A critical study of the concept of form in Adorno’s writings on art and literature. Adorno’s Poetics of Form is the first book-length examination of the elusive deployment of the concept of form in Adorno’s writings on art and literature, and the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the relation of these writings to his broader philosophical project. It examines form within the constellation of concepts that exist around it, considering how it appears when seen in conjunction with (...) and in opposition to content, expression, genre, and material. Illuminated from these angles, form is revealed as the site of a complex web of dynamic conceptual interactions. The book thus offers a resolution to a problem in Adorno’s work that has remained unsolved for several decades, and in doing so sets out the consequences of Adorno’s poetics for literary and critical theory today. (shrink)

The absence of would-be palpable skills in contemporary and modern art has become a commonplace of both conservative and radical art-criticism. Indeed, these criticisms have tended to define where the critic stands in relation to the critique of authorship and the limits of ‘expression’ at the centre of the modernist experience. In this article, I am less interested in why these criticisms take the form they do – this is a matter for ideology-critique and the sociology of criticism and audiences (...) – than in the analysis of the radical transformation of conceptions in artistic skill and craft in the modern period. This will necessitate a focus on modernism and the avant-garde, and after, as it comes into alignment with, and retreat from, the modern forces of production and means of reproduction. Much, of course, has been written within the histories of modernism, and the histories of art since, on this process of confrontation and exchange – that is, between modern art’s perceived hard-won autonomy and the increasing alienation of the artist, and the reification of art under the new social and technological conditions of advanced capitalist competition – little, however, has been written on the transformed conditions and understanding of labour in the artwork itself. This is because so little art-history and art-criticism – certainly since the 1960s – has been framed explicitly within a labour-theory of culture: in what ways do artists labour, and how are these forms of labour indexed to art’s relationship to the development of general social technique? In this article, I look at the modern and contemporary dynamics of this question. (shrink)

Starting from the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, with its Brechtian curatorial theme, this essay considers the Left’s varying responses to art’s so-called ‘political turn’. Discussion ranges from the local and regional context of the Biennial’s function as part of Turkey’s bid to join the EU, through to a longer theoretical perspective on the critical debates over ‘art and life’, artistic autonomy and heteronomy, and the revival in avant-gardism. The authors propose that the standard accounts of the intimate connection between the commodity (...) and art have become politically counterproductive. They suggest that Marxist analysis needs to develop a more complexly-articulated philosophical reflection on the relation between economy, politics, and art ‐ and between political and aesthetic praxes ‐ if it is to advance its longstanding contributions to considerations of ‘aesthetics and politics’. (shrink)

From its beginning in the 1940s, the nuclear regime has been the subject of aesthetic as well as political practices and interventions. This article examines a number of such interventions, from the Surrealists via the Situationists to the present. The focus is on forms of aesthetic activism that challenges the reigning thanatocracy. Key figures are Roberto Matta and Wolfgang Paalen, Situationists such as Debord and Vaneigem in the late 1950s and 1960s, later writings by ex-Situationists and pro-Situs such as René (...) Riesel and Jaime Semprun, as well as contemporary artists such as Ei Arakawa and The Otolith Group. Through concepts and tropes such as invisibility, survival and mutation, these practitioners seek to counteract the “insensible” nature of radiation and problematize post-war society’s dependency on nuclear deterrence and “peaceful” nuclear technology alike. (shrink)

Justin Raden reviews the Postmodern/Postwar — and After, edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hobarek, and Daniel Worden.

Suther contrasts Theodor Adorno’s idea of “truth” in the work of art with Martin Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. Ultimately, the piece argues for a materialist aesthetics through Adorno’s account of modernism, suggesting that the “dissonance” intrinsic to modernist works of art activates the intellect of the beholder, disclosing the contradictions of capital.

Amanda Armstrong reads Marx’s famous figuration of the dancing table, situating it historically so that we might glean something new about Capital, Volume I and capital itself: “Capital is a splintered text, pulled apart by the varied strains of materialism that course through its pages: the wooden table figures forth the text’s non-identity with itself.”.