A Conversation with Aliza Shvarts

Aliza Shvarts first came to widespread attention when her Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008), consisting of a yearlong performance of self-induced miscarriages, was declared a “fiction” by Yale University and censored from public exhibition. That controversial work was on view for the first time in New York as part of her 2020 exhibition Purported at Art in General. It frames the areas of inquiry she has continued to explore: how the body means and matters and how the subject consents and dissents. In this in-depth conversation, Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts discuss the exhibition and a wide range of topics relevant to contemporary feminist practice and thought: the genealogy of citation; the uses of theory; speech action; rape kits; nonconsensual collaboration; queer kinship; and memes.

On Epigenesis

“On Epigenesis” consists of a series of interrelated short articles examining the philosophical concept of epigenesis, with a particular focus on Catherine Malabou's development of it in contemporary thought. Alexander Miller introduces the topic of epigenesis and considers its significance as a new paradigm. He also presents the reader with an overview of Malabou's work on the topic: Drawing from recent advances in the life sciences as well as the Western philosophical tradition, he claims, Malabou has proposed “an epigenetic paradigm for rationality” for the 21st century. Catherine Malabou explains that when, in 2001, the scientific journal Nature published virtually the entire sequence of three billion bases that make up the human genome, people were surprised: Only five percent of the sequence turned out to actually be genes. Assembled in bunches and clusters, they are separated by vast expanses of so-called gene deserts made up of DNA characterized as “junk” or “repetitive,” which is to say, non-coding. The sequencing of the genome did not offer the revelations that people had expected, marking the end of the “everything is genetic” creed and announcing the rise of the “epigenetic paradigm.” The present article analyzes the implications of this new paradigm in biology, philosophy, and hermeneutics. Emily Apter situates Catherine Malabou's theory of epigenesis within a broader disciplinary context of Continental philosophy, the cognitive turn, and what a brain does or “is” as an object of aesthetic representation. Peter Szendy argues that even if they are not the central focus of her philosophical work, media and medial metaphors play a key role in Catherine Malabou's understanding of epigenetics. Indeed, her views on the epigenetic paradigm shift could lead to a rethinking of mediality. A medium, according to such an epigenetic approach, would be neither simply a storage space nor a carrier: It would be what happens along with the events (whether they involve works or data) that it hosts or transports. Emanuela Bianchi asks whether the epigenesis of “pure reason” can in any sense be “pure,” since epigenesis necessarily involves empirical processes. Foregrounding the topological involvement of the developing organism in its environment in both biological and psychoanalytic registers, she suggests a way forward can be found in thinking of the genesis of reason as both empirical and rational. Alexander R. Galloway traces an etymological path from “epigenetic” back to the Greek verb “gignomai,” meaning “to be born” or “to become.” But what is becoming? And why is becoming better than (mere) being? One answer is that becoming helps one to escape the confines of identity and rote determination. But what happens when the epigenetic paradigm becomes dominant, when contingency, evolution, and becoming prevail over essence, stasis, and determinism?

Screening Memories

Through the lenses of feminism and psychoanalysis, this essay traces the use of screens, both literal and metaphoric, in the performance and video-installation works of the multi-disciplinary artist Suzanne Bocanegra. These complex pieces engage with ideas around voyeurism, identification, and screen memory, evoking Bocanegra's idiosyncratic cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lu Märten: An Introduction to Four Texts

This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.

Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten's Feminist “Objectivity”

“Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten's Feminist ‘Objectivity’” highlights the feminist stakes of German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten's interventions in the interwar discourses on art and labor, on objectivity (Sachlichkeit), and the new media of film and radio. The essay argues that Märten's contributions to these areas sit squarely within more familiar narratives of materialist aesthetics and Weimar culture (from Walter Benjamin's epochal Artwork Essay to the Bauhaus) and that they do so on account of her heterodox reading of Marx and commitment to Spinoza's monism. In Märten's view, this non-binary materialism offered an alternative, non-Hegelian route to a materialist conception of art or as she preferred to say, form. In contrast to art history's academic formalism, Märten espouses a notion of form that does not maintain art's autonomy but instead connects art to other social fields. Here form always evolves out of informality. The essay traces the close bond between art work and life work across Märten's multiple publications, including her theoretical magnum opus Essence and Transformation of Forms/Arts and her studies on The Economic Conditions of Artists and The Female Artist. In so doing, the text contributes to revisiting the firm boundaries that art history has drawn between objects and communities.

