti’s book surveys the work of artists’ collectives
such as the Spur group in the Federal Republic of Germany, GRAV in
France, Gruppo N in Italy, and Equipo 57 in Spain, parsing “the granu-
lar differences between notions of collective subjectivity and the spe-
cific tactics deployed to realize them.” However, where Galimberti
observes the dwarfing of these groups’ projects before the background
of the overall politicization of society, Caplan in turn questions
Galimberti’s fondness for artistic process and collectivism as models
for leftist politics. By contrast, Deseriis’s study of artistic and political
collectivism illuminates how collectives, historically, have alternately
used pseudonyms and anonymity as a way of questioning individ-
ual authorship in art, but also, more significantly, of constituting
de-centered social and political movements. In Caplan’s assessment,
the “improper name” represents a way of conceiving the socially con-
structive potential of collectivism in symbolic terms.

Freya Schiwy’s “Thresholds of the Visible: Activist Video,

Militancy, and Prefigurative Politics” attends to the formal conventions
of activist video in the context of the 2006 Oaxaca Commune. Schiwy
considers how these videos, much like the artists’ collectives in
Galimberti’s study, seek to effect a prefigurative politics. Asking “how
can activist video, a genre committed to reflecting what occurs before
the lens, make visible what has not yet arrived?,” Schiwy’s article chal-
lenges the truth claims of many activist videographers by underscoring
their stylistic choices. More specifically, Schiwy examines contrasting
examples of indexicality in digital video and film. She argues that their
representations of the Oaxaca Commune also simultaneously reveal
forms of self-government to come. Against the truth claims of their
authors, Schiwy asks us to consider the veracity of such images, based
not only on the adequacy of the phenomena that they document, but
on the retroactive truth that they effect through the relationship forged
with the spectator.

Katarzyna Pieprzak’s “Whitewash as Affective Platform: Art and
the Politics of Surface in the Work of Yto Barrada and Hassan Darsi”
examines two contemporary artists whose works involving “photogra-
phy, film, and architectural models . . . engage and produce whitewash

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surfaces that insist on being looked at, slowly and at length.” Both art-
ists address the phenomenology of postcolonial Morocco, in which the
whitewash of shanty neighborhoods, like that of modernist architec-
ture, dissimulates the historical contingency and social heterogeneity
that lies beneath. Rather than reveal the material histories and ontolog-
ical multiplicity that whitewash conceals, Pieprzak instead invites us to
“dwell on the surface, on whitewash itself.” Moreover, Pieprzak argues
that insofar as Barrada and Darsi ask us to consider the surface as an
affective site, their works also register “moment[s] of possibility” for
radical subjective transformation.

Hiba Kalache’s artist project, titled “Encounters—Ongoing,”
records the artist’s chance encounters with “people who have a vested
interest in Lebanese land.” As Kalache writes in her preface, the ink-
wash of the drawings attempts to capture the fleeting and casual
nature of her conversations with farmers met, in the artist’s words,
“on leisurely road trips around the mountains of Lebanon.” Text and
image both signal and blur “the sectarian divisions upon which the
ownership of land is based.” However, far from providing a reprieve
or decorative escapism from the sectarian divisions of the region, the
fragments of conversation juxtaposed with and transposed onto the art-
ist’s watercolors of native flowers and plants testify to the images’ vio-
lence. As if they were inviting us to reflect on the interpretive claims of
Schiwy and Pieprzak, Kalache’s elegant illustrations attempt at once to
“index encounters” with the farmer and the land, and to do so by tran-
scribing the speech of the artist’s interlocutors in handwritten Arabic
script on the picture plane. (The titles or captions of each painting
include fragments of this text.) Perhaps counterintuitively, Kalache’s
diaphanous plants and fragmented, coded transcriptions (for those
who do not read Arabic) test the limits of aestheticized sociality and
surface reading by simultaneously presenting and dissimulating, regis-
tering and abstracting, the passing encounters of a determinate time
and place.