- Associate Professor Gene Ray
Department of Visual Arts, CCC Masters Programme
HEAD – Genève/ Geneva School of Art and Design
Boulevard Helvétique 9
CH 1201 Geneva
Switzerland
- National Hellenic Research Foundation, Institute for Historical Research, Department Memberadd
- Critical Theory, Art and the Anthropocene, Anthropocene studies, Ecocide, Genocide, Mass extinctions, and 11 moreClimate Change, Environmental Humanities, Animal Studies, Memory Studies, Art Theory, Visual Arts, Aesthetics, The Sublime, Art Theory and Politics, Social Movements, and Indigenous Movementsedit
- Gene Ray is Associate Professor in the CCC Research-based Master Program at HEAD-Genève, HES-SO (Geneva University of... moreGene Ray is Associate Professor in the CCC Research-based Master Program at HEAD-Genève, HES-SO (Geneva University of Art and Design) and a senior researcher for the European Research Council Consolidator Grant MUTE: Soundscapes of Trauma (Horizon 2020) at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens. Ray is author of After the Holocene: Planetary Politics for Commoners (Autonomedia, 2024), Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011), editor of Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (DAP, 2001), and co-editor of Art and Contemporary Critical Practice (Mayfly, 2009) and Critique of Creativity (Mayfly, 2011). He is author of essays for journals including South as a State of Mind, Third Text, Brumaria, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Left Curve, Historical Materialism, and Yale Journal of Criticism, and of essays and chapters for books including Rasheed Araeen (Van Abbemuseum, 2018), Documenta 14 Daybook (2017), Camera Atomica (Art Gallery of Ontario/Black Dog Press, 2015), Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Routledge, 2010), and The Sublime (Whitechapel/MIT, 2010). Ray was Project Director of the collective research project The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva (2016-2018).edit
Capitalist modernity has ended the Holocene. The epoch of planetary heating and climate chaos has begun. Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse earth and mass extinction, but how to pull the emergency brake on the extraction and... more
Capitalist modernity has ended the Holocene. The epoch of planetary heating and climate chaos has begun. Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse earth and mass extinction, but how to pull the emergency brake on the extraction and techno-acceleration regime? Alternatives exist, but the capitalist classes are blocking them. This book argues that one such alternative, commoning, offers first steps on a pathway to metabolic sanity and collective self-rescue. As the mutualist and more-than-human association of direct producers, commons ecologies will be a necessary and buildable factor in the strategic struggle to disarm, power down and abolish capitalism.
Research Interests: Technology, Climate Change, Commons, Agroecology, Political Violence and Terrorism, and 15 moreCapitalism, Permaculture, DeGrowth, Climate Justice, Biosphere, Late Holocene, Social Struggles, Decommodification, Indigenous Land Struggle, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Culture and the Anthropocene, Commoning, Capitalocene, Cultures of Conviviality, and Critique of Progress and Development
These twelve interconnected essays probe the dense historical knots binding terror, power, and the aesthetic sublime, and trace transformations in art and critical theory in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. (New York: Palgrave... more
These twelve interconnected essays probe the dense historical knots binding terror, power, and the aesthetic sublime, and trace transformations in art and critical theory in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2nd edition)
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2nd edition)
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Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray & Ulf Wuggenig (eds.), Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the 'Creative Industries' (London: Mayfly, 2011) Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old... more
Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray & Ulf Wuggenig (eds.), Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the 'Creative Industries' (London: Mayfly, 2011)
Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators - the hallowed labors and privileged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world-makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses - are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses old creationism in the new gowns of 'intelligent design', the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entrepreneurs. In the hype of the 'creative class' and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of 'the creatives' is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex resurgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity.
Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators - the hallowed labors and privileged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world-makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses - are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses old creationism in the new gowns of 'intelligent design', the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entrepreneurs. In the hype of the 'creative class' and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of 'the creatives' is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex resurgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity.
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Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds.) Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (London: Mayfly, 2009) ‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and... more
Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds.) Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (London: Mayfly, 2009)
‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between ‘institutions’ and ‘critique’, the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.
‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between ‘institutions’ and ‘critique’, the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.
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This volume edited by Gene Ray collects essays developed from the 1998 symposium on artist Joseph Beuys at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. The included authors are: Lukas Beckmann, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Mel Chin,... more
This volume edited by Gene Ray collects essays developed from the 1998 symposium on artist Joseph Beuys at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. The included authors are: Lukas Beckmann, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Mel Chin, Pamela Kort, Kim Levin, Peter Nisbet, Gene Ray, Max Reithmann, and Joan Rothfuss. This PDF includes chapter 4: Gene Ray, "Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime," pp. 55-74.
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This essay for Searccch, the new CCC Master Programme journal, reads the stakes and difference of planetary politics through a critical engagement with the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Andreas Malm, Kate Soper... more
This essay for Searccch, the new CCC Master Programme journal, reads the stakes and difference of planetary politics through a critical engagement with the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Andreas Malm, Kate Soper and Anna Tsing. “Surviving the Globe” is a supplement to my new book, After the Holocene: Planetary Politics for Commoners but is addressed more directly to artists, art students and the concerns and discourses of art.
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This wide-ranging conversation with Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan covers their new book We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones, the ZAD, commoning, planetary meltdown, resistance to "the airport... more
This wide-ranging conversation with Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan covers their new book We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones, the ZAD, commoning, planetary meltdown, resistance to "the airport and its world," Les Soulèvements de la Terre, art and ritual, and much more.
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Joseph Beuys’ installation Plight (1985) forcefully avows the Nazi genocide by means of negative presentation. The work culminates a collective artistic investigation of negative sculptural strategies for representing traumatic history,... more
Joseph Beuys’ installation Plight (1985) forcefully avows the Nazi genocide by means of negative presentation. The work culminates a collective artistic investigation of negative sculptural strategies for representing traumatic history, opened by the Nouveaux Realistes under the impact of Alain Resnais’ documentary film Nuit et Brouillard. This article for Nordic Journal of Aesthetics outlines this history and analyzes Plight in the context of the ‘after Auschwitz’ crisis of representation and traditional culture theorized by Theodor W. Adorno. For Adorno, Auschwitz demonstrated threats to autonomous subjectivity posed by tendencies unfolding within the global social process of modernity itself. Reflecting on the fate of music, poetry and literature under these conditions, Adorno advocated a hermetic art of silence and dissonance, as exemplified by Paul Celan and above all Samuel Beckett. This article shows that in the visual arts, too, the genocidal violence of World War II was confronted with analogous strategies of indirection. In Plight, Beuys would successfully synthesize John Cage’s symbolic demolitions of traditional music and the investigations of negative presentation carried out in sculpture by Arman and Daniel Spoerri.
keywords Beuys,Negativepresentation,Adorno
keywords Beuys,Negativepresentation,Adorno
Research Interests: Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, Immanuel Kant, The Sublime, Theodor W. Adorno, and 13 moreJohn Cage, Politics of representation, Terror, Daniel Spoerri, The Nouveaux Réalistes, Arman, Theory of Sublime, POST-1945 Art History, Critical Theory and POST-1945 Art History, Art After Auschwitz, art and culture after Auschwitz, Capitalist Modernity, and negative presentation
This essay for the third documenta 14 issue of South as a State of Mind explores the links between ecocide, genocide, settler colonialism and capitalist modernity, and proposes that a reconsideration of the ethico-politics of place opens... more
This essay for the third documenta 14 issue of South as a State of Mind explores the links between ecocide, genocide, settler colonialism and capitalist modernity, and proposes that a reconsideration of the ethico-politics of place opens possible new alliances between Indigenous knowledge, critical theory and art.
Online at http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/895_writing_the_ecocide_genocide_knot_indigenous_knowledge_and_critical_theory_in_the_endgame
Online at http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/895_writing_the_ecocide_genocide_knot_indigenous_knowledge_and_critical_theory_in_the_endgame
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Contemporary Art, Cultural Politics, Indigenous Knowledge, Modernity, and 10 moreFlorida Studies, Genocide, Settler Colonialism & Its Legacies, Ecocide, Settler colonialism, Extinction, Politics of Place, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Culture and the Anthropocene, and indigenous movements and struggles
Essay for ISSUE – Journal of art & design HEAD – Geneva, 24 June 2019; For online version with images and embedded videos, see: https://issue-journal.ch/focus-posts/diasporas-of-the-so-called-anthropocene/
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This essay for the last documenta 14 issue of South as a State of Mind, reflects on contemporary processes of eco-genocide in so-called Florida, and on the 2016 struggle of Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota. It... more
This essay for the last documenta 14 issue of South as a State of Mind, reflects on contemporary processes of eco-genocide in so-called Florida, and on the 2016 struggle of Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota. It can be read online here: South as a State Mind 9
http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/25218_resisting_extinction_standing_rock_eco_genocide_and_survival
http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/25218_resisting_extinction_standing_rock_eco_genocide_and_survival
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Written for the online platform of a series of three exhibitions curated by Katarina Stenbeck, this paper was published online in early November 2016. Ecocide and Genocide are knotted processes in the endgame of capitalist modernity. This... more
Written for the online platform of a series of three exhibitions curated by Katarina Stenbeck, this paper was published online in early November 2016. Ecocide and Genocide are knotted processes in the endgame of capitalist modernity. This essay wrestles with the emotions triggered by anthropogenic extinction and human species supremacism, and argues for collaborative project of productive, politicized, decolonizing cultural mourning. Online at: http://lostfuture.net/chapter-1/texts/gene-ray/
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This essay for ISSUE #8 reflects on the renewed protest form of iconoclastic defacing and toppling of monuments to white supremacism and settler colonialism in the context of current BLM-led protests against police terror and violence.... more
This essay for ISSUE #8 reflects on the renewed protest form of iconoclastic defacing and toppling of monuments to white supremacism and settler colonialism in the context of current BLM-led protests against police terror and violence. For access to the full online special ISSUE, see https://issue-journal.ch/focus-summaries/issue-8-all-monuments-must-fall/ .
