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Roger Rothman

Bucknell University, Art and Art History, Faculty Member

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Author of "Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dali and the Aesthetics of the Small" (University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

Currently writing a book on Fluxus and the politics of the sixties. The book sets the work and theories of the American Fluxus artists in relation to both the emerging hacker ethic and the prefigurative politics of sixties counterculture. It argues for a conception Fluxus as a constructive, post-critical practice as articulated by figures such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Andrew Pickering, Steven Shaviro, McKenzie Wark, Alexander Galloway, David Graeber, Richard Day, and others.

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Richard Tabor Greene

PUT

University of Virginia

Royal College of Art

University of Notre Dame (Australia)

University of Chichester

Kansas State University

University of Haifa

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Alessandro Del Puppo

Università degli Studi di Udine / University of Udine

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Books by Roger Rothman

Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction

by Roger Rothman and Pamela Fraser

Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of C... more Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of Conceptual Art, artists have been expected by critics, curators, and art school faculty to focus their work on exposing and debunking ideologies of power and domination. Recently, however, the effectiveness of cultural critique has come into question. The appearance of concepts such as the speculative, the reparative, and the constructive suggests an emerging postcritical paradigm. Beyond Critique takes stock of the current discourse around this issue. With some calling for a renewed criticality and others rejecting the model entirely, the books contributors explore a variety of new and recently reclaimed criteria for contemporary art and its pedagogy. Some propose turning toward affect and affirmation; others seek to reclaim such allegedly discredited concepts as intimacy, tenderness, and spirituality. With contributions from artists, critics, curators and historians, this book provides new ways of thinking about the historical role of critique while also exploring a wide range of alternative methods and aspirations. Beyond Critique will be a crucial tool for students and instructors who are seeking to think and work beyond the critical.

https://bloomsbury.com/us/beyond-critique-9781501347184/

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Critique-Pamela-Fraser-dp-1501347187/dp/1501347187/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1542138882

Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small

Although one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century, Salvador Dalí has typically be... more Although one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century, Salvador Dalí has typically been considered no more than peripheral to the dominant practices of modernism. Roger Rothman’s Tiny Surrealism argues that this marginal position itself should be examined as a coherent response to modernism. It demonstrates how Dalí’s practice was in fact organized around the logic of the small and the inconsequential and considers in this context Dalí’s identification not only with the literally small (ants, sewing needles, breadcrumbs, blackheads, etc.) but also with the metaphorically small (the trivial, the weak, the superficial, and the anachronistic). In addition to addressing Dalí’s imagery, Tiny Surrealism demonstrates that the logic of the minor and the marginal was a fundamental factor in Dalí’s adherence to the techniques of miniaturist illusionism; long derided as antimodernist and kitsch, Dalí’s style was itself a strategy of the small aimed at subverting the dominant values of modern painting. Dalí constructed his practice as a parasite on the body of modernism: a small but potentially virulent intruder.

Dalí was a prolific and complex writer and Rothman makes extensive use of Dalí’s writings, both his public pronouncements and private correspondence. By attending to the peculiarities of Dalí’s technique and examining overlooked aspects of his writings, Tiny Surrealism is the first study to detail his deliberate subversion of modernist orthodoxies.

Papers by Roger Rothman

Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic

The MIT Press eBooks, Apr 16, 2019

A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entere... more A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the masters of suspicion and their acolytes hold fast to the work of unmasking hidden forces of oppression, but the ghost shows no sign of departing. Essay published in &quot;Aesthetics Equals Politics&quot;: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/aesthetics-equals-politics

Traveling the Plane

https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/books/1033/thumbnail.jp

