BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH AND HAL FOSTER, ONUR ERDUR, INGEBORG BACHMANN Seen & Read – by Isabelle Graw

Exit Interview: Benjamin Buchloh in conversation with Hal Foster

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 2018
While I feel I know Benjamin Buchloh quite well, I learned a lot of new things about him reading this conversation between him and Hal Foster. I never knew, for instance, that he once harbored artistic ambitions of his own, for example, or that he almost moved into Dieter Kunzelmann’s Kommune 1 (a plan that failed when Kunzelmann made it a condition that he be allowed to sleep with Buchloh’s girlfriend at the time). In methodological terms, the skepticism regarding the supposedly truthful nature of the autobiographical is a constant theme in this conversation, while it also looks at Buchloh’s professional life from today’s perspective. For example, he admits that Adorno was probably right in his assessment that the 1968 student protests were also a revival of the fascism of the fathers, which he didn’t understand at the time. He also questions the validity of his own criteria for judging artistic practices – according to him, artists must precisely mimetically take on the systems they operate under. This might be the most striking aspect of this book: that Buchloh makes judgments while at the same time challenging their authoritarian gesture. He expresses his doubts about criticism’s claim to normativity, above all with regard to a now global art industry in which, he claims, critics no longer have any significance. Asked by Foster about his own institutional power, Buchloh answers that it doesn’t exist. Leaving aside this blind-spot in Buchloh’s self-image, I would agree with him that the art world has undergone a structural transformation in the last 15 years, in which critics have fallen behind. In my view, however – and here I would object to Buchloh’s finalistic swan song for criticism – this does not mean that critics no longer serve any function. On the contrary, it’s precisely when many are declaring criticism to be dead that it’s more alive and important than ever in my experience. Criticism itself is not dying, then, but perhaps a certain understanding of it is no longer possible. As this conversation shows, it is particularly essential today, as a tool for reflecting upon and analyzing the current changes in art’s systems of value.
New York: no place press, 2024, 184 pages.
Onur Erdur, Schule des Südens

Pierre Bourdieu, “Images d'Algérie,” 1957–61
This fluidly written study by the cultural theorist Onur Erdur addresses the colonial dimension of post-structuralist theory, which has gone largely unexplored until now. Well-researched case studies discuss the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, and Hélène Cixous, examining the extent to which their respective research interests, ways of writing, and key concepts were rooted in the colonial experience. According to Erdur, the key terms and works of French theory cannot be understood without also understanding these protagonists’ experiences of “borders and difference” under colonialism. His study is particularly successful in the way it brings contemporary debates into dialogue with the key ideas of French theory: not only does he demonstrate that “anonymous Kabyle farmers in Algerian resettlement camps” made a significant contribution to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, but he also claims that Lyotard’s appeal for contradiction shows how it is possible to support a cause like Algerian independence without subscribing to all its “theoretical and political premises.” Erdur’s account of how Barthes used both the death of his mother and his stay in Morocco to reorient his writing in a literary direction is particularly vivid. We also learn a lot about the silence of Foucault, who enjoyed sexual relations with “freshly decolonized subjects” in Tunisia but gave them no voice of their own in his theory. For Derrida, too, his Algerian roots were for a long time a “self-imposed taboo,” and yet Erdur also sees Derrida’s method of deconstruction as inspired by the colonial experience, as an attempt to explode the supposedly natural border between self and other. Cixous alone is praised for the fact that, from early on, her autobiographical-theoretical texts circled around her Algerian background and experiences of antisemitism and misogyny in France; Erdur also celebrates her as theorizing gender fluidity avant la lettre. For Erdur, Balibar’s concept of a culturally articulated racism in which aspects of gender, class, and nation are intertwined represents an early form of intersectional thinking, now the topic of much discussion. Rancière is somewhat more critically discussed, since Erdur sees his commitment to “disidentification” as coming close to a Eurocentric universalism. But he also defends Rànciere’s work for articulating a form of political resistance that not only aims at the recognition of minorities but also contains a “disidentifying aspect” that it is ultimately the precondition for political subjectivization.
Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2024, 335 pages.
Ingeborg Bachmann, Senza Casa

Ingeborg Bachmann, 1962
These newly published notes from Ingeborg Bachmann’s archive contain multitudes. They present the writer as as a vagabond, who never felt at home anywhere and was plagued by anxieties. Writing alone offered her an escape, since she saw it as a way of “pushing back the darkness”; Bachmann thus used writing as a way of keeping her feelings of sadness and despair under control. Valuable poetological insights appear alongside fitting descriptions of anxiety in these diary-like notes. Bachmann emphasizes that art should ideally be capable of pulling us out of our personal situations: for as long as art “lays its hand on us,” nothing else can touch us; we forget our troubles and “enter into a special order” – an order that Bachmann describes as referring to life without being contained in it. Just as she gave new and poetic shape to biographical events in her texts and poems, she was able to use this process to point beyond the circumstances of her own life. On the subject of “fear,” she notes that this is ultimately beyond our understanding, since it resides in our heads and has its hand “on every lever” there; it is precisely because fear dominates our thoughts so entirely that it is “physical torture, a guillotine.” In addition to her thoughts on fear, this collection also contains apposite reflections on the “economy of marriage” and her inability to engage in “leisure” activities. There are also passages in which Bachmann surprisingly eulogizes the trappings of wealth, at one point stating that “I really do love luxury.” Like “all sensible people,” she also professes her love of money and disdain for parsimony; that she sang the praises of money at a time when most progressive authors purported to despise it is astonishing. These notes also capture the two sides of “vagabondages”: on the one hand, Bachmann’s restless traveling and stream of apartments and places was necessary, since her writing fed off this turbulence, while on the other she suffered from a lack of emotional stability and financial security as a result. She states that her frequent travels would sometimes cause her to lose herself, only to then add that escaping oneself is impossible. Bachmann captures this duality in a pithy formula: “I am not it. I’m it.” With this, she is not only referring to the tension between self and other in her autobiographically anchored writing, but also the pluralization of this self that staying in so many different places makes possible.
Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024, 336 pages.
Translated by Ben Caton
Isabelle Graw is the cofounder and publisher of TEXTE ZUR KUNST and teaches art history and theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her most recent publications include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (Sternberg Press, 2020), Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (Sternberg Press, 2021), and On the Benefits of Friendship (Sternberg Press, 2023).
Image credit: 1. Foto Rob Kulisek; 2. Foto Albrecht Fuchs; 3. © Pierre Bourdieu / Fondation Bourdieu; courtesy Camera Austria, Graz, Archiv Pierre Bourdieu, N 066/556; 4. © Heinz Bachmann / Familienarchiv Bachmann