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The article presents three models of radical cultural practice: Adorno’s dissonant modernism, Brecht’s “functional transformation” or “re- functioning” of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism, and Debord’s... more
The article presents three models of radical cultural practice: Adorno’s dissonant modernism, Brecht’s “functional transformation” or “re- functioning” of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism, and Debord’s Situationist detournement of art, aiming to rupture and de- colonize naturalized everyday life. The three models all begin with a critical appropriation of the traditions of art and aims at resisting the social power that passes through art, as an institutionalized field of production and activity. Each of the three modes establishes a set of productive strategies.
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This essay considers the shifting meanings and stakes of the sublime, from the Lisbon earthquake to Auschwitz and the unpresentable, from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Francois Lyotard. This essay for The... more
This essay considers the shifting meanings and stakes of the sublime, from the Lisbon earthquake to Auschwitz and the unpresentable, from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Francois Lyotard. This essay for The Yale Journal of Criticism was revised as chapter one in Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011), pp. 19-32.
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This essay for Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (ISSN: 1557-2935), special issue Terror on Tour: Borders, Detours, and Contingencies, eds. Paul Antick & Arianne de Waal, brings my previous critical reflections on the... more
This essay for Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (ISSN: 1557-2935), special issue Terror on Tour: Borders, Detours, and Contingencies, eds. Paul Antick & Arianne de Waal, brings my previous critical reflections on the shifting category of the sublime up to date in the end-Holocene era of late-capitalist planetary meltdown.
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This essay for ISSUE #8 explores the iconoclastic action of the Friends of Acoma, which reactivated awareness and debate about the violence of early Spanish settler-colonialism in so-called New Mexico.
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This essay for ISSUE #8 explores a Situationist-inspired 1969 action at the site of a monument to Charles Fourier destroyed in 1941 by the Nazi-allied Vichy regime.
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Attempts to rethink the sublime after 1945 have increasingly relied on the psychoanalytic category of trauma and with good reason, given the centrality of terror in the aesthetics of the sublime. This article for Third Text analyzes the... more
Attempts to rethink the sublime after 1945 have increasingly relied on the psychoanalytic category of trauma and with good reason, given the centrality of terror in the aesthetics of the sublime. This article for Third Text analyzes the changing category of the sublime after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and reflects on its meanings for radical politics today.
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Considering the practices of the Situationist International, this essay critiques Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, in light of the current tendency to use Bürger's book as authority for dismissing radical political projects and... more
Considering the practices of the Situationist International, this essay critiques Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, in light of the current tendency to use Bürger's book as authority for dismissing radical political projects and positions. This essay revisits the question of what a radical and critical theory of art would be. It was first published in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds.), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (May Fly Books, 2009), pp. 79-91. The text was reprinted in Marc James Léger (ed.), The Idea of the Avant-Garde, and What It Means Today (Manchester University Press and Left Curve, 2014), pp. 131-137.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Guy Debord, Fluxus, Art Theory and Politics, Situationist International, and 7 moreTwentieth Century Art and Architectural history, Dadaism & Surrealism, Peter Bürger, Art Installations, Performance Art and Art Happenings, Society of the Spectacle, Radical Cultural Practices, and Theories of the avant-garde
Co-author: Iain Boal. This contribution to Camera Atomica, John O'Brian, ed. (London: Black Dog Publishing and Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015) constellates quotations, descriptions of social facts, and photographic images of various nuclear... more
Co-author: Iain Boal. This contribution to Camera Atomica, John O'Brian, ed. (London: Black Dog Publishing and Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015) constellates quotations, descriptions of social facts, and photographic images of various nuclear calculators. The result is a critical perspective on the history of nuclearism and its social contexts.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Nuclear Weapons, Max Horkheimer, Edmund Husserl, Galileo Galilei, and 13 morePaul K. Feyerabend, Theodor W. Adorno, Joel Kovel, Nuclearism, Edward P. Thompson, Science Of Climate Change, War machine, Science and Technology Studies, Atomic Weapons, Capitalist Modernity, Science and Capitalism, capitalist science, and exterminationism
This chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, eds. John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff & Ming-Cheng Lo (New York: Rutledge, 2010) puts the problem of social violence in history into relation with the aesthetics of the sublime... more
This chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, eds. John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff & Ming-Cheng Lo (New York: Rutledge, 2010) puts the problem of social violence in history into relation with the aesthetics of the sublime and Adorno's propositions about culture's failure "after Auschwitz."
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This essay considers the US-led so-called war on terror through the lenses of capitalist modernity and the aesthetic category of the sublime. It began as a talk at the 2007 conference The Sublime Now at Tate Britain. It was published and... more
This essay considers the US-led so-called war on terror through the lenses of capitalist modernity and the aesthetic category of the sublime. It began as a talk at the 2007 conference The Sublime Now at Tate Britain. It was published and developed in several versions over the following years in Left Curve and Static 7. This revised version was published in Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska (eds.), The Sublime Now (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 133-154.
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In Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 174-177.
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This essay for the catalog to the Van Abbemuseum's Rasheed Araeen retrospective, curated and edited by Nick Aikens, offers a reading of the artist and Third Text founder's manifesto for the 21st century.
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This short text is a tribute to Rasheed Araeen.
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Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay `Commitment' Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brecht's work and... more
Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay `Commitment' Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brecht's work and artistic position. Adorno's arguments have often been dismissed but, surprisingly, are seldom closely engaged with. This paper assesses these two approaches that have been so central to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics: Brecht's dialectical realism and Adorno's sublime or dissonant modernism. It provides what still has been missing: a close reading and immanent critique of Adorno's case against Brecht. And it clarifies one methodological blind spot of Adorno's formalist conceptualisation of autonomy: he fails to provide the detailed analysis of context that his own dialectical method immanently calls for. The paper shows how and why Brecht's dialectical realism holds up under Adorno's attack, and draws conclusions for contemporary artistic practice.
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This essay for a Brumaria special issue on Revolution & Subjectivity rereads the culture industry chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, in light of events as of 2009/2010.
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This essay, added as chapter eleven of the second, softcover edition of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-11048-9), develops the category of "enforcement" in the context of the... more
This essay, added as chapter eleven of the second, softcover edition of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-11048-9), develops the category of "enforcement" in the context of the capitalist modernity and its ruined myths of automatic progress, as well as the post-1945 transformation of the modernist state into a Weapons of Mass Destruction security regime grounded in terror.
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Reflections on the politics of fear and so-called war on terror.
The essay offers reflections on radical cultural practices of resistance and the autonomist embrace of the virtual and virtuosity, in the context of the US-led so-called war on terror, five years in.
Research Interests: Spectacle, Art Theory and Politics, Empire, Culture Industry, Multitude, and 14 moreAutonomist Marxism, Tactical media, State Terror, Paolo Virno, Art Theory and Criticism, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Post-Fordism, media studies, social movements in global south and new Left politics, Virtuosity, Radical Cultural Practices, Politics of the so-called War on Terror, Social Movements and Struggles, media art and activism, and Retort
This essay queries the conditions for various forms of art and cultural practices to develop anti-systemic and anti-capitalist efficacy, in relation to contexts of social movement struggles. In Agata Stopinska, Anke Bartels, and Raj... more
This essay queries the conditions for various forms of art and cultural practices to develop anti-systemic and anti-capitalist efficacy, in relation to contexts of social movement struggles. In Agata Stopinska, Anke Bartels, and Raj Kollmorgen (eds.), Revolutions: Reframed, Revisited, Revised (Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 239-251.
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This article is a Spanish translation of "On the Mattering of Silence and Avowal: Joseph Beuys' Plight and Negative Presentation in Post-1945 Visual Art" (Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Nos. 49-50, 2015).