Between Fluxus and the Situationist International

Dada/Surrealism, Jul 10, 2020

Fluxus and the Joys of the Small and Slow

Disinterested in perpetuating the commercialization of the avant-garde, Fluxus artists took their... more Disinterested in perpetuating the commercialization of the avant-garde, Fluxus artists took their work out of the gallery and the museum. This chapter explores the community ethos of Fluxus and its dependence upon the construction of new sites of production, distribution, and display. This dimension of Fluxus is not suitable to the established conception of the avant-garde as a practice founded upon critique. It is instead more akin to the operations of what Eugene Holland has called “the slow-motion general strike.” Rothman proposes that Fluxus is best understood in relation to what Holland calls “nomad citizenship” and “free-market capitalism.” Fluxus aimed to “rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism” and to do so by establishing a form of citizenship “within and beyond the boundaries of the State.” The essay is viewable on google books: https://books.google.com/books?id=PUagDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT2&amp;dq=social+practice+art+in+turbulent+times&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwignNjhoo_kAhUElKwKHdUwCIQQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false

The Ideas, Identity and Art of Daniel Spoerri: Contingencies and Encounters of an ‘Artistic Animator’ by Leda Cempellin

Modernism/modernity, 2018

m o d e r n i t y 202 a broader debate about how we communicate (by words, texts, images, face-to... more m o d e r n i t y 202 a broader debate about how we communicate (by words, texts, images, face-to-face encounters) and about literature's putative or possible instrumentality. Emre concludes with a provocative rejoinder and challenge to both "weak theory" and what Jeffrey Williams deemed "the new modesty in literary criticism." Along the way, Paraliterary attempts to strike a delicate balance between readings of traditional literary texts and historical accounts of sociologies of reading. It almost always succeeds on this count; its paratactic structures are welcome and illuminating, and Emre is conscious of the difficulty in positing "micro-and macrosociological" claims at once, as she does (179). At specific moments, her narrative thread gets buried under her own ample and rich evidence: one wishes for more narrative, less description at a few points, so that the scale of claims and evidence are better aligned. But a small price to pay for the admirably far-reaching work this book executes marvelously. Emre's prose is elegant and convincing, and this book will be required reading for scholars of the postwar world's overlapping, incomplete, and understudied interpretive communities.

Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art by Nico Israel

Modernism/modernity, 2016

A Mysterious Modernism: René Magritte and Abstraction

Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Dec 1, 2007

... 2, 1979, p. 1–31; Stuart Hall, »The Rediscovery of Ideology: The Return of the Repressed in M... more ... 2, 1979, p. 1–31; Stuart Hall, »The Rediscovery of Ideology: The Return of the Repressed in Media Studies«, in Veronica Beechy and James ... Instead, Magritte&#39;s relationship to Modernist abstraction was rather more dialectical, in which one thing led in the end to its polar opposite ...

Fluxus and the Art of Affirmation

Dalí's Inauthenticity

Modernism/modernity, 2007

... 44 x 30 cm. private collection. Copyright photo DESCHARNES/daliphoto.com/ Copyright 2006, Sal... more

Fluxus, or the Work of Art in the Age of Information

Symplokē, 2015

Over the past two decades, critical and historical understanding of Fluxus has shifted dramatical... more Over the past two decades, critical and historical understanding of Fluxus has shifted dramatically. Upon its emergence in the early sixties, it confronted criticism as little more than a belated rehabilitation of Dadaist provocation.1 In time, however, its reception changed to such a degree that it is now widely hailed as a crucial precursor to the conceptual and performative practices of the late sixties and early seventies.2 Indeed, today Fluxus is typically presented as the most politically progressive instantiation of John Cage’s aesthetic of chance and, at the same time, as the advent of post-war institutional critique.3 Effective though the current perspective is in capturing

Against Critique: Fluxus and the Hacker Aesthetic

Modernism/modernity, 2015

Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entere... more A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the masters of suspicion and their acolytes hold fast to the work of unmasking hidden forces of oppression, but the ghost shows no sign of departing. Essay published in &amp;amp;quot;Aesthetics Equals Politics&amp;amp;quot;: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/aesthetics-equals-politics

