watches the clock to parse the question of temporality in current artistic practice.
e-flux Index #2, 512 pp., full color, 20 x 25.5 cm, ISSN: 2997-1950, July 2024
Index #2
“It’s always too late, whenever you take a photograph.”
This laconic remark, which I heard during a recent artist’s talk in Berlin, bubbled up from a discussion upon the often-tragic indexicality or nonindexicality of contemporary photographic practice. JPEGs taken for wonders. Smoke plumes without embers. Footprints crossing the beaches of abandoned resorts. Hands that point at nothing in particular, and the gullible eyes that follow the lead of pointing index fingers. There is indeed something awkward to the snapshot’s belatedness. Its untimeliness. The ways in which, the second the shutter clicks—or that our thumb melds with the appropriate region of our phone’s liquid plasma displays and the resultant file is uploaded to a distant server—the instant we sought to “capture” has passed by and something else enters the frame. Someone blinks, the rubble dust envelopes the scene, the light changes, the hoodie we saw underground bearing the phrase “THEIR DESTINIES WOULD INTERTWINE” disappears behind an arriving subway’s blur, the wind cajoles a neighboring branch we hadn’t before noticed into the family portrait. Photography then remains, contrary to the terms in which it is sold to us by Silicon Valley manufacturers who stress its total immediacy as an instrument for perceiving the world, a stubbornly untimely pursuit.
Can we not also say, “It’s always too late, whenever you start to index”?
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11 Chapters
July 2024
A Brand New Day
With: Charles Tonderai Mudede, Anna Kornbluh, Adeline Chia, Juan José Santos, Xin Wang, and Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
Bad Circulation
With: Salmaan Craig, Maddie Hampton, Jamila Squire, Seth Wheeler, Evan Calder Williams, Anya Sirota, Claudio Medeiros, Victor Galdino, and Jason Read
traces the figure of “circulation struggles” across a series of outwardly rippling concentric circles, from the circulation of militant texts for the Autonomists to the paradoxes of philanthrocapitalist “gifting.”
The Traveling of a Concept
With: Luis Camnitzer, Ecosistema Urbano, Noah Simblist, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art, and Denny Mwaura
combines practical and theoretical approaches to radical and expanded pedagogy.
The Earth Is an Image
With: Oraib Toukan, Antonia Majaca, Sylvie Fortin, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis
zooms out, and further out still, to examine what gets made visible and what is occluded—as is devastatingly evoked by Oraib Toikan’s text on the “things the eye sees that the mind alone cannot decipher,” within the context of Israel’s genocidal occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Leaving Without a Suitcase
With: Tom Denman, Zhen Zhang, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Suzanne Hudson, Chris Murtha, Jasmina Cibic, Ben Eastham, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Andres Lepik, and Łukasz Stanek
draws its title from a description of Ilya Kabakov’s famous “total installation” The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, to gather together texts that examine the im/permeability of nations and their thresholds, as well as the condition of (forced) exile such borders produce.
The Technocapitalist Gentry
With: Leigh House, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Zairong Xiang, Isadora Neves Marques, Gaby Cepeda, Dominique Routhier, Benjamin Crais, and Jonas Staal
data-mines the fantasies, extracurricular pursuits, and downstream cultural impact of the capitalist class enriched beyond all hitherto known limits by Silicon Valley.
The Poetics of Relation
With: Boris Groys, Orit Gat, Ye Liu, Ben Eastham, Michael Kurtz, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Damjan Kokalevski, Vanessa Holyoak, Mariana Fernández, and Stephanie Bailey
borrows its title from Édouard Glissant’s famous book, where he wrote of how “our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.” The texts here open up onto horizons of intersubjectivity, hybridization, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism.
The Fox News Expanded Universe
With: Alberto Toscano, Evan Calder Williams, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jason Read, and T. J. Demos
gathers together a compact selection of essays and discussions on modern (or, following Alberto Toscano’s recent coinage) “late” fascisms and the forms of anti-fascism that seek to resist them.
Transgenerational Witnessing
With: GerHub, Phil Coldiron, Dylan Huw, Florian Idenburg, Gail Brager, Mark DeKay, Christina Kiaer, and Ekaterina Kulinicheva
brings together pieces which recognise and interrogate the status of the home: not just a place to rest our heads or a space to securitise against outsiders (as for the denizens of the Fox News Expanded Universe), but often also a repository of family memory marking the ties that bind generations together.
“Anything can come after anything else…”
With: Anton Vidokle, Ben Ware, Xenia Benivolski, Boris Groys, Stephanie Bailey, and Elena Vogman
draws its title from a skeptical remark against montage, from the dawn of film history, to pool together pieces that play with and investigate montage, collage, listing, and other combinatorial pursuits in art, architecture, and literature.
Only the Sun Works
With: Arseny Zhilyaev, Łukasz Stanek, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Isabel Jacobs, Tom Jeffreys, Elena Sorokina, Xu Tiantian, and Oxana Timofeeva
turns its lens upward toward the source of life-giving energy itself. This final chapter moves from a review of a retranslated novel that deals with solar communism to the avant-garde solar imaginary of the Kabakovs. The issue draws to a close with Oxana Timofeeva squinting into the glare of the apocalypse and asking: “Is another end of the world possible?”