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This collective text by Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC) is a critical discussion of the politics of relational art published online by Transform/eipcp in 2007.
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This text in ENEKEN is a Greek translation of “Adorno, Brecht, Debord: Three Models for Resisting the Capitalist Art System,” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics (2013). Translation by by Kóstas Drougalás and Kostís Stafilákis.
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La teoría crítica rechaza el mundo dado intentando ver más allá. Al reflexionar sobre el arte tenemos también que distinguir entre una teoría acrítica, esto es, afirmativa, y una teoría crítica que rechaza el arte dado para mirar más... more
La teoría crítica rechaza el mundo dado intentando ver más allá. Al reflexionar sobre el arte tenemos también que distinguir entre una teoría acrítica, esto es, afirmativa, y una teoría crítica que rechaza el arte dado para mirar más allá. La teoría crítica del arte no se puede limitar a recibir e interpretar el arte, siendo ésta la forma que la teoría del arte adopta bajo el capitalismo. Debe reconocer que el arte, tal y como se institucionaliza y practica hoy día-bussines as usual, en el actual "mundo del arte"-, es, en el sentido más profundo e inevitable, "arte bajo el capitalismo", esto es, arte bajo el dominio capitalista. La teoría crítica deberá orientarse en cambio hacia una ruptura clara con el arte que el capitalismo ha sometido. La primera tarea de la teoría crítica del arte es comprender cómo el arte dado sirve de apoyo al orden dado. Debe exponer y analizar las actuales funciones del arte bajo el capitalismo. ¿Qué hace toda la esfera de actividad que llamamos arte? Cualquier teoría crítica del arte debe comenzar entendiendo que la actividad del arte en sus formas actuales es contradictoria. El "mundo del arte" es el espacio donde tiene lugar una enorme movilización de creatividad e invención que se canaliza a la producción, recepción y circulación de obras de arte. Las instituciones artísticas manejan el conjunto de esta producción de varias maneras, aunque dicha conducción, por lo general, no es directamente coercitiva. El mercado del arte ejerce, ciertamente, una fuerte presión mediante formas de selección que el artista o la artista no pueden ignorar si desean forjarse una carrera. Pero, en tanto que individuos, el artista o la artista son relativamente libres de elegir qué quieren hacer de acuerdo con su concepción de lo que es el arte. Son libres de hacer lo que les plazca, aun al precio de no vender ni alcanzar la fama. El arte, por tanto, no ha abandonado su pretensión histórica de ser autónomo en el seno de la sociedad capitalista; aún hoy día podemos comprobar por doquier, empíricamente, la manera en que opera esta autonomía relativa. Por otra parte, quien ejerza la teoría crítica está obligado a observar que el arte, visto como un todo, es un factor de estabilización en la vida social. La existencia de un arte que se produce con apariencia de libertad y en gran abundancia acredita el orden dado. El arte sigue siendo una joya en la corona del poder, y cuanto más rico, espléndido y exuberante es, tanto más afirma el status quo. Puede que la realidad material de la sociedad capitalista consista en una guerra de todos contra todos; en el arte, empero, los impulsos utópicos cuya realización se ve bloqueada en la vida cotidiana encuentran una formalización social ordenada. Las instituciones artísticas son capaces de articular una gran variedad de actividades y agentes en una unidad sistémica compleja; el sistema-arte capitalista funciona como un subsistema del sistema-mundo capitalista. No cabe duda de que alguna de estas actividades y productos artísticos son abiertamente críticos y políticamente comprometidos. Pero si se lo considera como un todo, el sistema artístico es afirmativo[1], en el sentido de que convierte la totalidad de las obras y prácticas artísticas-la suma de todo lo que fluye a través de estos circuitos de producción y recepción-en "legitimación simbólica" (por tomar en préstamo la adecuada expresión de Pierre Bourdieu[2]) de la sociedad de clases. Lo consigue alentando los impulsos autónomos del arte mientras simultáneamente neutraliza políticamente lo que esos impulsos producen. Modernismo francfortiano Los teóricos de la Escuela de Francfort fueron los pioneros en la elaboración de una comprensión dialéctica del arte. Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer y Theodor W. Adorno nos mostraron cómo el arte bajo el
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This text in Elpída Karaba, Théspina Zefkili and Glykería Stathopoúlou (eds.), Η ΔΗΜΙΟΥΡΓΙΚΟΤΗΤΑ ΩΣ ΕΡΓΑΣΙΑΚΗ ΜΕΤΑΡΡΥΘΜΙΣΗ (Omblos, 2018) is a Greek translation of “Culture Industry and the Administration of Terror,” from Gerald Raunig,... more
This text in Elpída Karaba, Théspina Zefkili and Glykería Stathopoúlou (eds.), Η ΔΗΜΙΟΥΡΓΙΚΟΤΗΤΑ ΩΣ ΕΡΓΑΣΙΑΚΗ ΜΕΤΑΡΡΥΘΜΙΣΗ (Omblos, 2018) is a Greek translation of “Culture Industry and the Administration of Terror,” from Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds.), Critique of Creativity (Mayfly, 2011).
