the thing p. 2

introduction p. 1

the thing p. 2

entwinements p. 3

collecting p. 5

displaying p. 6

publishing p. 8

summary p. 9

introduction

With my recent work I have used the physical object as a starting point to look at certain aspects of cultural making. It would seem to me that the relation to physical things is a decisive characteristic for a civilization, being as they are that ‘other’ we are sharing the space with. In a moment when

‘the thing’ is expanding always further into the immaterial realm I would like to explore this relation to the object in general and to the art object in particular. Beginning with a

phenomenological, in a sense pre-linguistic, relation to the physical object, my work has led me to investigate patterns of cultural making, in other words the system that defines the value and purpose of things.

solid objects is a collection of objects and its cultural life, where the roles of the object, artist, collector, museum, writer, publisher and curator are suspended to reemerge in other possible forms. In this work the text becomes an object, the pocket a museum, the collection a persona, the artist its curator, the writer a sign. solid objects is appropriating the short story ‘Solid Objects’

(1920) by Virginia Woolf as a method of collecting as well as a category of objects. These criteria of collection are applied to the context of the work. The fact that the collection mainly consists of waste material just makes the ontological shifts of the objects themselves clearer, but the shifts set in motion are multiple. To attempt a change in our relation to things, even instantly and within the experience of a work of art, might require presenting an alternative system of value production. A system made in relation to – but not simply mimicking – the system(s) within which it places itself as an artwork. Looking at the notion of the thing has also been a way for me to reflect on larger

‘things’ such art, knowledge and culture, and how their constant commodification and

simplification effects our relation to the most basic of physical objects.

Maurice Merleau Ponty wanted with his work to describe the complex entwinement

between the human and the non- human, how we both create the world of things and are at the same time ourselves shaped by it. In his later writings he claimed that there is a limit not just to our objectivity but also to our subjectivity, and that we cannot fully consider the human without taking into account the non-human. The familiar and yet unfamiliar sensation we can have in front of a physical thing was a starting point for this work. But while solid objects might have begun as an attempt to look closer at my own relationship with the object as well as the art object, it soon turned into a quest around the life of things and how our notion of subjectivity can be challenged by exploring this relationship. With my work in general I’m often drawn to questions of ontology, what things are and can become. This work is an attempt to slow down in front of the thing, to ask questions about its nature that goes beyond the common taxonomies of domination: us and them (we make them, we decide what they are good for). What if instead we would enter a space – real or imaginary – where these divisions are not that clear, or at least where the roles are not pre- determined?

the thing

We assign a great value to intangibles, or immaterial things. In the midst of an aggressive

materialism we seem to be striving for a thing-less reality. And yet, physical things will clearly not disappear, so who will make them and what lives will they live? Without tracing the genealogy of the thing within western philosophy I will bring in a few ideas formed by my own observations about objects, inside of art and outside, as part of my working practice as an artist. The

Heideggerian ‘tool analysis’ very briefly is based on the idea that things in our consciousness become equipment, something in-order to… and tend to withdraw from us and become invisible.

Unless, of course, they break. In other words, as things become dysfunctional they also become visible. Something useless and indefinable could thus have a certain effect on us, a thing that speaks to our unknowing rather than to our knowledge. solid objects is in a sense a category of objects that are based on unknowing, many of them being literally parts of broken tools. Knowing what they are is the least important part, and yet this is the question that we keep asking ourselves when in front of them.

Elizabeth Grosz has in her writing about ‘the thing’ looked at another figure from the

phenomenological school, Merleau Ponty, and in particular the ‘wild being’ of his final enigmatic writings. These texts address “the entwinement of the thing with the subject and the subject with the thing”, and deal with questions of how ontological differences are made. In these unfinished texts it would seem as if the writer is moving away from the ideological qualities of the

phenomenological school to suggest, as mentioned above, a limit to our subjectivity. He describes something like the world’s capacity to “double back”, to “turn back on itself” which means that things will always be out of our control.

In contemporary art practice there seem to be a recent attention to animism, or in any case an interest to reformulate this idea and what it can mean

1 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Question of Ontology’ in Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007, p. 128

today: in other words new ways of thinking around the boundaries of the human and the non human, nature and culture and so on.

In the last years a tendency in philosophy to move away from the anthropocentric world view that puts the emphasis on human language can be identified. Graham Harman’s object oriented ontology is one representative of a wider approach that has gained attention under the name of

‘speculative realism’. Harman wants to “include those entities that are neither physical nor even real” under the notion of ‘object’.

