Blake Stimson

Conceptual Work and Conceptual Waste

(moments often charged with social upheaval and political transformation), artists saw professional opportunity in associating themselves and their work with the goals of political parties, emerging industries and other extra-artistic social institutions (Fig. 1). Such opportunity, we should also note, has been a driving force equally for modernist formal experimentation as for postor antiformalist realism.1 At the same time, there have been other, very different moments (also associated with various positions ranging across the stylistic spectrum) when artists did not respond directly to topical issues and did not seek out association with extra-artistic social movements and institutions and instead defined themselves

Andy Warhol's Red Beard

Entering art school in 1945 with a well-developed appreciation for mass consumer culture and a history of making art occupied with that interest, Andy Warhol ran into a very different form of populism in a faculty that had come of age with the social consciousness and worker-identified fellow-traveler culture of the “Red Decade.” This essay looks at the meeting of these two sensibilities in the early development of Warhols mature aesthetic position and investigates its implications for understanding the changing basis of legitimation for high art in a mass-cultural world.

For the Love of Abstraction

The cyborg has long been our most vigorous figure for social imagining, our best and brightest emblem of modernity’s dream of the primal intercourse of the horde. It might not seem so at first blush but, if you think about it, all the fantastic incarnations of the cyborg – since the age of Gutenberg or Galileo, say, or since the onset of the legal institution of private property, or since linear perspective’s mathematicisation of phenomenal space – were never meant to be simple figures for the conjoining of man and machine or even nature and culture but instead stood forcefully for modernity’s vision of the broader category of mediation itself, for the peculiar intermingling and consubstantiation of like and unlike that serves as the engine of modern life. One need only flip through some of the reproductions in the early anthologies published by Zone Books, or think of the wealth of interpretation surrounding the monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , or the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis , or Dziga Vertov’s various human–machine montages, or turn more recently to the yearning tone of Donna Haraway’s celebrated cyborg manifesto, or the sublime dystopianism of the Ghost in the Shell and Matrix franchises. 1 The cyborg has always been, as Haraway put it in her opening salvo, ‘an ironic dream of a common language’. 2 Far better than the tainted social imagining of blood or soil or nation or people, it is the best expression we moderns have ever had for our uniquely restless and reflexive desire to belong. The specific role played by technology in this dream has been described neatly, if a little too passively and a little too technocratically, by one recent commentator. ‘Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice’, writes Yochai Benkler in his ambitious attempt to wrest the promise of new media from neoliberalism, The Wealth of Networks . 3 We might make this point simultaneously more forceful and less determinist by moving it more fully into metaphor: technology is the coin of our social realm , we could say for example; or, perhaps more 1 For one ambitious attempt to open up the history of the cyborg, see Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830 , University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2007.

Communion and Disunion in the Work of Allan Sekula

It is not too much to say that Allan Sekula has long stood for the best critical historical thinking about photography, or to assume that several of his essays will continue to live on as standard-bearers alongside few prized others — the well-known contributions by Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, for example — for what the history, theory and criticism of photography can accomplish. Sekula was not just a critic, however, but first and foremost an artist, so we might well ask how these two spheres of accomplishment affected one another. For example, we might see some of the practitioner’s on-the-barricades passion for logistics slipping into Sekula’s enterprise as a writer in a way that differentiates it Allan Sekula, Untitled. From Waiting for Tear Gas (white globe to black) portfolio, 2000.

The Form of the Informal

From “Black Collectivities: A Conference,” held May 3–4, 2013, at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator. This article places the informal as a social ideal within a larger history of collectivism by distinguishing between two root forms, one derived from formal enfranchisement of political life and the state and the other from the laissez-faire informality of economic life and the market. While we are very aware of the social and political costs associated with collectivisms that derive their organizational principle from the state, on the whole we are much less attentive to the costs borne by collectivisms that derive their form from the market.

Notes from the Field: Detail

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.