In his third book this year, Matt Brand explores themes of ephemerality and reflection, turning a book of poems into an exhibition space of impressionistic tableaus. As in the author’s prior collections, time and our relationship to it still take center stage here. However, in these poems, Brand paints with a palette of emotions untypical for his prior work—joy, epiphany, celebration, contentment. This book-sized art exhibition makes pitstops in a James Benning film, Walter Benjamin’s critical theory, a wine fair in France, a first date in Berlin, a Jane’s Addiction music video, a long-distance COVID film club, and a Bernie Sanders meme. The outcome is a text that highlights the richness of our finite passing moments and the gratitude that can be found therein.

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They Have Clocks, We Have Time

An issue to challenge the colonial standardization of time, its measurement, its retrospective reading as “history,” its practice, its memorial production in U.S. sundown towns, Ireland & Palestine, Warsaw & Paris, the Indian Subcontinent, the Horn of Africa, the Sahara, in dictatorial and bordering regimes, and more.

Welcome to the 36th issue of The Funambulist. With it, we conclude our sixth year of publishing, thanks to the continuous support of our subscribers! They Have Clocks, We Have Time is an issue to challenge the colonial standardization of time, its measurement, its retrospective reading as “history” (WAI Architecture Think Tank), its practice, its memorial production, and its representation (Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye) in U.S. sundown towns (Rasheedah Phillips), Ireland & Palestine (Emily Jacir), Warsaw & Paris (Michael Rothberg), the Indian Subcontinent (Syma Tariq), the Horn of Africa (Nasra Abdullahi & Miriam Hillawi Abraham), the Sahara (Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui), in dictatorial and bordering regimes (Shahram Khosravi), and more. “They Have Clocks, We Have Time” is an expression we heard a few times in Kanaky, where the cyclicity of the clocks may reinsure the colonial order, but its end is only… a matter of time.

The issue’s cover is an artwork by Black Quantum Futurism.

The News from the Fronts section includes a text on the Colombian uprising (Edna Martinez), a reflection on solidarity with Palestine (Sophia Azeb), as well as a presentation of the artistic project National Museum of Eelam (Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam & Simon-Pierre Coftier). The issue also includes a short fiction by Shahram Khosravi.

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PERFORMANCE ART FROM ROMANIA AND MOLDOVA

Interviews with: Iulia Popovici & Raluca Voinea, Dan Perjovschi, Szilard Miklos, Matei Bejenaru, Pavel Braila, Farid Fairuz, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Nicoleta Esinencu, Alexandra Pirici, Veda Popovici, Candidatura la Presedintie, Paul Dunca, Ioana Paun, Simona Dumitriu & Ramona Dima, Florin Flueras & Alina Popa.

„The diversity of performance art forms in Romania and the Republic of Moldova speaks about distinct motivations, personal and artistic, in the opinion for this language, but also about the mode in which an art gets to build its own definitions, in specific contexts. There are these definitions that we are searching, through the dialogues with artists, in the present book.”
(Iulia Popovici)

„These days we don’t find each other so much in the street; we don’t find ourselves in the political or aesthetical programme of the recent protests or we simply wait that they generate other metaphors and other concepts, for a new generation of artists (and citizens).”
(Raluca Voinea)

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The Last Acts of Saint Fuckyou by Bern Porter was first published in 1975.

This new edition presents an additional introduction, transcribed from a reading given by Bern Porter on May 19,1985, in Madison, Maine.

Bern Porter wrote this poem, The Last Acts of Saint Fuckyou, which were presented in alphabetical order, with the same number of acts for each letter.

Edition of 500, 2021

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2nd edition – 100 numbered copies

A Manifesto for a fictional political movement that through satire and pop culture references shines a light on the sterotypes and prejudices within the gay male community.

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Foreword by Bill Sherman

Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.

The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective.
The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images.

Contributions from writers, philosophers and curators including: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Ramon Amaro, Noelani Arista, Jorge Luis Borges, Benjamin H. Bratton, Federico Campagna, Arthur C. Clarke, Rana Dasgupta, Eknath Easwaran, GPT-2, GPT-3, Yuk Hui, Nora N. Khan, Suzanne Kite, Jason Edward Lewis, Catherine Malabou, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matteo Pasquinelli, Archer Pechawis, Noah Raford, Nisha Ramayya, Beth Singler and Hito Steyerl.

Artworks by: Anni Albers, Pablo Amaringo, Refik Anadol, William Blake, Ian Cheng, Ithell Colquhoun, DeepDream, Federico Díaz, Susan Hiller, Hildegard of Bingen, Pierre Huyghe, C. G. Jung, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Paul Laffoley, Lucy Siyao Liu, Branko Petrović and Nikola Bojić, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Casey Reas, Jenna Sutela and Suzanne Treister.

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Dissent Without Modification (Bergen Kunsthall), written by Grace Ndiritu, is a research book composed of interviews with radical and progressive artists and thinkers, who started their education and careers in the 1990s. Some are well-known, some are not. They are African, European, and American women working as painters, photographers, performers, hackers, activists and educators, among other roles such as Lisha Sterling, Monster Chetwynd and Kathrin Böhm.

What connects these brilliant women together, now in their late thirties, mid forties, early fifties and sixties; is that the decade of the 1990s had a culturally significant impact on their politics, career and personal life choices. The decade represented a creative coming of age for them all and their lives changed forever. The consequences of those changes are still reflected in their distinctive thoughts and practices today.

The long format interviews that comprise Dissent Without Modification are casual, meandering, philosophical conversations with a wide ranging appeal. Each person’s character is slowly revealed within a backdrop of humour, while touching on many serious universal and global subjects. Topics include pedagogy, race relations, neo-paganism, sexual violence, class warfare, interracial marriage, ecological feminism, contemporary slavery, activism, extreme tourism, African politics, terrorist practice in Western democratic states, and much more.

Dissent Without Modification illuminates the 1990s in a new way, and regards it as a pivotal point in the lineage of today’s grass-roots politics and cultural ferment. on show. The book recalls the Seattle Riots against the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement; the recent televisual phenomenon Catfish recalling MTV’s Real World and the spread of the Occupy movement and the birth of Black Lives Matter through the recent Ferguson and Missouri uprisings. Dissent Without Modification offers first-hand perspectives on the 1990s as the decade “when shit went bad and which we never recovered from,” – to quote Hank Moody, the cantankerous main character of Californication, cult TV show.

At last in Dissent Without Modification Grace Ndiritu takes readers on a circular, revealing expedition into the recent past, sharing its impact with a new generation of readers.

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