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A Turkish translation of Gene Ray, "Culture Industry and the Administration of Terror," in Ali Artun (ed.), Sanat Emegi: Kültür Isçileri ve Prekarite (Iletsim Yayinlari, 2014), pp. 237-258. Translated by Esin Sogancilar.
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This essay questions a tendency in contemporary autonomist theory that absolutizes a rejection of instrumental, strategic thinking; it argues for a position in which the tensions involved in aiming struggles anti-systemically need to be... more
This essay questions a tendency in contemporary autonomist theory that absolutizes a rejection of instrumental, strategic thinking; it argues for a position in which the tensions involved in aiming struggles anti-systemically need to be continuously bourne, rather than eliminated. In Third Text, vol. 23, no. 5, Special Issue 100, Art: A Vision of the Future (September 2009): 537-546.
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This essay analyses the provocative Hitler videos of 'post-Zionist' Israeli artist Boaz Arad. This chapter in Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palsgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011) was first published in Afterimage,... more
This essay analyses the provocative Hitler videos of 'post-Zionist' Israeli artist Boaz Arad. This chapter in Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palsgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011) was first published in Afterimage, vol. 31, no. 2 (September/October 2003).
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This essay explores Jacques Derrida's writings on hospitality and his collaboration on the Cities of Asylum project of the International Parliament of Writers. This chapter of Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory... more
This essay explores Jacques Derrida's writings on hospitality and his collaboration on the Cities of Asylum project of the International Parliament of Writers. This chapter of Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011) was first published in Anselm Franke, Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman (eds.), Territories: Islands, Camps, and Other States of Utopia (Berlin: Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003).
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This essay puts the term "ground zero" in historical context and shows the complex psychic repressions and disavowals behind the appropriation of this term in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers. This chapter in... more
This essay puts the term "ground zero" in historical context and shows the complex psychic repressions and disavowals behind the appropriation of this term in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers. This chapter in Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palsgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011) was first published in Alternative Press Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2003).
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This essay considers how Adorno's arguments about art after Auschwitz need to be conditioned and contextualised today, in light of the US-led so-called war on terror, as well as decades of political instrumentalization of the Holocaust.... more
This essay considers how Adorno's arguments about art after Auschwitz need to be conditioned and contextualised today, in light of the US-led so-called war on terror, as well as decades of political instrumentalization of the Holocaust. This essay for Third Text was reprinted as chapter ten of Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011).
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This essay analyzes the controversial 2002 exhibition "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum in New York, in the context of the US-led so-called war on terror, as well as recent debates about the political and... more
This essay analyzes the controversial 2002 exhibition "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum in New York, in the context of the US-led so-called war on terror, as well as recent debates about the political and cultural instrumentalization of the Holocaust.
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This text appeared in Chto Delat, September 2009,
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This essay appeared in Chto Delat, #10-34, "In Defense of Representation," March 2012.
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This 2008 essay, in English and Slovene (trans. Barbara Hribar) transcribes a talk given at the symposium "Sustainability and Contemporary Art: Exit or Activism?", Budapest, February 2008. Maska, 115-116, Summer 2008, pp. 28-34. It was... more
This 2008 essay, in English and Slovene (trans. Barbara Hribar) transcribes a talk given at the symposium "Sustainability and Contemporary Art: Exit or Activism?", Budapest, February 2008. Maska, 115-116, Summer 2008, pp. 28-34. It was first published online at republicart/ eipcp.
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This essay for the Third Text special issue on Art and Collaboration (Eds. John Roberts and Stephen Wright) considers forms of contemporary art in relation to social movements and proposes the category of 'catalytic art'.
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Considering the practices of the Situationist International, this chapter for the edited volume Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique re-reads Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde and critiques the... more
Considering the practices of the Situationist International, this chapter for the edited volume Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique re-reads Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde and critiques the current tendency to use Bürger's book as authority for dismissing radical political projects and positions. This essay revisits the question of what a radical and critical theory of art would be.
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This essay reviews Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2004).
