Category Archives: Art

Hito Steyerl at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

In the recent exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK) a movie theatre-like darkness pervades, and scarce light is provided only by the films being shown. This is Hito Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Germany, and it doesn’t seem a moment too late considering her rather impressive career. The Munich-born filmmaker and writer holds a PhD in [...]

Fear of Music: Is Experimental Music an Institution, or Institutionalizable?

Although it never quite fully answers its foundational question, Fear of Music does provide the necessary background for interested readers to formulate their own answers while at the same time raising interesting questions about the relationship of the arts across disciplines.

Garbage Pail Kids, Cage and Cut-Ups – Interview with John Pound

John Pound is an illustrator artist based in California, probably best known as the creator of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. More recently he has been experimenting with software to produce randomly generated comics and animations and just a few months ago even designed a series of t-shirts for Stüssy. Currently he has work in The [...]

The Radical Ambiguity of Tom McCarthy*

If Zadie Smith is to be believed, the future of the avant-garde lies in the hands of artist and writer Tom McCarthy. Through his novels and the parodic/splenetic interventions of the INS [International Necronautical Society], he ceaselessly returns to questions of death and space-poaching in the fissures of the symbolic and political like an agitprop [...]

Them There United States

In his “Frontier Thesis” of 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner expounded his view that the spirit of the United States was defined by its exploration of the Frontier. With these historic exploits, Turner believed that a new American citizen had been born, one with a power to tame the wild and who was fundamentally un-European.
Sixty [...]

Formulary for a New Urbanism

SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest [...]

The Rest is Silence: Interview with Emanuel Almborg

In the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney in East London began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighborhood and continued building until this January. The story of the project’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on [...]