He proposes to place fictive objects alongside with the physical ones, not in order to group them together as equally real but to treat them as equal objects.

Harman, who comes form a phenomenological - Heideggerian background, wants to free the object from the reclusiveness they have lived within the idealist tradition that limits them to the human mind on one hand, but at the same time not confine them to the realm of the real in the way that material realists have. This leads to Harman’s theory of the fourfold object. “Everything inside and outside the mind is an object that both has and does not have qualities”

entwinements

For the purposes of my recent work, Harman’s theories are interesting mainly for two reasons. The first one is mentioned above and has to do with the notion of real and imaginary objects. Secondly, Harman is claiming the existence of the object – object relation, to add to the subject – object

relation that has characterized much of western philosophy since Decartes with the division of soul and body, mind and matter. In solid objects, real objects along with immaterial and imaginary ones are in play. The real objects are often part of other objects and have assumed their present form through a series of coincidences unknown to us.

When Marina Vishmidt is articulating an idea of a hidden pattern of the systems underpinning our civilization, she describes it as a relation between form and formlessness, concretion and

abstraction and is referring to the Marxian model of ‘value-form’. The hidden pattern is contagious, but, she underlines, it has cracks, “cracks that can only proliferate” as our society is developing.

In my recent work I have come to ask myself questions around the life of things and how the cracks of the system (as I imagine them) can tell us more than the system itself can. Is it possible that art can provide a form of suspension within the system of cultural production that

2 An example is the exhibition ‘Animism. Modernity Though the Looking Glass’ at the Generali Foundation, Vienna, September 11, 2011 – January 29, 2012. The ‘new’ animism is here described as follows: “In the context of a critique of the dualisms and static categories of modernity, anthropologists have recently begun to reassess animism. Avoiding Western notions of what “life,” “soul,” “self,” “nature,” “supernatural forces,” or “belief” are, can we understand animism as a practice that revolves around different experiences of the relations between subject and object? In light of current ecological, technological, and biopolitical developments, finding novel ways to rethink the boundaries between nature and culture, between human and non-human (nature, technology), between psyche and outside world, and between life and non-life represents an urgent political challenge.”

3 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, Zero Books, 2011, p. 12: Harman argues that idealism ignores the possibility of an ongoing world outside of the subject, while materialism reduces things to their external relations and thus fails to explain the constant changing and becoming of things and the world.

4 ibid p. 143

5 Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Mirror of the Network’ in Uncorporate Identity, Metahaven, Luc Muller Publishers, 2010, p.

562

defines the life of things? How can we approach the unknowing on one hand and the thing on the other in a time when knowledge is becoming a thing, a commodity? Or as artist Claire Fontaine is wondering: how can we as artists work within this paradigm of creativity where artists themselves are becoming the ready-mades?

Harman says that “instead of trying to eliminate the paradox of objects and relations by turning them into nothing but a system of relations, we need to

understand the polarizations at work in objects themselves”.

Any object that we would pick up would inevitably be part of both large and tiny, external and internal, polarizations.

Artist Koby Matthys has with his ongoing work Agency created an alternative system that in my opinion has rich philosophical as well as political implications. Agency consists of a collection of disputable law cases that concern copyright. The things under dispute (music, books, films etc.) are not easily classifiable and together the cases constitute a taxonomy that proves the limits of taxonomies. It’s a complex work that can’t be summarized easily and yet it sets an immediate atmosphere through its presentation. What interests me about this work is the relation between the immaterial and ungraspable aspects of the legal discourse that surrounds the objects and the matter of fact, concrete way of presenting them within the art work. The selection of physical and immaterial objects circulating within this system is idiosyncratic, yet consistent. No difference is made between the material and the immaterial. What comes through is an experience of the complex entwinements hidden in the making of things and cultures.

The place between the material object and the immaterial, even imaginary, one can perhaps tell us something about where we are at in this moment. Although I don’t think of my work as

‘paraficion’, after all a fictive character is providing me with a method that I use in reality. Carrie Lambert Beatty is in her essay on parafiction in contemporary art describing our social and political landscape as being in fact just that, a complex entwinement between the real and the imaginary. She concludes that “(parafictions) are so powerfully and uniquely appropriate to our historical moment – which is to say, powerfully and uniquely troubling.”

The subjectivity in play in solid objects is in a sense fictive, since the gaze that selects the objects is borrowed from an invented personality. It’s a reproduced subjectivity of a kind but the objects themselves are also real and will maintain their autonomy.

The dialectical materialism of the Frankfurt school and in particular the view of Herbert Marcuse that emerges in his One Dimensional Man (1964), tends to see contemporary societies not simply as blocked systems of domination, but as systems of contradictions. Marcuse finds that one of the most disturbing characters of advanced industrial civilization is the “rational character of its irrationality”, which among other things tends to “turn waste into needs, destruction into

construction” and to “transform the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body”.

Art itself, as Marcuse will later state in his last book The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), is by nature contradictory in so far as it is “inevitably part of that which is and only as part of that which is does

6 Claire Fontaine, Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A few Clarifications, www. clairefontaine.wr, 2008

7 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, p. 69

8 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’ in OCTOBER 129, October Magazine, MIT, 2009, p. 58,

9 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Routledge Classics, 2007, p. 11

it speak against that which is.” This is the “power of estrangement” of art which means that it is both grounded in contemporary society and its institutions and at the same time autonomous.

collecting

John, the protagonist of Woolf’s story starts collecting almost by accident, but once he becomes a collector his life begins to gravitate around the desire to find yet another solid object that can enhance his collection. An object that “mixes itself profoundly with the stuff of thought ”, and that often is “of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded”. By the end of the story, John’s former officious law studio has turned into the chamber of a mad man, where each surface is dominated by different curiously looking objects, none of them identifiable, each an enigma, all of them surreal in a sense. John is happily involved with his growing collection but the problem is that he has lost his mind. The objects have taken over and he is not able to share this intense and, in the end, completely personal relation to the things with anyone.

What Woolf’s fictive character does in London of the 1920’s I am doing today, hopefully while avoiding John’s fate. The collection I am building consists of a growing number of more or less indefinable objects, most of them in the scale that fits into a pocket and that the city somehow (consciously or unconsciously) has selected away or put up for ontological recycling.

There is an idea of objectivity that lingers over our public collections but truth is that most of them are built up by private, or perhaps even personal, collectors. Walter Benjamin wanted to show us how the impulse to collect can be an anarchic one, where the desire for the object precedes reason.

His collector, a frequent visitor of both junk shops and museums, has a profoundly democratic attitude toward the material world. What Benjamin was trying to distinguish between was not the private and the public way of collecting but the private and public versus the personal.

The private collector, he says, transforms the things into an external value, just like the public one does. The difference is that the public collection is more justifiable (at least in appearance) on a social and academic level. Needless to say this has proven to be true, and is very much part of the debates around contemporary art. Interestingly, there often seem to be an assumption that part of the fault lies in the art object that made this possible. The collector that Walter Benjamin has in mind is of an almost extinguished species, where the desire towards the thing is about losing ourselves. This encounter with the object would mean to transform the thing and ourselves into another. “The collector makes the transfiguration of things his concern” Benjamin writes, when describing this anarchic collector, a person that by “loyalty to the thing” uproots all that is taxonomically classifiable.

10 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, Beacon Press, 1978, p. 41: “In this sense art is inevitably part of that which is and only as part of that which is does it speak against that which is. This contradiction is preserved and resolved in the aesthetic form which gives the familiar content and the familiar experience the power of estrangement and which leads to the emergence of a new consciousness and a new perception.”

11 Douglas Crimp, ‘This is Not a Museum of Art’, in On the Museum’s Ruins, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993, pp 203 - 204

12 Ester Leslie, ‘Telescoping the Microscopic Object: Benjamin the Collector’ in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, edited by Alex Coles, Black Dog Publishing Limited, London,1999, p 67. Ester Leslie writes: “Benjamin wants to hold on to the specificity of objects, and the possibility of an object’s sensuous participation in a genuine life not dominated by

This idea seems to correspond always less to the figure of the collector in our society. The contemporary art collector could perhaps be described as someone who places her- or himself right in the critical nexus of what Marina Vishmidt is identifying as the “speculative praxis of art”

on one hand and the financial speculation on the other. In describing this aspect of art practice Vishmidt goes back to Adorno’s idea of art as “both the de-functionalization of capitalist

subjectivities and social relations and the apotheosis of these, as an absolute commodity with no use value”. She is pointing to the fact that the relation (dysfunctional or non) between the “open- ended processes of art” and recent phenomenon such as “creative financial instruments” is an area to address in this moment.