The Cubist Detective, or the Eclipse of theFlâneur

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Dec 1, 2006

This essay concerns the historicity of spectatorship, the ways in which methods of viewing (and o... more This essay concerns the historicity of spectatorship, the ways in which methods of viewing (and of interpreting that which is viewed) can be seen to have changed over time. Modes of visual engagement change, the horizon of expectation shifts, and methods of interpretation are transformed. By all accounts, one of the most significant shifts took place with the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque—a shift not only in terms of pictorial construction, but also in terms of visual reception. Typically, historical periods are bounded by military events. Thus is so-called ‘‘high modernism’’ bound by the two World Wars. On the one hand, this is surely a disciplinary convenience, a useful tool to unite a disparate assortment of objects, practices, and discourses that have nothing more in common than the coincidence of their having taken place between two wars. One wonders, however, is there, in fact, a collection of salient experiences that one can say were common, if not universal, in the years between 1914 and 1945? In approaching this question, one would do well to begin, as Slavoj Žižek has recently done, with the case of Ernst Jünger, for whom face-to-face combat in the trenches of World War I was to be celebrated as the purest example of an authentic interpersonal encounter (6). For Jünger, the immediacy and unambiguousness of warfare served to underscore the otherwise persistent anxiety that everyday social interactions were superficial, if not altogether phony. Jünger’s wartime reflections are indicative of a broad sweep of interwar experience. For example, Tristan Tzara, although at odds in almost every way with Jünger, was nonetheless in full agreement regarding the inauthenticity of

Fountains of Beauty (Duchamp’s Other Lesson)

Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Apr 2, 2020

Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, ... more Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, the central figure in the lesson is Marcel Duchamp. This essay will argue that the Duchampian readymade offered artists a second, far less readily identifiable legacy, in which the lesson to be learned was not the irrelevance of beauty but rather its ubiquity. The main champion of this antithetical legacy is John Cage, who proposed that what made Robert Rauschenberg’s work so significant was that it demonstrated that “[b]eauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” This essay pursues the implications of Cage’s perspective on Rauschenberg by arguing for a different conception of aesthetic experience, one that can be understood as “uncritical” or “affirmative.” Where the critical avant-garde is distinguished by its institutionality at the service of critical cognition, the affirmative avant-garde, precisely because it rejects institutionality, is utterly incapable of critical cognition.

Modernist Melancholy

French Cultural Studies, Feb 1, 2009

The binary opposition that is said to hold between an enthusiastic, future-oriented avant-garde a... more

Arnheim's Lesson: Cubism, Collage, and Gestalt Psychology

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Jun 1, 2007

af Klint, Hilma (1862–1944)

Routledge eBooks, Oct 15, 2018

The Art of the Real : visual studies and new materialisms

Art of the Real is devoted to registering the materialist turn of contemporary theory in visual s... more Art of the Real is devoted to registering the materialist turn of contemporary theory in visual studies. For many years, visual studies was dominated by post-structuralist theory and its attendant nominalism. More recently, however, the materialism of Slavoj Žižek, the realism of Gilles Deleuze, especially as imputed by Manuel de Landa, and Alain Badiou has disrupted this status quo. Today, we are more likely to take for granted the relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. This book considers visual studies and the questions that have led to the new materialism, its ontology and its relation to contemporary politics. While a good deal of work has promoted a materialist agenda at the same time that scholars in art history and visual studies have felt liberated by the call to attend to objects, materials and “materiality,” no publication has yet treated this move for its meta-theoretical commitments. This volume does this by addressing the conditions that have brought about the turn to materiality, the ontological commitments that follow on from new materialist metaphysics, and the political implications wrought by these commitments.

Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction

by Roger Rothman and Pamela Fraser

Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of C... more Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of Conceptual Art, artists have been expected by critics, curators, and art school faculty to focus their work on exposing and debunking ideologies of power and domination. Recently, however, the effectiveness of cultural critique has come into question. The appearance of concepts such as the speculative, the reparative, and the constructive suggests an emerging postcritical paradigm. Beyond Critique takes stock of the current discourse around this issue. With some calling for a renewed criticality and others rejecting the model entirely, the books contributors explore a variety of new and recently reclaimed criteria for contemporary art and its pedagogy. Some propose turning toward affect and affirmation; others seek to reclaim such allegedly discredited concepts as intimacy, tenderness, and spirituality. With contributions from artists, critics, curators and historians, this book provides new ways of thinking about the historical role of critique while also exploring a wide range of alternative methods and aspirations. Beyond Critique will be a crucial tool for students and instructors who are seeking to think and work beyond the critical.

https://bloomsbury.com/us/beyond-critique-9781501347184/

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Critique-Pamela-Fraser-dp-1501347187/dp/1501347187/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1542138882

Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small

Although one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century, Salvador Dalí has typically be... more Although one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century, Salvador Dalí has typically been considered no more than peripheral to the dominant practices of modernism. Roger Rothman’s Tiny Surrealism argues that this marginal position itself should be examined as a coherent response to modernism. It demonstrates how Dalí’s practice was in fact organized around the logic of the small and the inconsequential and considers in this context Dalí’s identification not only with the literally small (ants, sewing needles, breadcrumbs, blackheads, etc.) but also with the metaphorically small (the trivial, the weak, the superficial, and the anachronistic). In addition to addressing Dalí’s imagery, Tiny Surrealism demonstrates that the logic of the minor and the marginal was a fundamental factor in Dalí’s adherence to the techniques of miniaturist illusionism; long derided as antimodernist and kitsch, Dalí’s style was itself a strategy of the small aimed at subverting the dominant values of modern painting. Dalí constructed his practice as a parasite on the body of modernism: a small but potentially virulent intruder.

Dalí was a prolific and complex writer and Rothman makes extensive use of Dalí’s writings, both his public pronouncements and private correspondence. By attending to the peculiarities of Dalí’s technique and examining overlooked aspects of his writings, Tiny Surrealism is the first study to detail his deliberate subversion of modernist orthodoxies.

Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic

The MIT Press eBooks, Apr 16, 2019

A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entere... more A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the masters of suspicion and their acolytes hold fast to the work of unmasking hidden forces of oppression, but the ghost shows no sign of departing. Essay published in &quot;Aesthetics Equals Politics&quot;: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/aesthetics-equals-politics

Traveling the Plane

https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/books/1033/thumbnail.jp

Between Fluxus and the Situationist International

Dada/Surrealism, Jul 10, 2020

Fluxus and the Joys of the Small and Slow

Disinterested in perpetuating the commercialization of the avant-garde, Fluxus artists took their... more Disinterested in perpetuating the commercialization of the avant-garde, Fluxus artists took their work out of the gallery and the museum. This chapter explores the community ethos of Fluxus and its dependence upon the construction of new sites of production, distribution, and display. This dimension of Fluxus is not suitable to the established conception of the avant-garde as a practice founded upon critique. It is instead more akin to the operations of what Eugene Holland has called “the slow-motion general strike.” Rothman proposes that Fluxus is best understood in relation to what Holland calls “nomad citizenship” and “free-market capitalism.” Fluxus aimed to “rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism” and to do so by establishing a form of citizenship “within and beyond the boundaries of the State.” The essay is viewable on google books: https://books.google.com/books?id=PUagDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT2&amp;dq=social+practice+art+in+turbulent+times&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwignNjhoo_kAhUElKwKHdUwCIQQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false

The Ideas, Identity and Art of Daniel Spoerri: Contingencies and Encounters of an ‘Artistic Animator’ by Leda Cempellin

