e-flux podcast

Luis Camnitzer and editor Ben Eastham have a conversation following the June 2020 publication of One Number Is Worth One Word, the latest in the e-flux journal book series with Sternberg Press.

For nearly 60 years, Luis Camnitzer has been obsessing about the same things. As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an “ethical anarchist” preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. “If we keep digging,” he writes, “it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed.”

At the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, Camnitzer has worked primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as an art medium has distinguished his practice, influencing generations of socially engaged artists. Though based in New York since 1964, his practice remains intrinsically connected to Uruguay and Latin America, and he represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988. As well as many solo exhibitions, his work has featured in biennials including the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; Whitney Biennial, New York; and documenta 11, Kassel. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate, London; the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo; and the Museo de Arte Latino Americano de Buenos Aires, among others.

Edited by Ben Eastham, One Number Is Worth One Word spans over half a century of the artist’s radical engagement with art education and its institutions, and includes many texts published for the first time. This is a singularly authoritative, antiauthoritarian gathering of a life’s work in art, education, and activism. With mischievous wit and wisdom, Camnitzer’s writings summon an inherent utopianism in egalitarian, participatory models of art education to identify how meaning is made.

Available from Sternberg Press (distributed by MIT Press).

Eva Díaz discusses her essay "We Are All Aliens" published in e-flux journal issue 91 (May 2018) with contributing editor Elvia Wilk.

"For some, contemporary art has become a kind of alt-science platform for research and development projects that offer alternatives to the corporate control and surveillance of outer space. Artists working on issues about access to space are at the front line of a critical investigation about the contours of the future, both in its material form and social organization. Many of these artists are challenging the current expansion of capitalist and colonial practices into outer space, particularly that of so-called 'primitive' accumulation: the taking of land and resources for private use. They recognize that much of the tremendous capital amassed in the early 2000s e-commerce and tech boom is now being funneled into astronomically costly 'New Space' projects such as SpaceX, a company funded by PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, the space enterprise of Amazon's Jeff Bezos."

–Excerpt from "We Are All Aliens"

Eva Díaz has taught at the Pratt Institute in New York since 2009. Her book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a new book titled After Spaceship Earth, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art.

Live recording from the opening of Goldin+Senneby’s exhibition, Insurgency of Life, at e-flux. The exhibition is on view until February 8, 2020.

Goldin+Senneby is a Stockholm-based artist subject. Since 2004 their work has explored the structural correspondence between conceptual art and finance capital, drawn to its (il)logical conclusions. Recent works include a ghostwritten detective novel about an offshore company on the Bahamas (2007–15), a magic trick for the financial markets (2016), and a proposal for an eternal employment at a train station (2026–). Currently their practice is mutating: Drawing on bodily experiences of an autoimmune disease, they are staging a fiction with an “autoimmune tree” as the main protagonist.

Read more about the exhibition here.

Andreas Petrossiants speaks with author Leigh Claire La Berge about Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art, published in November 2019 by Duke University Press.

“The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.” Read more

Leigh Claire La Berge is associate professor of English at BMCC CUNY and author of Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s as well as co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism. Her writing and journalism has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Post-45, the Los Angeles REview of Books and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is also a member of the Marx for Cats collective

Sanna Almajedi talks to composer and trombonist Peter Zummo, and Eve Essex, a musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics.

The music heard in this episode was recorded live during the fifth edition of Satellite at Bar Laika on March 12, 2019, featuring Zummo and Essex.

Peter Zummo is a composer and trombonist whose music encompasses both the contemporary-classical and vernacular genres. His work is informed by five decades of realizing the work of other composers, poets, bandleaders, choreographers, directors, and filmmakers. The way in which he maneuvers the contemporary trombone is genre non-conforming, and still finds a place in any genre.

Zummo worked closely with Arthur Russell, appearing on many of his recordings. He has also collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Phil Niblock, and Yasunao Tone. His music has been released by Foom, Optimo Music, and Experimental Intermedia Foundation.

Eve Essex is a Brooklyn-based musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics, harnessing elements of classical, drone, free jazz, and distorted pop. She has performed as Das Audit (with guitarist Craig Kalpakjian), as well as in trios Hesper (with James K and Via App), and HEVM (with MV Carbon and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix). She has also collaborated extensively with Juan Antonio Olivares as installation/performance-art duo Essex Olivares.

Her first solo album, Here Appear, was released by Soap Library (cassette) and Sky Walking (LP) in 2018. She also appears on Pan’s compilation Mono No Aware. Select solo performances include Artists Space, Outpost Artists Resources, Safe Gallery, and Meakusma Festival.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi.