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PREFACE

This March issue of Texte zur Kunst examines forms of dissent. It does so from both historical and contemporary perspectives, and it attempts to conceive of and actualize art criticism as a practice of dissent. As such, this issue aims not only to produce an analysis of concrete instances of conflict in and beyond the art field but also to explore the form of debate itself. This is a particular concern of ours, seeing as critical reflection has deteriorated as a result of the absolutization of market values in neoliberalism. To make matters worse, the triumph of (online) evaluation as a feature of “the metric society” (Steffen Mau) stands in opposition to the central tenets of criticism: differentiation and justification. A defamatory and one-sided approach now often takes the place of nuanced, deliberative exchanges.

By this, however, we do not mean that disagreement and confrontation should, as negative affects, be severed from critical judgement, or that such an avoidance of affect would even be possible. It is precisely in the critical reflection on discrimination and violence that psychosocial factors are of central importance, as movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have demonstrated. The dimension of commonality in the social – that is, the social basis of differences in society as well as acts of solidarity – has to be reestablished, again and again, which also means it has to be fought for. Taking into account the much-discussed structural transformation of public space through social networks, we are also interested in the aesthetic forms in which dissent emerges. To us, they seem to be exemplary models for genres and gestures of an art criticism that also addresses hegemonic notions of class, race, gender, and sexuality as they manifest in their respective roles.

In art, the status of any work as art is traditionally controversial. From the avant-garde’s and neo-avant-garde’s 20th-century investigations into the gap between art and life to the destabilization of art and existence in the virtual realities of the present, artistic practices that open onto lived environments have constantly been redefined in terms of these tensions. As the history of feminist movements in art demonstrates, women artists had to work tirelessly for art to be recognized as a tool relevant to life beyond art itself. The withdrawals, whether temporary or permanent, of Lee Lozano, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Adrian Piper, and Charlotte Posenenske, to name just a few, can be attributed in part to the discrimination they experienced in the art world during their careers. As the art historian Charlotte Matter illustrates in her contribution, a prerequisite for withdrawing from art and, thus, for practicing art as a form of dissent is that the artist already possess sufficient power – only then can they renounce art without endangering their financial survival.

Even an active disengagement from discourse – as a gesture of refusing patriarchal, racist structures and economic exploitation – is still bound up with dominant power relations that determine who participates in public discourse and who is excluded. The writer and director of the Berlinale Forum Cristina Nord argues that this dynamic is frequently accompanied by an assertion of the intellectual inferiority of all those who intervene in the major cultural debates and who, in so doing, bring up and advocate for subjective experience and victimization as affects that can be politicized. Similarly, Natalie Wynn successfully combines complex analysis of controversial topics with unfiltered emotions in her YouTube videos released under the moniker ContraPoints, which take the form of a fictional diary, as Isabelle Graw elucidates in her contribution. With their multi-perspective role-playing, Wynn’s video essays represent a form of dissent production from which, according to Graw, art critics can learn a great deal.

Nevertheless, the differentiated treatment of controversial topics contradicts the specific ecologies of social media, which feature unique architectures of polarization and division. Through the particular lens of psychodynamic processes, communications theorist and sociologist Jacob Johanssen investigates the difficulties and opportunities that social media platforms present. From another perspective – namely, against the backdrop of attempts to grapple with discrimination without implementing meaningful structural change – art theorist Lucie Kolb outlines a form of art criticism that encompasses a reappraisal of the infrastructures of publishing and collaboration, drawing on the artist collectives Rosa Brux and The White Pube as examples.

In its most effective moments, writing – more specifically, literature – can make tangible just how untenable dichotomies and ordering principles are – those operations with which we react to the unknown and conflictual. Literary theorist and philosopher Vivian Liska explains this phenomenon through the example of Franz Kafka’s short narrative “Up in the Gallery,” whose main character is a young circus spectator whose repression is, according to Liska, transferred onto the reader in such a way that the logic of oppositions dissolves for the duration of the story. The narrative element of the enactment of dissent also plays a central role in Andrea Fraser’s performances, albeit with a decidedly psychoanalytic perspective. In a conversation with Sabeth ­Buchmann and Isabelle Graw, the artist offers insight into her newest work, This meeting is being recorded (2021), a video that attempts to work through embodied relationships to white supremacy and racism, as well as conflicts in group dynamics.

The numerous strike movements that have arisen in museums and other art institutions over the last few years testify to the fact that questions of political organization in art are highly topical. When, in November 2021, thousands of students at Columbia University took to the streets in a strike for fairer compensation and greater protections, it also impacted the university’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. Art historian and cultural critic Pujan Karambeigi, who is a PhD candidate in that department, shares a series of vignettes documenting the (self-)exploitation that has become second nature to so many students, who nevertheless resist the precarity and competition omnipresent in academia.

Dissent entails disagreement and a multiplicity of voices, both pointing to different possibilities. This issue attempts to develop related perspectives that lead us away from the apparent hopelessness of mutually reinforcing antagonisms, a dynamic the pandemic has made increasingly apparent. In place of absolutizing gestures, we advocate an engaged form of art criticism that, in working through dissent, finds new ways of addressing social injustice.

Isabelle Graw, Katharina Hausladen, Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov, Vivian Liska, and Cristina Nord