Art Writing and Allegory in the Anthropocene

This essay traces the emergence of a rich and densely layered field of art writing within the Anthropocene. We ask: If the Anthropocene is all around us, where is it in art writing? We identify the emergence of Anthropocenic art writing: writing that is not art writing about the Anthropocene per se but rather art writing that takes its cue from the operations and outcomes of the Anthropocene itself, including its flagrant disregard for boundaries (disciplinary and otherwise), and its agency. We find such strategies already at work, particularly, in writing by artists such as Hito Steyerl, Martha Rosler, and Chris Kraus, as well as in writing that is polyphonic either through the collaboration of multiple writers or through collage. We map art writing's strata (its past and present delineations, some of its cardinal points) in order to identify sites of resistance to the accelerations of the contemporary era, which is to say places where deceleration and deliberation may be possible. Anthropocenic art writing claims such modes as its own. While for scientists the Anthropocene has been marked by the contestation of golden spikes, in art writing these proxy signals go far beyond employing “nature” and the environment as a theme or topic, taking the Anthropocene as an allegorical mode itself.

Lying in the Gallery

This essay addresses a recent exhibition phenomenon associated with time-based art: the striking preponderance of beds, beanbag chairs, and other horizontal viewing platforms in the staging of such work. Indeed, in black-box galleries around the world, viewers have been increasingly solicited to go horizontal. What might these new modes of display tell us about contemporary cultures of work when compared to historical examples from the 1960s, particularly in regard to the mass phenomenon known as “burnout” in the present? Might such novel conditions of reception shed light on the shifting interactions between humans and computers in what the ethnographer Marcel Mauss called nearly one hundred years ago, the “civilization of latitude”? Departing from Niki de Saint Phalle's She (1966)—an immersive media environment presented as a recumbent female figure—the essay argues that lying in the gallery chimes with technologies of work post-Internet, our incorporation of its media platforms, and the generalization of the network as a ubiquitous and ambient resource.

On Black Affective Forms: A Conversation with Garrett Bradley

In this conversation—recorded in 2019 for the artist's first solo museum exhibition—New Orleans–based Garrett Bradley discusses her filmic work as well as its relationship to institutional archives and personal communities with art historian Huey Copeland. What emerges is a critical account of Bradley's evolving Black feminist practice—its inspirations, antecedents, and analogues—which puts pressure on filmic conventions to move toward an “affective resymbolization” of America's racial imaginaries and the means through which they might be contested, shared, and visualized for audiences on all sides of the color line.

Lu Märten: Four Texts

This article collects four texts written by German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970): “Artistic Aspects of Labor in Old and New Times” Published in 1903 in the social-democratic journal Die Zeit at a time when Märten dedicated the majority of her writings on form to feminist perspectives on housing and reproduction. It is her first systematic essay on what will become a central concern of her own “life-work,” namely, the question of how to break open the capitalized division between “productive labor” and what Märten calls “social-personal” work. Märten thus sketches an understanding of labor outside of its capitalist determinations and notions of progressive temporality. Essence and Transformation of Forms (Arts) This text appeared in 1924 in the journal Arbeiterliteratur. Its immediate objective was to explain the aim of her similarly titled book to a proletarian audience. In this short summary, Märten emphasizes the importance of ethnography for her project. Rather than isolating forms from their social surroundings, as was traditional in art history, the practice of viewing forms ethnographically allows their origins to be seen in a broader framework of social-collective materialities and vital needs. Märten argues that this shift in perspective could be an aid de-fetishizing workerss relationships with the object world. “Art and Proletariat” This was first published in 1925 in Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion and later that year reprinted in Czech translation in Pásmo, a magazine run by the revolutionary artist collective Devětsil. The article argues that the notion of “proletarian art” is politically and systematically pointless given that “art” is merely the historically specific, impoverished manifestation of form under the conditions of industrial capitalism. In place of art, Märten draws on the notion of “classless form” in order to imagine a monist state of form beyond the divisions of class, gender, and species. “Workers and Film” Written in 1928, this text was not printed during Märten's lifetime, instead serving as a script for a radio broadcast, as was the case for most of her published and unpublished texts on film. Almost a decade before Walter Benjamin's Artwork essay (1936), Märten's “Workers and Film,” along with numerous other articles and radio broadcasts, addressed strikingly similar questions, yet under profoundly different premises. In Märten's synthetic understanding of a monist material culture of people and things, film promised to actualize a technologically mediated monism for the industrial age.

NFTs, or The Readymade Reversed

Modern and contemporary art have redefined the relationship between information and matter. Whether in the readymade's scrambling of the categories of art and commodity or Conceptual art's translation of matter into information, the artwork is embedded in a dynamic multi-media discourse. The NFT, or non-fungible-token, reverses this long genealogy of contemporary art by hijacking the category of art as nothing more than a tool for designing a new asset class, ripe for exuberant speculation. In short, the readymade—whose purpose was to demonstrate the fungibility of artworks when shifted from one discursive category to another—has been reversed.