The advanced mode of capitalist production where creativity, flexibility and innovation become objectives in themselves just makes the positioning of artists in relation to the larger system more complex, and our relationship to ‘our’ collectors more

paradoxical than ever.

displaying

solid objects is in a sense a museum with its own program and agenda. The museum as we know it is normally a place of knowledge production, where objects are used as keys to a more vast

knowledge. The list of artists playing with the sense and nonsense of museological methods is long, from Duchamp and his First papers of Surrealism (1942) and Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, to recent artists like Kobe Matthys mentioned above. The museological methods are not compatible with the object as a thing of wonder, and while I’m creating another taxonomy, it’s one that doesn’t belong in the museum as institution. The objects of the solid object collection are there as empty signifiers, not as signifiers of a predetermined meaning within a larger system.

The collection will not be an environment where you learn specific things about things but rather an atmosphere where you intuitively perceive something we might be unable to articulate in words.

Artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska are describing the relation between power and gaze, how the commercial power has made it an embarrassing act to let our gaze rest on a thing.

Perhaps the stigma that consumerism has brought over the thing has led to a fear to deal with objects in general because at this point also museums seem hesitant to display them. But within this accumulation and withdrawal relation we have developed towards physical objects in our society there is still another inexplicable attraction to physical matter as I see it. What happens if such a personal relation to things is made public and shared through methods that normally speaks of another, more comprehensible and authoritative relation to the objects? Can there exist such an ambiguity, or perhaps even uncanniness, of the public realm?

exchange and functionalism”. She then quotes Walter Benjamin: “The true, unrecognized passion of the collector is always anarchistic, destructive. For this is its dialectic: by loyalty to the thing, the individual thing, salvaged by him, he evokes an obstinate, subversive protest against the typical, the classifiable.”

13 Marina Vishmidt, Econ-Aesthetics: A Recent Lecture, Barbershop, Agencia, 2011 (www.thisisthebarbershop- agencia.com)

14 Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowka, The Value of Things, Birkhäuser, 2000, p. 45:The artists, in their analysis of the object on display in the museum, are pointing to the fact that it’s nearly impossible at this point for an object to exist within this context as a “thing of wonder”, but things within the imagined “total classificatory system” we are living in are always there to represent something else, a story or a class of objects.

15 ibid, p. 160.

At this point the solid object collection has been shown just a couple of times, but the future – imaginary and real – sites of display are many. Each occasion of display is a way to look at certain aspects of the objects as well as the context in which they are integrated. The work over time could become also an exploration of the politics of display and presentation. Many of the components of the work have their counterparts within the art context: the collector, the publisher, the art object.

Also curatorial and museological methods are at play. While the work at large is discussed throughout this text, what follows is a brief description of two occasions of display.

solid objects À PARIS:

This is both the title of an exhibition as well as of an imaginary book published for the occasion.

The title is reminiscent of the modernist era when Paris was a center for the arts. solid objects draws upon methods of the surrealists movement, a significant presence in the city during this time period. The 'close up', the 'object trove' and the 'sculpture involontaires' are artistic methods that have been functioning as inspiration for the building and presentation of solid objects collection.

Truth is that solid objects À Paris took place in Saint-Ouen (technically outside of the city of Paris), an area known for its historical flea market of highly collectable items 'les puces' and more recently depicted in the news as a multi cultural neighborhood characterized by social and political

tensions. The work integrates 13 objects from the area, some indigenous from the streets around the gallery, other from 'les puces'.

solid objects in collaboration with Stockholms Stadsmuseum (and featuring Sopmuseum, 1902 – 1939):

This work will bring solid objects into a public museological context. The world of the museum is not real like the rest of the world, though at the same time it reflects the reality outside of it. The museum as a context is not in any way an ideal environment for solid objects. Just like the art museum is both the most natural and unnatural habitat for any art work, so the objects in any museum are treated with a double ambiguity. There are parallels and paradoxes in the relations between the artist and the museum (as a naturalized unnatural environment) and between the art object and the artefact. This specific occasion of display will further explore the question of what we decide to keep and what we reject, in other words what we as a society consider valuable and meaningful and not. In this work solid objects will move from the streets of Stockholm into a no man’s land of Stadsmuseet, inhabited by objects that have not yet made it into the collections. solid objects will apply its criteria of collection to this group of objects that have entered into the

museum building (though gifts, excavations or alike) but that have not yet received an inventory number. Some of them of course never will. Artefacts will temporarily and without commitment become art objects, to then return to their previous, ambiguous status.

