Artistic, Programmatic, Aesthetic, Political and Existential Critique of the World The journal Zenit (Zenith) was a Yugoslav avant-garde review of new art and culture, initiated in 1921 by the poet and critic Ljubomir Micić. Until 1923, it was published in Zagreb, and subsequently in Belgrade. Zenit was sharply criticised, prohibited even, and accused of being …
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Walking on Thorns – Thoughts on the Art World Today
As consumers, capitalism grooms us to live in the present. Contemporary electoral politics — especially as practiced in the United States — and contemporary twenty-four-hour news media also try and trap our imagination in the present. The past and future, history and long-term imagination, are all obliterated or obscured — crushed by short-term thinking. William …
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Federation of Artists of the Paris Commune 1871
Manifesto of the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists Assembly of artists Yesterday, at two o’clock, the meeting of artists brought about by Mr. Courbet with the permission of the Commune took place in the grand lecture hall of the School of Medicine. The hall was absolutely full up, and all the arts were amply represented. …
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What Is To Be Done?
“Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life… In the end communism will triumph.I want to help bring that day.” – W.E.B. Du Bois What Is To Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future …
A Worker Reads History
Japanese Posters Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian workers opposing the war between Manchuria and Mongolia; Design by Yanase Masamu 1927. Chinese and Japanese peasants working together, 1929; Design by Ōtsuki Genji. The Factory as Event Site by Alain Badiou Why Should The Worker Be a Reference in Our Vision Of Politics? The analytical and objective …
Architectural Retrogardism: Etarea city, Auroville city and Sinturbanizam (Sinturbanism)
Etarea City Designed in 1967 for a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and exhibited that year at the Montreal Expo, Etarea was to be a city of 135,000 inhabitants, where the conveniences of automated infrastructure would satisfy future socialist generations. Etarea placed the question of meaning at centre stage. Meaning in architecture was considered in terms …
Poetic Justice
Nina Simone on the Role of the Artist Interviewer: You want your art to live on long after you? Nina Simone: Oh yes. Interviewer: And your music says this, and it speaks to Black people. I want you to tell me what your gut feeling is about. Nina Simone: Well, look, off the top of …
Dissent as an Event in Art
Carla Lonzi, Art Critic – Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) – An Excerpt It wasn’t an interest in art, my interest that is, at the beginning, I have to tell the truth, if I retrace the steps from the very beginning it comes out that I immediately had this existential feeling, like a warning from within, but my …
In the Time of Coronavirus: Thoughts from Naples and Belgrade
On Pessimism and Optimism in the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic — Dušan Grlja from Beton Beton (Concrete), from Belgrade, was a joint cultural and artistic endeavour of the members of the original editorial board. We understood the editorial office primarily as an intermediary (how else), which, following its poetic determinants, would provide an organized, well-thought-out …
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Aesthetic mode of production as reversal – “retournement”
By aesthetic mode of production we understand the combination of factors whose effect is to operate the reversal. To operate the reversal means to give an ideological function to certain real-imaginary elements that are regionally produced by a historically determined state of the aesthetic process. We might say that art repeats in the real the …
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