<nettime-ann> This month in Artforum: On the Commons

[geert lovink <geert@desk.nl>]

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This month in Artforum: On the Commons. Artforum presents two extended  
excerpts from , Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's much-anticipated  
final volume of the Empire trilogy, whose earlier texts—Empire (2000)  
and Multitude (2004)—have, arguably, been the dominant works of  
political philosophy of the new century. Curator Okwui Enwezor sets  
the stage, with a discussion of Hardt and Negri's profound if diffuse  
impact on artistic practice and on the art world more broadly; and art  
historian Pamela M. Lee considers new perspectives on the commons  
offered by the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, whose artistic and  
curatorial projects have appeared in the Venice Biennale, Manifesta,  
and Documenta, as well as, most recently, Frith Street Gallery in  
London.
"Early in this decade it was quite clear, given the sudden  
proliferation of artistic collectives, that vestiges of Hardt and  
Negri's theorizations were being absorbed into numerous  
counterpractices." —Okwui Enwezor
"Raqs's members will tell you that the art world's peculiar fetish for  
collectivism hews to a misty-eyed vision of a storied past, failing to  
capture what is at once more mundane and more insidious about  
collectivism's contemporary forms." —Pamela M. Lee
"Even artistic experimentation and creation that is not explicitly  
political can do important political work, sometimes revealing the  
limits of our imagination and at other times fueling it." —Michael  
Hardt and Antonio Negri
Also: Popularly known as an author of science fiction, the late J. G.  
Ballard was a veritable philosopher of contemporary culture, whose  
keen observations both delineated and anticipated vast, rapid shifts  
in postwar technology and media—the likes of which, his stories  
implied, were forever altering the shape of our global environment.  
The writer is remembered here in texts by editor Robert Weil, film  
director David Cronenberg, artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and  
poet Clark Coolidge.
"If our past has been partly Kafkaesque, our present and future are  
Ballardian." —Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
"I got an erection reading Crash in the bathtub and thought, Hey, this  
is not exactly my thrill of choice—or is it?!" —Clark Coolidge
Plus: Art historian and critic Hal Foster reflects on "Dan Graham:  
Beyond," the storied post-Minimalist's retrospective that traveled  
this summer from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to the  
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
"What Andy Warhol was to the so-called Pictures generation, so Dan  
Graham might be to the Orchard–Reena Spaulings crowd—except that, in  
part because of figures like Graham, art history no longer seems to  
develop in this dynastic way." —Hal Foster
And: Artist Cyprien Gaillard curates "Relocating the Past," a  
speculative exhibition whose "reunion" of displaced monuments ranges  
from Fritz Koenig's Sphere, 1971, to Ramses II temple statues; Scott  
MacDonald views Andrew Noren's films on the occasion of the artist's  
major exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art; Maria Lind  
inaugurates a column on contemporary curating; Liz Kotz gives her  
reading of Words Without Pictures; Nicholas Cullinan interviews artist  
Henrik Olesen; Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer gives photographer and filmmaker  
Elad Lassry a critical double take; Laurence A. Rickels explains our  
thirst for HBO's True Blood; Elizabeth A. Castelli asks what  
sacrifices are made in Lars von Trier's Antichrist; Maria Gough,  
Charlotte Birnbaum, and Bruce Sterling look at Futurism in its  
hundredth year; Ian Kiaer gives his Top Ten; and Huey Copeland  
remembers sociopolitical provocateur and painter Robert Colescott.
Visit Artforum online at http://www.artforum.com

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Visit artguide—Artforum's free directory of the international art  
world, listing art fairs, auctions, and current gallery and museum  
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