Moodwrestling

Moodwrestling is a project by Christophe Coënon, Charles Negre / Thomas Rousset.

Photographers: Olga Cafiero, Christophe Cöenon, Francesco Ercolini, Stella Falcoz, David Favrod, Matthieu Gadoin, David Geeting, Lukas Goretta, Roberto Greco, Elise Guillod, Jonas Haenggi, Nicolas Haeni, Billy Kraft, Charles Negre, Agatha Philbé, Maya Rochat, Thomas Rousset, Anaïs Schrameck, Senta Simond, Lee Wei Swee, Raphaël Verona, Myriam Ziehli
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Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism.
Published by Fillip and Artspeak.

Participants:
Jeff Derksen
Diedrich Diederichsen
Maria Fusco
Kristina Lee Podesva
Tom Morton
William Wood
Tirdad Zolghadr

Over the course of the past decade, we have seen unrelenting levels of market speculation in contemporary and historical art at the same moment that global conflict and war has escalated and world economies have begun to crumble. Concurrent to these developments, there has been a new wave of interest directed toward the efficacy and function of art criticism. Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism will engage with many of the key issues coming out of these conversations, specifically returning to the role of judgment and valuation in contemporary art writing.

Described by Joseph Koerner and Lisbet Rausing as the “troubled objects of criticism,” value and judgment are—and have always been—at the forefront of debates about the social function of the art critic. For many, the end of the twentieth century saw the mitigation of the importance of critical valuation established within high modernist discourses. Instead, many critics argued for a more open dialogue between texts and objects, pursuing modes of critique that allowed for the exploration of ambiguity and interpretation, thus detaching art writing from questions of quality.

With the start of the new millennium, a growing chorus of critics began to suggest that a return to judgment was a remedy to the cauterized state of contemporary art criticism. Yet can judgment operate within new modalities of writing that hold open a reflexive space for ambiguity and dialogue? How would these new forms read? If, as Boris Groys has claimed, critical discourse today is an attempt to “bridge the divide” between the “inherited older public office” of the critic who judged art “in the name of the public” and the “avant-garde’s betrayal of this office,” can new forms of criticism remake judgment anew, without explicit determinations of quality?

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N+1 #9 BAD MONEY.

THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION:

THE EDITORS – The Intellectual Situation
Web 2.0 has been revelatory in lots of ways—user-generated naked photos, for one—but the torrent of writing from ordinary folks has certainly been one of the most transfixing.

THE EDITORS – Internet as Social Movement
“The Russian Revolution,” Wired founding editor Louis Rossetto once said, “was like a schoolyard game compared to the change that’s been driven by the digital revolution.”

THE EDITORS – Addled
Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in Gmail’s data mining of your emails.

THE EDITORS – Cave Painting
For the best writers on video games, games are not art and don’t need to be. Games are, by design, what Plato believed epic poetry to be: ethics manuals for inhabitants of the cave.

POLITICS:

BENJAMIN KUNKEL – Full Employment
Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least.

NARCOTERROR IN MEXICO:

ANONYMOUS – Under the Cartels
In the late ’90s, when I moved to the city of Monterrey, people made jokes about my origins: surely my father carried a gun, surely I was coarse and crude—I was from a border town.

JUAN VILLORO – The Red Carpet
It’s possible to distinguish the ‘signatures’ of the different cartels: some decapitate their victims, others cut out their tongues, others leave the dead in the trunks of cars.

ESSAYS:

EMILY WITT – Miami Party Boom
We were led to an elevator past tanks filled with pulsing jellyfish. The elevator went down to the basement area, and when the door slid open an impossibly tall drag queen greeted us.

ELIF BATUMAN – Summer in Samarkand, Part II
If there is one thing I heard a thousand times in Samarkand, it was how they have the greatest bread in Uzbekistan because of their amazingly clean water and air.

MARK GREIF – Octomom, One Year Later
The octuplets were supposed to be a distraction; instead, the camera teams camped on Nadya Suleman’s lawn got a living metaphor for the crisis.

FICTION:

SAM LIPSYTE – The Blue Newt Faction
The hand-scrawled sign over the door to the Happy Salamander preschool read: Closed indefinitely due to pedagogical conflicts. Please call 917 887 8884 for further information.

THOMAS LEVERITT – The Exchange Rate Between Lust and Money
Oh, the girls have panic buttons all right, and if one of them gets pushed it won’t be cops who’ll come running. That falls under “security,” provided by the landlord.

REVIEWS:

MARK MCGURL – Zombie Renaissance
Critics have been worrying about the death of the novel for decades. The publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is unlikely to change that.

CARLENE BAUER – Why Don’t You?
Because she wants to argue that having sex doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, Valenti insists on divorcing sex from emotional and ethical consequences altogether.

MOLLY YOUNG – Fake Food Triptych
One suspects a preexisting need to make food more interesting than it is, more beautiful, more strange—an impulse more fundamental than a flavor-tripping party.

D 17€
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Haphazard, Ellert Haitjema

“Watching Closely, Thinking Wildly
Foreigness is my job – it captures my atention as noting else does. It’s why I travel a lot. And though I don’t really like moving around the hunger for images drives me to faraway places with foreign customs. But it is not only far away that I have my camera close to hand, pointed at improvised repairs ; wondrous, temporary structures ; inventive packaging and highly personal attributes marked by someone’s inexact use of materials. I am also constantly on the lookout for contributions of everyday imagination around the corner from me and on the street where I live.”

Published by Timmer Art Books

D 35€
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Forde Motto est une librairie, un espace de lecture et un lieu d’exposition de l’écriture créé à Forde
en collaboration avec Motto Distribution. Ouvert en permanence pendant les deux années à venir, et
conçu en parallèle du programme d’expositions, Forde Motto est une tentative d’établissement à Genève
d’un espace de circulation de publications indépendantes, de livres d’artistes, d’ouvrages théoriques,
de revues et de fanzines, mais aussi d’un lieu de conversation et de présentation de projets éditoriaux.

Pré-vernissage le 15.09.2010, 18h – 21h
Vernissage le 16.09.2010, 17h – 21h (La Nuit des Bains)

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Nouveaux horaires !
mer.-sam. / 14h-19h

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Forde
4 place des volontaires
CH-1204 Genève
+41 (0)22 321 68 22
forde@usine.ch
mer.-sam. / 14h-19h
http://www.fordesite.com/

Neuf Veltes Remplissent un Quartaut

Book realised in collaboration with director Antoine Jaccoud, and the team of his show OBESE.
Photography by Matthieu Lavanchy et Jonas Marguet.
Texts by Marie Luce Ruffieux, Jean-Luc Borgeat, Bruno Deville, Sébastien Martin et Antoine Jaccoud.
Published by a plus trois éditions.

D 16 €
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