Modernism/modernity, 2018

m o d e r n i t y 202 a broader debate about how we communicate (by words, texts, images, face-to... more m o d e r n i t y 202 a broader debate about how we communicate (by words, texts, images, face-to-face encounters) and about literature's putative or possible instrumentality. Emre concludes with a provocative rejoinder and challenge to both "weak theory" and what Jeffrey Williams deemed "the new modesty in literary criticism." Along the way, Paraliterary attempts to strike a delicate balance between readings of traditional literary texts and historical accounts of sociologies of reading. It almost always succeeds on this count; its paratactic structures are welcome and illuminating, and Emre is conscious of the difficulty in positing "micro-and macrosociological" claims at once, as she does (179). At specific moments, her narrative thread gets buried under her own ample and rich evidence: one wishes for more narrative, less description at a few points, so that the scale of claims and evidence are better aligned. But a small price to pay for the admirably far-reaching work this book executes marvelously. Emre's prose is elegant and convincing, and this book will be required reading for scholars of the postwar world's overlapping, incomplete, and understudied interpretive communities.

Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art by Nico Israel

Modernism/modernity, 2016

A Mysterious Modernism: René Magritte and Abstraction

Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Dec 1, 2007

... 2, 1979, p. 1–31; Stuart Hall, »The Rediscovery of Ideology: The Return of the Repressed in M... more ... 2, 1979, p. 1–31; Stuart Hall, »The Rediscovery of Ideology: The Return of the Repressed in Media Studies«, in Veronica Beechy and James ... Instead, Magritte&#39;s relationship to Modernist abstraction was rather more dialectical, in which one thing led in the end to its polar opposite ...

Fluxus and the Art of Affirmation

Dalí's Inauthenticity

Modernism/modernity, 2007

... 44 x 30 cm. private collection. Copyright photo DESCHARNES/daliphoto.com/ Copyright 2006, Sal... more

Fluxus, or the Work of Art in the Age of Information

Symplokē, 2015

Over the past two decades, critical and historical understanding of Fluxus has shifted dramatical... more Over the past two decades, critical and historical understanding of Fluxus has shifted dramatically. Upon its emergence in the early sixties, it confronted criticism as little more than a belated rehabilitation of Dadaist provocation.1 In time, however, its reception changed to such a degree that it is now widely hailed as a crucial precursor to the conceptual and performative practices of the late sixties and early seventies.2 Indeed, today Fluxus is typically presented as the most politically progressive instantiation of John Cage’s aesthetic of chance and, at the same time, as the advent of post-war institutional critique.3 Effective though the current perspective is in capturing

Against Critique: Fluxus and the Hacker Aesthetic

Modernism/modernity, 2015

Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entere... more A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the masters of suspicion and their acolytes hold fast to the work of unmasking hidden forces of oppression, but the ghost shows no sign of departing. Essay published in &amp;amp;quot;Aesthetics Equals Politics&amp;amp;quot;: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/aesthetics-equals-politics

The Cubist Detective, or the Eclipse of theFlâneur

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Dec 1, 2006

This essay concerns the historicity of spectatorship, the ways in which methods of viewing (and o... more This essay concerns the historicity of spectatorship, the ways in which methods of viewing (and of interpreting that which is viewed) can be seen to have changed over time. Modes of visual engagement change, the horizon of expectation shifts, and methods of interpretation are transformed. By all accounts, one of the most significant shifts took place with the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque—a shift not only in terms of pictorial construction, but also in terms of visual reception. Typically, historical periods are bounded by military events. Thus is so-called ‘‘high modernism’’ bound by the two World Wars. On the one hand, this is surely a disciplinary convenience, a useful tool to unite a disparate assortment of objects, practices, and discourses that have nothing more in common than the coincidence of their having taken place between two wars. One wonders, however, is there, in fact, a collection of salient experiences that one can say were common, if not universal, in the years between 1914 and 1945? In approaching this question, one would do well to begin, as Slavoj Žižek has recently done, with the case of Ernst Jünger, for whom face-to-face combat in the trenches of World War I was to be celebrated as the purest example of an authentic interpersonal encounter (6). For Jünger, the immediacy and unambiguousness of warfare served to underscore the otherwise persistent anxiety that everyday social interactions were superficial, if not altogether phony. Jünger’s wartime reflections are indicative of a broad sweep of interwar experience. For example, Tristan Tzara, although at odds in almost every way with Jünger, was nonetheless in full agreement regarding the inauthenticity of

