Issue 153

Wars can be waged in various forms, from cold to hot, from trade wars to psychological warfare to outright bombardment and genocide. The techniques available for negotiating unresolvable differences can seem endless. But it would also seem that the material of war’s underbelly is capable of a strange expressivity. In this issue, Mary Walling Blackburn takes on the genre of “trench art”—objects crafted from war’s detritus by soldiers addressing material or spiritual needs, or by prisoners or civilians reflecting on the circumstances of war and confinement. In their detailed making and decorative use, Blackburn finds a contorted, diagonal relation to fine art objects. If trench art often miniaturizes the psychic magnitude of war, what would a proportional relation look like, say, if the estimated millions of tons of rubble, human remains, and unexploded ordinance in Gaza caused by US arms could be materially reabsorbed as an “unholy amalgam” of trench art for US art collections, as collective burial and real consequence? If spent bullet shells, weapons, or other war detritus can become decorative trench art, artist Kim Jones’s Mudman on the issue’s cover demonstrates how the psychological trauma of war can transform into material for art.

Also in this issue, Yuk Hui’s introduction to his latest book, Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking, suggests that to remain relevant today, political philosophy must address the primacy of technology in determining contemporary conflicts and alliances. Amidst the volatility of trying to achieve a technological sovereignty that may be impossible today, such negotiations often elude the terms of traditional nation-states and military power, creating an opportunity to revise what planetary unity means. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa compares Cameron Rowland’s exhibition “Properties” and Steve McQueen’s work Bass, simultaneously on display at Dia Beacon, tracing how these artists illuminate the entanglements of aesthetics, politics, and racial capitalism through drastically different approaches. 

Anton Vidokle recounts his close relationship with Boris Groys in a personal reflection on the philosopher’s unusual sensitivity to artworks and artists as foundational for intellectual work. Vidokle recalls the revelatory moment when Groys introduced him to the idiosyncratic ambitions of cosmism and the early Soviet avant-gardes. Part 2 of Rodrigo Nunes’s essay on Aleksander Bogdanov investigates how the philosopher’s views of the cosmos, organization, and human adaptation resonate with contemporary theories of anthropogenic climate change. How to reconcile Bogdanov’s endorsement of humanity’s “dominion over nature” with the present-day polycrisis? Nunes suggests that Bogdanov’s insistence on the horizon of “comradely” cooperation has much to offer us.  

What does caretaking that is decoupled from biological and gender essentialism look like? The figure of the “Mother,” writes iLiana Fokianaki, has become weaponized in contemporary culture to reinforce binary thinking, white-supremacist logic, and neofascist politics across the globe, especially in Europe. Fokianaki proposes the alternative of “othercare”—a practice that draws from Indigenous kinship structures and builds toward broader feminist alliances. In an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising, Jasper Bernes begins from the notion that forms of revolutionary action like the Paris Commune pull from the past while looking toward the future. In this way, the theory of the commune is “both retrospective and prospective at once.” In Marx’s theory of value, Bernes identifies a method for “testing” socialist proposals, even if the abolition of value is not itself sufficient to celebrate the arrival of communism. 

—Editors

Yuk Hui—An Introduction to Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking
Planetary thinking should be oriented toward the future with a new conceptual framework. The obstacle is that today we still think primarily from the perspective of the nation-state and its economic and military interests. The planetary should not be confused with a new configuration of power between the states, such as a bipolar or multipolar configuration, because this does not change the nature of politics. For this would be the mere continuation of the politics of the nation-state; the difference would only be related to who has more power and more control over resources and the world market.

Anton Vidokle—The Martian
Boris has been very close to artists ever since his student days and, while I hesitate to think of him as an art historian or a curator, his insight into art and its practitioners is unprecedented for a theoretician. Maybe this is why the Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin book he gave me years ago was so important for me in seeing the relationship between the incredibly complex trajectory of the Soviet avant-garde and the brutal velocity of dictatorial power: the total work of art that the USSR briefly embodied, and where I came from.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa—ECHO — LOCATION: On Properties, Bass, Bounty, Sunshine State, and Exodus
Given that for those myriad subaltern communities marked as structurally disposable, as incapable of (democratic) rights and the (responsible) exercise of freedom, “the fascism which liberal modernity and civil society have always required has never abided by this order’s mendacious separation of the political from the aesthetic,” how could one expect an art keyed to the operation of these structures, or grounded in the historical praxis of these communities, to conform to the artifice of such notionally separable strictures as those that divide aesthetics from politics, form from content, present from past, living from dead?

Jasper Bernes—The Test of Communism
The concept of value is nothing, for communists, if not a crosshair that flashes red when we need to smash something. There is also in Marx a tendential theory alongside the heuristic theory. The light of communism revealed for Marx a directionality to capitalist production, one that pointed toward its ruin but also its overcoming by communism.

iLiana Fokianaki—The Mother Is Dead, Long Live (m)Othercare: Care as Alterity, an Introduction
The Mother is not only a person or nation or continent; it is also the West’s self-flattering idea of itself. The West portrays itself as the Mother of all Mothers, the beacon of truth and civilization, the arbiter of law and justice. This idea has always been hypocritical, but after the war in Gaza, the West’s claim to defend “civilization” has been exposed as grotesque. Indeed, we may have reached a full-circle moment in history: Mother is finally accepting her true nature, as she revisits with pride her past of colonial plunder.

Mary Walling Blackburn—Wound, Whittle, and Peach
As an art form, trench art is more expansive than soldiers’ craft; it includes objects made by civilians attempting to mediate their feelings about war as bombings escalate and casualties mount. Yet another category within the form wedges somewhere between soldier and civilian: the prisoner/hostage/detainee who generates crafts while in captivity. These makers and their objects increase in number as we read these words—past, present, and future trench art heaps. 

Rodrigo Nunes—From the Organizational Point of View: Bogdanov and the Augustinian Left, Part 2
What tektology can make us see is that one need not deny that costs are real in order to oppose such positions; and, conversely, that to believe in the reality of costs does not entail agreeing with how mainstream economic and political discourses calculate what gains are desirable, what (and whose) losses are acceptable, and what trade-offs are worth it. The real question lies in the criteria and how they are decided.