SSM 3707 – 3787

On the occasion of the collaboration between solid objects and Stadsmuseet, a collection of t-shirts

featuring objects from the nearly forgotten Sopmuseum, 1902 – 1939 (the garbage museum) will

be produced and put in circulation. Sopmuseum was founded in 1902 by Mr. Björkbaum, a regular

garbage collector of the city of Stockholm. Throughout his entire carrier he collected objects,

sourced out of the garbage, and gathered them in a space open to the public at Östra Station. In

1939, three years after his retirement, the sanitary department of Stockholm decided to close the

activity. 80 of the objects were then acquired by Stockholms Stadsmuseum and given the

inventory numbers SSM 3707 – 3787. The t-shirts are things that propose a new life to objects that have already lived more than one before.

publishing

Even experimenting with the idea to shift our relation to the things that surround us is a test. Here is where the presence of the story by Woolf has become both instructive and challenging for the work. The story in itself brings up many of the questions described above in this essay. In Woolf’s story the collector lets the objects take over, he lets go of the need to define them, and this causes his madness. In contrast to the seemingly natural tendency to wanting to share something with others, stands the collector’s indifference to this possibility. His retreat becomes more and more obvious as the story unfolds, in fact the madness stems from the fact that he is unable to share this intense experience with anyone. Curiously, the story Woolf is sharing with us is about a man who is unable to share his: it’s a story about how stories end up having no role to play. Considering the dominant role that stories normally do have over objects (and this has proven to be true on various occasions during the making of this work) I have decided to keep the story as a reference on one hand and as an object on the other.

In 1941 Virginia Woolf put a number of rocks in her pockets and walked into the river Ouse. 2012, 70 years after the event, her work has become free of copyright. The possibility to publish the short story is brought into the work through the covers of imaginary books that use this story as a

method of collecting or as a reference.

The cover is a protection as well as the surface and boundary of the book as an object. The story is in these immaterial, even imaginary, book objects treaded not as a fictive story, but as an ‘essay’ or a ‘text’. The role of the story is thus double: as a work method and as an object that now, just like the found objects, belongs to all of us. The ‘re- covering’ of the story gives it a new surface as an object and puts it in circulation within the art work. The imaginary and real situations announced though the covers (which in any case are all covers of imaginary books) also make them into cultural signifiers of surplus value.

The act of publishing is thus limited to the covers, a way to look at how a text as an object lives within our culture and generates non-textual qualities. But this is not just about the text, it’s about its author as well. Virginia Woolf herself, not only her texts, is a cultural object. I’ve often been fascinated by the impact that book covers have on the way I perceived the text inside, or even worse, on which books I chose to read. The cover has to do with packaging and marketing but it also represents the aspect of the book as an object, one with a very specific authority and ability to radiate cultural value whether we actually open it up and read it or not. The book covers designed for solid objects become cultural signifiers of its system. One after the other, through different colors and phrasings in gill sans they invite the viewer to imagine the potentially inexhaustible cultural life of a collection that is never to be completed. As such signifiers, the qualitative aspects of the covers as things (font, color, phrasing) become as important as – and enter in relation with – the qualitative aspects of the objects themselves (color, shape, material).

16 Other than being published in occasion of the display, the covers are also published on the solid objects blog (www.solid-objects.tumblr.com). The blog functions as an ongoing inventory of the collection and it’s life.

summary

The notion of the thing is constantly gaining new territory, to the point that the artist could be seen as one. In this system, how can we as artists relate to the art object in particular and to the thing in general? The paradigm of creativity seems to force the thing to expand always further into the intangible realm but the physical object will not disappear. So how are these objects made and what lives will they live? How do we value them and what can we learn from them? My impression is that just like the most sophisticated and quoted author has a surface that we can only partly get passed, so has the most basic of objects. I’m interested in the uncomfortable relation between things and us and I think that the uncanniness of the solid objects is that while they seem indefinable and unfamiliar, they end up having a similar effect on us and our stories. Within this work, I have experimented with becoming a stranger, borrowing the gaze of another (fictive) person. This naïve, in a sense pre-linguistic, relation to things that surround us is obviously dysfunctional within the system we live, but perhaps art can work within the cracks of this system.

With the objects in the work assuming a subject-like quality bordering the notion of a pseudonym, I am experiencing a liberation, or at least distance, from the identity construction that is connected to artistic practice. Within the realm of solid objects, other than collect and display I am able to

‘make stuff’ (i.e. publish, announce, produce etc.) in ways slightly different than if I did it just under my name.

The thought that Elizabeth Grosz is presenting in her essay ‘the question of ontology’ is that we have somewhat in our political struggles (and she is here referring in particular but not exclusively to feminism) forgotten – or avoided – to ask ourselves questions of ontology, while questions of epistemology have become widely discussed and accepted, even collapsing what used to be the role of ontology.

By asking ourselves epistemological questions we already to some extent assume an acceptance of the worldly order as it is, its categories and taxonomies, because the question of epistemology deals with what we know of things, not with what they are or can become. In other words the question is not what we do know and how we know it but what we don’t know. Here again I see a connection to Marcuse’s ‘power of estrangement’ and the political potential in its ‘new consciousness and new perceptions’.

I find that the things of the solid objects collection have their own way of being in the world and investigating their surroundings. It seems to me as if the work is indeed partly made by these things, or better, they are able to do things I couldn’t in ways I wouldn’t be able to. This is a realization that has come out of the work and that I would like to continue to develop further. In the globalized world every object, material or non, hides a complex web of entwinements that goes

17 Cindy Smith, Alter-Ego as Consumer, Theorist and Producer: Cultural Studies as Art Production, Academic paper given at the CAA, 2010: Smith argues that working under an alter-ego can permit artists to engage with disciplines outside of the art contexts and to liberate themselves from categories set up by the ongoing professionalization of the art world.

The alter-ego is presented as a possibilty for artists to produce “stuff” that “falls outside the roles generaly ascribed to artists”. While solid objects is not an alter-ego it might still offer me as an artist some of these qualites mentioned by Smith.

18 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘the Question of Ontology’, p.123: Grosz is here exploring the late writing of Merleau Ponty and what she sees a departure from a more fixed phenomenological standpoint towards a Bergsonian idea of ‘becoming’.

beyond our knowledge. At the same time these things pursue their own lives and will most

probably survive us. The idea that a part of a plastic toy can be intimately related and even an equal player to the writing of Virginia Woolf is an ‘improbable symbiosis’

that wants to ask questions around the nature and life of things. But the ontological recyclings of solid objects transcend the objects themselves, perhaps even testing our notion of subjectivity. As I see it, this type of

experience can find links to Felix Guattari’s aesthetic ecology, his almost biological criteria of both art and politics. In this vision the autonomy of art is not undermining, but rather a condition for, its political potential. Art then becomes something that more than questioning our political

institutions explores the possibilities of escaping a human, all too human experience of life.

19 Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Mirror of the Network’, p. 150: Vishmidt describes a certain situation that appear within the system of value production that we live in as being an “improbable symbiosis” between “form and formlessness”, concretion and abstraction. She is referring to the underlying political and economical structures of production, distribution and evaluation. I am here using the term for the purposes of my own work.

20 Stephen Zepke, Towards an Ecology of Institutional Critique, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/zepke/en, 2007:

In this essay Zepke is returning to what Guattari meant by art as institutional critique and his influence by the

“Nietzschean cartography of forces”.

bibliography

Douglas Crimp, ‘This is Not a Museum of Art’, in On the Museum’s Ruins, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowka, The Value of Things, Birkhäuser, 2000

Claire Fontaine, Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A few Clarifications, www. clairefontaine.wr, 2008

Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Question of Ontology’ in Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, Zero Books, 2011

Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’ in OCTOBER 129, October Magazine, MIT, 2009

Ester Leslie, ‘Telescoping the Microscopic Object: Benjamin the Collector’ in The Optic of Walter

Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, Beacon Press, 1978 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Routledge Classics, 2007

Cindy Smith, Alter-Ego as Consumer, Theorist and Producer: Cultural Studies as Art Production, Academic paper given at the CAA, 2010

Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Mirror of the Network’ in Uncorporate Identity, Metahaven, Luc Muller Publishers, 2010

Marina Vishmidt, Econ-Aesthetics: A Recent Lecture, the Barber Shop, Agencia (www.thisisthebarbershop- agencia.com), 2011

Stephen Zepke, Towards an Ecology of Institutional Critique,

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/zepke/en