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Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs
Get PDFThe oeuvre of contemporary Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi is characterized by an approach that gives precedence to process over product and combines conceptual art with vernacular traditions, making her pictures happily imperfect. Starting with Kawauchi’s transmedial concept of the image, often positioned between word and image and mainly materialized through photo books, I propose that Kawauchi’s photographs are imperfect thanks to her experimentation with technical mistakes, the vernacular subject-matter of everyday snapshots, seriality, sequencing, and format variation, elliptical visibility, the aesthetics of color, and a non-linear temporality. Imperfection, furthermore, emphasizes the materiality of the medium, and removes photography from the referent-centered documentary domain by way of aesthetic, rather than semiotic, significance. Imperfection also activates different modes of reception, emphasizing emotional involvement and participant viewing
Errant Counterpublics:‘Solidarność’ and the Politics of the Weak
Get PDFThe essay discusses the notion of counterpublics in the context of the creation of the Solidarność labour union in Poland in 1980. The proposed reading of these events not only offers a feminist recontextualization against the grain of Western liberal triumphalism, but furthermore explores the implications of postcolonial thought for the analysis of the recent history of a Central European country as well as for the discussion concerning the public spheres of the excluded and marginalized. The thought of Eduard Glissant, as well as that of Gloria Anzaldua and Gayatri Spivak, allows for a rethinking of these events and theories in a global perspective, thus facilitating a universalizing practice based on a particular, localized experience
‘Submit Your References’:Introduction
Get PDFThe principles of ERRANS are introduced by considering two radically different contexts: Within academic publishing, the literary form of the edited collection is as common as it is denigrated and rarely reflected upon. The account being offered (within an edited collection) seeks to not only reinterpret the status of the genre, but argues in favor of a curatorial errancy within scholarly communication. Yet errancy has also become a crucial touchstone in management and leadership studies, whether as ‘disruptive innovation’ or ‘VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) worlds’, inviting a different consideration of the relationship between capitalism and its political and artistic critiques than the one offered by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello — one which does not consider itself untouched by the errant logics it discerns in its ‘subjects’
‘The Exile from the Law’:Keeping and Transgressing the Limits in Jewish Law
Get PDFWhat is an exilic law? The Talmud was itself located ‘in exile’ without ever being considered ‘exilic’: the self-representation of the Talmud is consistent with the idea that Jewish law might be redacted in diaspora but is still centred on the Temple of Jerusalem. Yet the Zohar offers a unique representation of Jewish law as a central legal product and a metaphysically exiled reality. Hence, Jewish law has not only been born ‘in exile’ but also has an ‘exilic’ nature. An exilic law, then, is a tenebrous ‘path’ that inverts the ‘moral ways’ of Jewish law, as it departs from the ‘exilic centre’ of Babylon and installs a ‘non-exilic centre’ on Mount Moria, where Isaac was almost sacrificed and the Temple of Jerusalem was erected. When Scripture is brought out in an ‘exodus’, it departs from the solid terrain of an ‘exilic law’ and radicalizes the event of Abraham’s being called to sacrifice his own son by producing a notable inversion of the notion of ‘literal sense’. And yet this ‘literal sense’ that has always been there had almost been neglected, just like a ‘purloined letter’ — in every sense of the expression
The Case for Reduction
Get PDFThe ICI Berlin with its 2020-22 cohort of fellows is pleased to present the first publication to come out of its core project ‘Reduction’, launched in autumn 2020. Critical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. The Case for Reduction suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction within and across different fields and approaches — from the sciences, technology, and the arts, to feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches. The event seeks to allow critical attention to dwell on specific forms of reduction and to explore their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Which reductions are to be avoided and which are to be endorsed? Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts? Introduction by Christoph Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger Talk by Sabine Mainberger A Case of Reduction In the European history of thinking about visual art, there is a predilection for extreme reduction: time and again, interest focuses on a single line. It provides an occasion to raise fundamental questions about artistic activity and to problematize artistic practice, work, authorship, and the art system. For example, the one eminently ‘fine’ line allows one to recognize the unmistakable author; the sketchy line or the simple circle gives one a glimpse of the range of a mastery; the one effortlessly drawn line reveals the artist’s membership in a socio-aesthetic elite, and so on. From remarks on the line drawn with a light hand or the spontaneously placed brushstroke in the early modern period and in antiquity, the sinologist and philosopher François Jullien has established a bridge to Far Eastern art and aesthetics. Apparently, European and Chinese culture share the fascination of the one line; despite all other profound differences, their aesthetic ideals seem to converge here. Against this background, a prominent example from recent art history can be understood as an amalgamation of the Western and the Eastern ‘cult’ of the one simple line – and as a (self-)ironic commentary on it. Followed by a discussion with Alberica Bazzoni, Christopher Chamberlin, and Iracema Dulle
