‘Critical Designers’ produced by an increasing number of design schools are prompted to address social, political and environmental issues through their practices. Yet, who can afford to continue such effort after graduation?

In a dynamic style holding multiple voices, “Who Can Afford To Be Critical?” discusses the limits that affordability, class and labour impose upon the educational promise of holding a ‘critical’ practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? In fact, where does our agency lie?

Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we, instead, focus first on designers’ own working conditions, targeting them as one immediate site for collective action? And can we engage politically with the world not necessarily as designers, but as workers, as activists, as citizens?

With contributions by Silvio Lorusso, J. Dakota Brown, Marianela D’Aprile, Evening Class, Somnath Batt, Danielle Aubert, Jack Henrie Fisher, Alan Smart, Greg Mihalko and DAE students 2021/2022.

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“I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist “differently” through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens’ labor as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of “performance.” “I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 – 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.

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The book includes the first publication of Gidal’s text from 1978, with a new introduction. Gidal in this dense theoretical essay deals with the limits of language and representation in the practice of experimental filmmaking and writing. Considered as one of the most influential experimental filmmakers, Gidal’s lost text “The Author as Producer of Nothing”, will give a new insight into the theoretical and political context to the artistic film practices. Afterword by Sezgin Boynik. Design by Ott Kagovere.

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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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A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound.

In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art.

Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.

Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop’s essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.

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Harvard Design Magazine 45 – Into the Woods | Spring/summer 2018

To go “into the woods” is to enter both nightmare and wonderment, chaos and serenity. The woods are the threatening realm of wolves and witches, yet also a space of peace and introspection. They confound and illuminate, disorient and clarify, endanger and protect. The woods are where we “come to our senses,” and where we embrace our wilder selves. They are a space of complex life forms and ecological destruction; of growth and decay; of fantasy and ritual; of secrets and control; of hiding and? the hidden.

The woods are often framed as a nonurban place; an entity separate from, and opposed to, the city—even the world; an eternal refuge that can smoothly be entered and exited, gone into and back out of. But how much of our woods still remains to go into—and on what terms?

As designers, we encounter the woods as building site, as obstacle, and as resource—territory to be cleared, but also to be preserved, cultivated, tamed, or simulated. Wood itself—along with its products like lumber, wood pulp, silvichemicals, and charcoal—fuel the building industry and feed architecture. In a period of accelerated climate change, the planet’s woods are disappearing, burning up, threatening and threatened by human existence. How can we holistically address the woods and its ecosystems, and the life and life-giving power they contain?

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine treks into the woods to come to terms with its precarious status as habitat and resource, and to challenge assumptions about wood as material. We won’t be “out of the woods”—this looping conundrum—any time soon, even if the woods as we once knew it, and might still imagine it, has ceased to exist. At the intersection of wilderness, urbanization, and myth, “Into the Woods” embraces contradiction, challenges destruction, and revisits our roots, biological and architectural alike.

“Into the Woods” combines contributions by noted critics and theorists including Milica Topalovic, Lawrence Buell, T. J. Demos, Rosetta Elkin, Jack Halberstam, and Maria Tatar; practitioners Dogma, Alexander Brodsky, Dilip Da Cunha, Eelco Hooftman, and Paulo Tavares; as well as artists Tang Chang, Maria Thereza Alves, Janet Cardiff, and Bas Princen; anthropologists Anna Tsing and Eduardo Kohn; and philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Harvard Design Magazine 45 is edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin, and published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD).

On the occasion of their exhibition at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Slavs and Tatars present Kirchgängerbanger: a new, bi-lingual (Eng/DE) reader on Johann Georg Hamann, the 18th century polemicist, frenemy of Kant, and proto-Postmodernist who critiqued the Enlightenment with an unlikely mix of Lutheran theology and vulgar sexuality, enough to make even Bataille blush: “My coarse imagination has never been able to conceive of the creative spirit without genitalia.” With an introduction by Slavs and Tatars and a selection of Hamann essays including the triple-platinum hits “New apology of the Letter H” and “New Apology of the Letter H by Itself”.

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A major new look at experimental political writing and publishing
Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing. He takes a “post-digital” approach to a wide array of textual media forms, inviting us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce.

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“An intelligent and literarily written account of ‘the art of assholedom’, shining light on all-encompassing and ruthless art as/is life as represented in the acts of Kippenberger, Lee Lozano, Andy Warhol.”
– the northern committee

“Truly unapologetic assholery of which (and because) the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ remain hard to grasp – leaving those who try with nothing but a blank stare: why accelerate on a dead end street? Is there a way out – a secret, or a lie? But told by the beholder it still remains a bitter fairytale.”
– substantial times

“So there is a moral after all, despite the critique of art world mechanism that is convoluted and captivating with a discernible joy for provocation.”
– amsterdam tribune

“A voice that we can’t help but think is yet too cautious to actually touch upon the unknown knowns.”
– the moral observer book review

€13.00

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London, Paris, New York, Milan, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Palo Alto – art is moving faster than capital like a god wind that no-one can stop let alone control. Meanwhile a lot of art writing and ‘critical theory’ is stuck in the comfort zone of the 70-90s when there actually was an avant garde or subculture. For art writing to get back on track it needs to shake out of this nostalgia and start engaging with the nuances of what is going on by covering the new breeds of involvement that have emerged since 2009 – the new sincerities and ironies, the more subtle art practices and social variations of market participation that have developed to deal with the institutional grip. For some time an aesthetic suspension of disbelief helped to provide an alibi that allowed us to participate as if we did believe the market was the key to “validation”, but then quickly vanished into feelings of depression after any agency seemed like an impossibility. As the contradictions got wider, different problems have emerged such as whether art is concurrent with the transitional moments of our present culture or technology, or whether art altogether has reached its informational limit. The art world has slowly transitioned from modernist pretensions that seem like delusional excuses to the public, to developing a new sensibility – one of silent, shared communion, retributions and confessions. It has taken the step into a reality that is more in keeping with the real world of business, design and branding than creating stark ‘alternatives’. Beyond short-term pragmatism and adaptability, how can artists aesthetically work alongside their authentic desire to participate in a logic of the market that by necessity must scale? How can we realistically judge the work of art institutions if they are frozen into following instrumental logics rather than relevance? With the availability of information online, there is no way these logics are not transparent to a committed internet user. Narratives like these happened in Pop Music years ago. Just as the Music Industry had to face up to its own protocols, the Art Industry needs to be judged on its changing developments; the ways art is being used as a financial instrument, art’s new marketing techniques, art as representation of different sociological interests, art as access to power, status, fame, participation and the rest of it. Until art writing gets really into these driving forces, it won’t be able to say anything interesting about art. It also won’t be able to grow or be writing that anyone really wants to read. Art Against Art marks a turning point – the one that says by breaking from the overbearing logic of what seems like an inevitability, we can get closer to the conceptualizations we would like society to experience but don’t. The Editors

9€

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