Fountains of Beauty (Duchamp’s Other Lesson)

Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Apr 2, 2020

Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, ... more Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, the central figure in the lesson is Marcel Duchamp. This essay will argue that the Duchampian readymade offered artists a second, far less readily identifiable legacy, in which the lesson to be learned was not the irrelevance of beauty but rather its ubiquity. The main champion of this antithetical legacy is John Cage, who proposed that what made Robert Rauschenberg’s work so significant was that it demonstrated that “[b]eauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” This essay pursues the implications of Cage’s perspective on Rauschenberg by arguing for a different conception of aesthetic experience, one that can be understood as “uncritical” or “affirmative.” Where the critical avant-garde is distinguished by its institutionality at the service of critical cognition, the affirmative avant-garde, precisely because it rejects institutionality, is utterly incapable of critical cognition.

Modernist Melancholy

French Cultural Studies, Feb 1, 2009

The binary opposition that is said to hold between an enthusiastic, future-oriented avant-garde a... more

Arnheim's Lesson: Cubism, Collage, and Gestalt Psychology

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Jun 1, 2007

af Klint, Hilma (1862–1944)

Routledge eBooks, Oct 15, 2018

The Art of the Real : visual studies and new materialisms

Art of the Real is devoted to registering the materialist turn of contemporary theory in visual s... more Art of the Real is devoted to registering the materialist turn of contemporary theory in visual studies. For many years, visual studies was dominated by post-structuralist theory and its attendant nominalism. More recently, however, the materialism of Slavoj Žižek, the realism of Gilles Deleuze, especially as imputed by Manuel de Landa, and Alain Badiou has disrupted this status quo. Today, we are more likely to take for granted the relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. This book considers visual studies and the questions that have led to the new materialism, its ontology and its relation to contemporary politics. While a good deal of work has promoted a materialist agenda at the same time that scholars in art history and visual studies have felt liberated by the call to attend to objects, materials and “materiality,” no publication has yet treated this move for its meta-theoretical commitments. This volume does this by addressing the conditions that have brought about the turn to materiality, the ontological commitments that follow on from new materialist metaphysics, and the political implications wrought by these commitments.

Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic

Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading

A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entere... more A specter is haunting Theory—the specter of affirmation. All the powers of Old Theory have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the masters of suspicion and their acolytes hold fast to the work of unmasking hidden forces of oppression, but the ghost shows no sign of departing. Essay published in &quot;Aesthetics Equals Politics&quot;: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/aesthetics-equals-politics

Beyond Critique : Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction

Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of C... more Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of Conceptual Art, artists have been expected by critics, curators, and art school faculty to focus their work on exposing and debunking ideologies of power and domination. Recently, however, the effectiveness of cultural critique has come into question. The appearance of concepts such as the speculative, the reparative, and the constructive suggests an emerging postcritical paradigm. Beyond Critique takes stock of the current discourse around this issue. With some calling for a renewed criticality and others rejecting the model entirely, the books contributors explore a variety of new and recently reclaimed criteria for contemporary art and its pedagogy. Some propose turning toward affect and affirmation; others seek to reclaim such allegedly discredited concepts as intimacy, tenderness, and spirituality. With contributions from artists, critics, curators and historians, this book provides new ways of thinking about the historical role of critique while also exploring a wide range of alternative methods and aspirations. Beyond Critique will be a crucial tool for students and instructors who are seeking to think and work beyond the critical. https://bloomsbury.com/us/beyond-critique-9781501347184/ https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Critique-Pamela-Fraser-dp-1501347187/dp/1501347187/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&amp;me=&amp;qid=1542138882