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This article reconsiders the work of Damien Hirst in the context of the rewriting of the aesthetic category of the sublime after 1945, and critically interprets Hirst's 1990 work A Thousand Years.
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This 2003 article for Dissent explored the vexed history of the term "ground zero" and challenged editorial calls for a "left-wing patriotism" in the context of the US so-called war on terror.
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Co-author: Gregory Sholette. This text introduces the 2008 Third Text Special Issue Whither Tactical Media? Contributing authors: Brian Holmes, Critical Art Ensemble, Geert Lovink, Rozalinda Borcila and the 6+ Collective, Prishani Naidoo,... more
Co-author: Gregory Sholette. This text introduces the 2008 Third Text Special Issue Whither Tactical Media? Contributing authors: Brian Holmes, Critical Art Ensemble, Geert Lovink, Rozalinda Borcila and the 6+ Collective, Prishani Naidoo, Ana Longoni, Kirsten Forkert, Nato Thompson, Karen Kurczynski, Rasha Salti, Yates McKee, Blake Stimson, Gerald Raunig, Ricardo Dominguez, and campbaltimore, USA.
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This essay continues the reconsideration of radical twentieth-century avant-garde art practices and movements, in the context of early twenty-first century conjunctions. In Third Text, vol. 21, issue 3 (May 2007): 241-255.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Dada, Art Theory and Politics, Situationist International, Art and Social Movements, and 10 moreTwentieth Century Art, Dadaism & Surrealism, Berlin Dada, Radical Cultural Practices, Art and Capitalism, Capitalist Art System, Avant-Garde Art Movements, Art and Anti-Systemic Movements, Anti-Capitalist Art, and Marxism and Art
This collective text by the Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC) is a critical discussion of documenta 12, published in Radical Philosophy, A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy 146, Nov./Dec. 2007, pp. 40-42.
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This collaboration by students and faculty at HEAD - Genève grew out of the 2020-21 Critical Studies seminar, taught by Gene Ray, for the CCC Research-Based Master Program. Authors and collaborators: Román Alonso, Sara Bissen, Garance... more
This collaboration by students and faculty at HEAD - Genève grew out of the 2020-21 Critical Studies seminar, taught by Gene Ray, for the CCC Research-Based Master Program. Authors and collaborators: Román Alonso, Sara Bissen, Garance Bonard, Vanessa Cimorelli, Basile Collet, Phoebe-Lin Elnan, Joséphine Devaud, Daniela Gutiérrez-González, Luigi Guzzardi, Yasemin Imre, Roman A. Karrer, Sylvain Menétrey, Emilie Moor, Elena Pirazzoli, Gene Ray, Loreleï Regamey, Cecilia Moya Rivera, Mikhail Rojkov, Balam Ronan Simon Delgado, Camille Shirin Zaerpour and Roberto Zancan. For online access to the contents of ISSUE #8, see https://issue-journal.ch/focus-summaries/issue-8-all-monuments-must-fall/ .
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Principal co-authors: Gene Ray, Aurélien Gamboni, Janis Schroeder, Kate Stevenson. Additional co-authors: David Cross, Marguerite Davenport. Visual art contributed by artists Denise Bertschi, Ursula Biemann, Giulia Bruno, Chris Jordan,... more
Principal co-authors: Gene Ray, Aurélien Gamboni, Janis Schroeder, Kate Stevenson. Additional co-authors: David Cross, Marguerite Davenport. Visual art contributed by artists Denise Bertschi, Ursula Biemann, Giulia Bruno, Chris Jordan, Armin Linke, Oliver Ressler, Luc Schuiten, Paulo Tavares, and Marie Velardi. Interviews with: Chiara Barberis, Martin Beniston, Mickaël Blanc, Antonin Calderon, Victorine Castex, Philippe Clerc, Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat, Thomas Descombes, Christophe Dunand, Dominique Ernst, Montserrat Filella, Delia Fontaine, Thierry Gaudreau, Denise Gautier, Justin Ginnetti, Raphael Gomez, Jacques Grinevald, Rachel Heaton, Pierre-André Magnin, Olivier de Marcellus, Michel Meyer, Abdallah Mokssit, Charlotte Nicoulaz, Pascal Peduzzi, Géraldine Pflieger, Anne-Cécile Reimann, Oliver Ressler, Philippe Roch, Philippe de Rougemont, Daniel de Roulet, Thibault Schneeberger, Denis Schneuwly, Arlène Shale, Nazhat Shameen Khan, Marie Velardi, Alain Yenni. TAAG Advisory Research Group: Iain Boal, Gabriella Calchi Novati, David Cross, Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat, Anna Grichting, Sacha Kagan, Armin Linke, Nils Norman, Catherine Quéloz, Grégory Quenet, Philippe Rekacewicz, Oliver Ressler, Liliane Schneiter, Paulo Tavares, Eddie Yuen, and the late Chris Wainwright.
