The Agamben TrendMatrix
June 10, 2010
By Egle Obcarskaite, Timothy Murray and Tobey Albright
“Who are you wear.., I mean, reading?”/ Memorial architecture in Germany
/ Hope for the coming American community/ Gesture is the purest form of politics and also of intellectual activity/ Agamben was, after all, a medievalist: Gucci, nudity, and a socialite report on what he said while standing in line at MoMA/ What Is An Apparatus? was the best book of 2009./ Governments claim emergency executive powers during states of ‘sovereign exception’/ Agamben used as formal resource for collaborative artistic production/ This project was inspired by Agamben. / If some animals are indeed political, bees would be the political animals par excellence./ Dance, dance education, Agamben’s biopolitical theory, and Badiou’s theory of truth/ Blog named after Agamben’s The Coming Community/ Discursive Diarrhea/Talking Shit about H. Ulrich-Obrist / Just your average art-world Agambenista / Taste and social alliances may trump theory’s importance in curatorial practice./ Temporality/History/ The world of gorillas mustn’t be understood anthropocentrically/ This art project takes its cue from Agamben’s essay “On Potentiality”/ dance/ the problem of movement codes and the search for new ones / The Man without Content/ economies of gesture/ Lithuania/ Theory is sometimes employed for the purpose of dissolving the boundary between aesthetics and politics in art-making/ Agamben being used to question the contemporaneity of art/ Jan Verwoert grapples with the meaning of life, the ethical tenor of the times, and the carryover of the ‘New Innocence’/ Review of a show questioning its use of Agamben./ Use of Agamben to lament the state of ruling bodies, mainly the U.S. government./ The art object is sacred the art object is a commodity Agamben and the status of the art object/ Eulogy for gesture/Fingerprinting travelers to the U.S. is like biopolitical tattooing/ Agamben’s idea of potentiality is a good one to keep in mind when trying to train artists/ Giorgio Agamben is not a specialized thinker, but a completist one (along the lines of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard). Does this bear on whether or not he understands art? This is a bad question. / Like Rita Hayworth, Giorgio Agamben gave good face in a film for two seconds when he was 22. He also said, “the face is the site of community.”
Agambentron! Note: Giorgio Agamben Is Best Invoked in the Penultimate Paragraph.
Timothy Murray to me, Egle
show details May 13
T & E,
After a brief online research into three big trade magazines (Artforum, e-flux, Frieze), here’s a cross-section of what I’ve got.
For the most part, I’ve excerpted the paragraph in which his name is mentioned. In writing about shows and more general writings, he uncannily appears 90% of the time in the second to last or last paragraph, which leads me to think writers feel they need something deep to say at the end. As for the other 10% he’s usually in the lead paragraph and very seldom buried in the middle. Should this be attributed merely to ideas of singular authorship and the rules of the game of art writing? Did someone learn this somewhere? Or is it there an automaticity there, an osmotic reproduction of style and form due to the mere fact that we exist together in this historical moment and read one another?
I digress. Look, the important thing is: Artists use him to explain their work. Writers use him to explain artist intentions, artworks themselves, frames of shows and exhibits and art discourse itself. To this end, I’ve divided the found texts between Shows/Exhibitions and General Discursive Commentary. The first three below are my favorite because they actually have a pulse. 🙂
I also like the idea of screen shots of some of these in terms of formatting. Or something.
Anyway, browse when you have time.
Happy German Father’s Day!
Timmy Joe
» Intellectual Trends Digest
⊕
Comments Off on The Agamben TrendMatrix
