Introduction: Creative Disruption in the Age of Soft Revolutions
1.
Of Human Bondage, dir. John Cromwell, RKO Radio Pictures, 1934; W. Somerset Maugham,
Of Human Bondage (London: George H. Doran Company, 1915).
2. These lectures were: “1820: Erasmus and Upheaval” (February 26, 2013), “1948: Skinner and Counter-Revolution” (February 28, 2013), “1963: Herman Kahn and Projection” (March 5, 2013), and “1974: Volvo and the Mise-en-scène” (March 7, 2013), all at the Miller Theatre, Columbia University, New York.
3. These works include various artworks and texts: Liam Gillick,
McNamara (1992);
Erasmus Is Late (1995);
Discussion Island/Big Conference Center (1997);
Literally No Place (2002); and
Construction of One (2005).
4. Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,”
Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 198–227; Michel Foucault,
On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in
The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991).
5. Jacques Derrida,
The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
6. Michel Foucault,
Hommage á Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 145–172. English translation by Paul Rabinow, in
The Foucault Reader, 76–100.
1. Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place
This essay was developed during a week long seminar at Columbia University, School of the Arts, in October 2010. Special thanks to Robin Cameron and Ernst Fischer for the use of their notes of the week’s work.
1. Liam Gillick, “Why Work,”
e-flux Journal 16 (2010); Liam Gillick,
Why Work? (Auckland: Artspace, 2010).
2. “This questionnaire was sent to approximately seventy critics and curators, based in the United States and Europe, who are identified with this field. Two notes: the questions, as formulated, were felt to be specific to these regions; and very few curators responded.” Hal Foster and the editors, “Introduction: Questionnaire on the Contemporary,”
October 130 (Fall 2009).
3. The term does not appear in Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,”
Arts Yearbook (1965), and is studiously avoided elsewhere in his writing.
4. See
Carnegie International Artists Bios, 2004/2005: “Two digital video works by Paul Chan engage us in the dual passions that are at the center of his world: art and political activism.” Other references include MoMA,
PS1 Board of Directors list (2010): “artist and activist Paul Chan.”
6. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds.,
Curating and the Educational Turn (London: Occasional Table, 2010).
7. Correspondence with the author, November 2010.
8. “The big Other is somewhat the same as God according to Lacan (God is not dead today. He was dead from the very beginning, except He didn’t know it …): it never existed in the first place, i.e., the ‘big Other’s’ inexistence is ultimately equivalent to Its being the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality.” Slavoj Žižek, “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist,”
Journal of European Psychoanalysis (Spring/Fall 1997).
9. Quoted in Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle,
A Guiding Light, Shanghai Biennale (New York: Performa, 2010).
10. Ina Blom,
On the Style Site: Art, Sociality, and Media Culture (Berlin: Sternberg, 2007).
6. 1948: B. F. Skinner and Counter-Revolution
1. B. F. Skinner,
Walden Two (New York: Hackett, 1948).
2.
A Matter of Life and Death, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Eagle-Lion Films, 1946.
3.
Entartete Kunst, Archeologisches Institut, Munich, 1937.
8. 1963: Herman Kahn and Projection
1. Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).
2. Erving Goffman,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959).
10. Maybe It Would Be Better If We Worked in Groups of Three?
1. Jürgen Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1:
Reason and the Rationalization of Society; vol. 2:
Lifeworld and System, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1981).
2. See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in
Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 132–146.
13. The Experimental Factory
1. Pierre Huyghe,
The Association of Free(d) Time, part of Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno,
The Moral Maze, exhibition, Le Consortium, Dijon, 1995.
2. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in
Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 132–146.