The Other Sun: Non-Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Georges Bataille FREDRIK RÖNNBÄCK In 1914, the nationalist right-wing author and politician Maurice Barrès pub- lished The Great Pity of the Churches of France, a collection of texts in which he inveighs against the law separating church and state that had been adopted on December 9, 1905. The book was the culmination of a campaign

Kodachrome test strips. C. 1935. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / / e d u o c t o a r t i c e – p d l f / d o i / . / /

Simone Forti with a lion cub at the Giardino Zoologico di Roma, 1968. Courtesy Simone Forti and The Box, LA. Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo* JULIA BRYAN-WILSON In the photograph, a young woman in a short skirt and sandals sits on a bench. With her crooked elbow, she braces her handbag to her body, tucking her large sketchpad into her armpit. She is petting

Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki NORA M. ALTER I last saw my friend Harun Farocki a few days before the opening of his exhi- bition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in late January 2014. Astonishingly, this was his first major one-person show in Berlin, a city that he called home and that had shaped his intellectual and artistic sensibility for over half

Model Exhibition* MARIA GOUGH Despite the fact that it was never realized at full scale, Vladimir Tatlin’s long-lost model for his Monument to the Third International (1920) remains to this day the most widely known work of the Soviet avant-garde. A visionary proposal for a four-hundred-meter tower in iron and glass conceived at the height of the Russian Civil War, the monument was to house

MASSIMILIANO MOLLONA Seeing the Invisible: Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance* The Slaves worked on the land, E, like revolution- ary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermina- tion of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar facto- ries, which covered the North plains, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in

Remembering Allan Sekula (1951–2013)* BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH Having just recently returned from a rare visit to Los Angeles, and wondering about the city’s loss of Michael Asher and Allan Sekula in the past year and a half, I was suddenly struck by the idea that these artists must have made gargantuan efforts in that environment on a daily—if not hourly—basis to sustain their conviction

Louise Lawler. No Drones. 2013. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / / e d u o c t o a r t i c e – p d l f / d o i / . / /

Complexio Oppositorum: Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt* TREVOR STARK On November 22, 1923, Emmy Hennings received an ecstatic letter from Hugo Ball, her husband and fellow founder of Zurich Dada, describing his “con- stant immersion in jurisprudence”: For months, I have studied the writings of Professor Schmitt, of Bonn. He is more important for Germany than the entirety of the Rhineland, with its carbon mines

The Metabiotic State: Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year* DEVIN FORE One of the most important units within Dziga Vertov’s conceptual system is the lexeme that means BOND. It recurs throughout his writings, most often appear- ing as the noun sviaz’ although sometimes it also surfaces as the verb sviazat’ (“to link”). Occasionally it is alloyed with a second lexeme to forge strange and unprecedented compounds,

Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema LUKE SMYTHE In late 1936, a year after it had been awarded a Medal of Honor in the spe- cially created category of “fantasy film” at the International Cinema Festival in Brussels, Len Lye’s first hand-painted film, A Colour Box (1935), was screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it met with a less than rapturous response. Consisting

16-mm film strips from Hans Richter’s unfin- ished film based on Kazimir Malevich’s 1927 scenario. C. 1970. © Hans Richter Estate. F / d o i / / / . 1 0 1 1 6 2 O C T O _ a _ 0 0 1 3 1 1 7 5 3 6 8 4 o c t o _ a _ 0 0 1

OCTOBER GREGORY SHOLETTE “What do we do now?” writes Egyptian artist Doa Aly, pointing out that ever since the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution, artists are running about like “headless chickens.” (“No Time for Art”?: moabdallah.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/no-time- for-art) Less terminal bouts of self-questioning also spread in the wake of OWS. Some artists abandoned their studios to create ephemeral street art, others engaged in direct action. Do such

MARTHA SCHWENDENER Remember right after 9/11, when irony was momentarily declared dead? In the midst of the Occupy movement, I thought more than once of Northrop Frye’s description of Aristotle’s eiron, a man who “makes himself invulnerable,”1 and Demosthenes’ ironic man, who evades his responsibilities as a citizen by pretend- ing he is unfit.2 Occupy encouraged vulnerability: sleeping in public squares, standing before police blockades,

Arts and Labor. May Day signs. 2012. F / d o i / / . / 1 0 1 1 6 2 O C T O _ a _ 0 0 1 2 6 1 7 5 3 6 3 6 o c t o _ a _ 0 0 1 2 6 p d . / f b y g u e s t

MARTHA ROSLER Artists have been deeply engaged in occupations in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Australia, as well as manifestations in Japan, Hong Kong, and Moscow. These occupations famously have drawn inspiration from the uprisings across the Arab world, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, driven by the frustration of the young edu- cated middle classes—fairly new ones, confronting societies controlled by hugely rich ruling elites

OCTOBER ARIANA REINES, JACKIE WANG, LARA WEIBGEN Occupy Wall Street was not a movement, much less a mass movement. For us, Occupy Wall Street was a mass. It was a mass for Troy Davis, murdered the same week Zuccotti Park was occupied, but it was not only a mass for Troy Davis. It was a mass for every person killed in the attacks on the

YATES MCKEE At once a prosaic verb and a proper noun, an ethical injunction and a socio- logical entity, a mobile trope and a site-specific tactic, Occupy lacks a unified meaning. Or, to put it more affirmatively, Occupy involves a surplus of meaning and cannot be reduced to one thing. The word itself is of course marked by ongo- ing legacies of colonial violence, calling