E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T
FROM THE EDITORS
We have a new type of rule now. Not one man rule, or rule of
aristocracy, or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to posi-
tions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to
political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.
They are representatives of abstract forces who’ve reached power
through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of
the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. 这
rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident,
inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they
cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons
to push.
This excerpt from William Burroughs’s 1970 poem “Ah-Pook the
Destroyer” reverberates more than ever in late capitalism. As the world
appears increasingly fragmented and chaotic, even the positivist social
sciences with their technologies of oracular predictions seem to be
purely imaginative exercises as they fail to diagnose even the most
immediate outcomes of political and social processes. “Who is in con-
控制?” seems to be the question of our days. The latest rise of right-wing
ideologies and their seizure of state apparatuses already weakened by
several decades of neoliberal reforms signals a transformation of the
neoliberal global order, a transformation that has yet to be analyzed.
© 2017 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
土井:10.1162/ARTM_e_00186
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Today the broader historical, 经济的, 文化, and political contours
of this possibly new period within capitalism are becoming increas-
ingly visible, while at the same time historical parallels are being
drawn with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, with tsarism,
and with Stalinism. There is a general sense that history repeats itself.
But history’s repetitions—via a temporality endemic to capitalism, 一
of perpetual crises and recoveries—seem not merely farcical today, 但
comical and tragic all at once. In this light, it is imperative to histori-
cize our contemporary repetitions of history.
ARTMargins is committed to a dialectic of contemporaneity and
historicity. We conceive of contemporary culture as a historical condi-
的, while at the same time we see contemporary relevance in histori-
cal studies and documents. Such a historical understanding of the
contemporary might help us find answers to the question “Who is in
控制?” and ultimately challenge the constitution of “this most inse-
cure of all worlds.” We do not believe that the answer is to be sought
within the disciplinary confines of art history alone, or within the
prevalent conception of art as a sphere detached from the social totality.
相当, we want to examine the discipline of art history and the sphere
of art alike as constituted by, and constitutive of, the social totality, A
term that for us includes both social production and reproduction,
technological and scientific development, as well as politics, ideology,
and culture.
The current issue of ARTMargins contains a roundtable edited
by Karen Benezra. In issue 5:3 (十月 2016), we published the first
English translation of the seminal essay “Art, Society/Text” (起初
published, in Slovene, in the journal Problemi-Rasprave [问题-
Debates] 在 1975). Introduced by art historian Nikola Dedi´c, who situ-
ates the text in nascent Yugoslav poststructuralism, that document
considers a materialist analysis of art and literature by inquiring into
art as both rooted within a determinate society and traversed by the
organization of class struggle. Given the pertinence of this approach
今天, both in terms of reinvigorating a materialist critique of “sym-
bolic forms” and for its political commitment, we asked a number of
critical theorists to comment on “Art, Society/Text.” The commentators
explore the theoretical and institutional consequences of the Problemi-
Rasprave editorial’s claim on the renewal of dialectical and historical
materialism.
如果, in a Benjaminian sense, every document of civilization is also a
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document of barbarism, then the promise of a document lies less in its
capacity to serve as a historical testimony of victory than in its ability to
reactivate a failed historical event in its potential for the present. 这
is the impulse behind our publication of the first English translation
of Iranian art student Amir Esbati’s article “The Student Movement of
可能 1968 and the Fine Art Students” in the Document section. 这
text was originally published in Tehran in 1980, in the journal Ka¯r va
honar [Labor and Art]. Esbati’s article, along with the revolutionary
posters that Morad Montazami discusses in his introduction, reflects
a post-revolutionary moment in which the Islamist co-optation of the
revolution had yet to be acknowledged by society.
A similarly disjointed temporality lies at the heart of Benjamin
Murphy’s contribution, “Juan Downey’s Ethnographic Present.”
Murphy argues that if the synchronous reception and transmission
of the feedback loop in Downey’s videos on the Yanomami people
cancels any sense of the past and the future, another type of feedback—
playback—offers the potential of situating the Yanomami as historical
subjects. Murphy argues that the temporal lag between transmission
and reception that playback offers resituates the anthropological
object in the historical temporality of the subject and opens up the
possibility of “coevalness” between the anthropologist and the people
studied.
Christopher Schmidt’s “Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Garbage and the
Aesthetics of Poverty” is similarly concerned with questions of
medium, materiality, 和代表, albeit this time in relation to
a social “other”: “waste,” or the devaluation of labor by capital. 施密特
discusses Muniz’s 2008 series Pictures of Garbage, in which the artist
photographs the garbage pickers—catadores—on the outskirts of Rio
de Janeiro. Muniz’s intention, according to Schmidt, is to resubjectivize
“dead” labor, to turn the catadores into historical subjects by represent-
ing their daily ordeal. Yet Schmidt finds that the photographs ulti-
mately become doubly objectified: the waste commodity appears to be
more alive than the trash pickers themselves, while at the same time
Muniz’s representations of the trash pickers circulate as a commodity
in the art market.
At least since the advent of Pop Art, traffic between the art world
and the world of commodities has not been a one-way street. 但什么
are the conditions that allow for an artistic engagement with consumer
culture and its material waste? This is the question that informs Alex
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Kitnik’s review of the exhibition International Pop, which toured from
Minneapolis to Dallas and Philadelphia in 2015–16. If North American
Pop Art reflects an ironic reworking of the materials of “low culture”
as high art, International Pop, according to Kitnik, demonstrates that
Pop does not necessitate an affluent society. Conceived in an interna-
tional dimension, Pop is marked by geopolitical difference and punc-
tured by localities and their varying relationships to global consumer
文化.
A key concern of ARTMargins has always been the question of
the margins—whether geopolitical, 结构性的, 经济的, 文化, 或者
textual. It is through the textual margins constitutive of a “core text”
that Faride Mereb intervenes in this issue’s Artist Project section.
Colophon as a Marginal Witness explores the colophon as a conceptual
figure, a formal device, a historical document, 和, 更具体地说,
as “a marginal witness to an authorial insurrection in publishing” in
委内瑞拉. Rarely read and almost always ignored at the end of a book,
the colophon bears witness to the conditions of its publishing. 在
Mereb’s work, the colophon appears through traces and fragments,
almost always as an ornament, yet one that, like any witness, 说
either too much or too little.
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
On August 22, our managing editor of four years, Nick Pici, 左边
ARTMargins after defending his doctoral dissertation. We are very sad
to lose him from the team, but we also understand that it is time for
him to move on to new challenges. 然而, as editors of this journal,
we do not want to let him go without a few words of appreciation, 举起-
ing for a brief moment the shroud of anonymity that generally sur-
rounds the managing editor of an academic journal. To all of us, Nick
曾是, 并将继续存在, 必不可少. His extraordinary ability to main-
tain a bird’s eye view of the editorial process while at the same time
being intimately acquainted with every article submission down to the
proverbial “t” soon became legendary among us. As one of the editors
笔记, “I cannot think of an inline query in an advanced, copy-edited
manuscript that Nick did not help to resolve.” A passionate organizer
who could be picky where necessary, yet generous and flexible when-
ever the situation allowed it, Nick showed the most remarkable patience
for the quirks of (一些) authors and, 是的, 编辑. As we were trying to
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come up with a phrase or expression that might most memorably sum
up Nick’s tenure, one especially came to mind: he never dropped the
ball. Not on a single manuscript, not on a review query that we needed
to chase, and not on that copyright issue that seemed unresolvable. 为了
这, for never dropping the ball on us, we thank him warmly and wish
him all the best for the future.
the editors
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