The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva (TAAG) is a long-term research project based at HEAD – Genève/Geneva School of Art and Design and funded (2017, 2018) by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Gene Ray, main applicant and project director).
Please visit the TAAG project website at: https://head.hesge.ch/taag/en/
A video intro trailer by Janis Schroeder can be seen on vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/user93523837/the-anthropocene-atlas-of-geneva-trailer-01
The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva (TAAG) is a long-term research project based at HEAD – Genève/Geneva School of Art and Design and funded (2017, 2018) by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Gene Ray, main applicant and project director).
Please visit the TAAG project website at: https://head.hesge.ch/taag/en/
A video intro trailer by Janis Schroeder can be seen on vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/user93523837/the-anthropocene-atlas-of-geneva-trailer-01
Research Interests: Climate change policy, Modernity, Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation Strategies, Permaculture, Anthropocene studies, and 11 morescience and technology studies (STS), Climate Change and Food Security, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Species Extinction, Culture and the Anthropocene, Sustainability, Commodities Trading, Fossil Fuel Divestment, Art and the Anthropocene, Anthropocene-Capitalocene, and toxification
Terror on Tour 2018 - "Anthroposcreams, Desert(ed) Destinations & Wilding Weather... Wish You Were Here" proposes a conceptual consideration of terror and travel in dialogue with climate concerns. Terror and touring in all forms are... more
Terror on Tour 2018 - "Anthroposcreams, Desert(ed) Destinations & Wilding Weather... Wish You Were Here" proposes a conceptual consideration of terror and travel in dialogue with climate concerns. Terror and touring in all forms are irreducible to the so-called Anthropocene: as the stable, mild climate state of the Holocene recedes, change is imposed under looming threats of extinction and disaster. Increased tourism adds more carbon dioxide to the problems, even as one new climate refugee is displaced every second. While scholars rethink longstanding assumptions about progress, history and the human, entrepreneurs develop new niches in dark, disaster, misery and extinction tourism. Meanwhile, activists call for slowing and de-growth, residents of Venice and Barcelona organize anti-tourist protests, whilst proposed airport expansions provoke militant citizen resistance (such as ZAD in France).
The conference presents the following 3 tracks:
- "Anthroposcreams, Screens & Scenes" seeks a questioning of the aesthetics and imaginings of art and popular culture (such as cli-fi) within ecological terror. The expression “it’s a scream!” already presents a conflation of the imaginary and real through an enjoyment of spectated terror, horror and the sublime.
- "Desert(ed) Destinations, Detours & Derangements" seeks to traverse the ethics and (bio)politics of movement, mobility and migration in the Anthropocene.
- "Wilding Weather" seeks a critical forecast of the tempestuous and feral becomings in the Anthropocene’s unprecedented extremes such as superstorms intensified by warming and rising sea levels, earthquakes fostered by fracking, wildfires, melting permafrost and drought.
The conference presents the following 3 tracks:
- "Anthroposcreams, Screens & Scenes" seeks a questioning of the aesthetics and imaginings of art and popular culture (such as cli-fi) within ecological terror. The expression “it’s a scream!” already presents a conflation of the imaginary and real through an enjoyment of spectated terror, horror and the sublime.
- "Desert(ed) Destinations, Detours & Derangements" seeks to traverse the ethics and (bio)politics of movement, mobility and migration in the Anthropocene.
- "Wilding Weather" seeks a critical forecast of the tempestuous and feral becomings in the Anthropocene’s unprecedented extremes such as superstorms intensified by warming and rising sea levels, earthquakes fostered by fracking, wildfires, melting permafrost and drought.
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This text in German and English was commissioned for Intim Sein/ Magazin Staatstheater Hannover, edited by Nora Khuon and Mazlum Nergiz. Online at: https://staatstheater-hannover.de/de_DE/notiz-ueber-die-liebe
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This text by Gene Ray and George Sotiropoulos and signed by the Void Network collective in Athens is an urgent call for food sovereignty and local commons systems through politicized agroecology and permaculture. Online at... more
This text by Gene Ray and George Sotiropoulos and signed by the Void Network collective in Athens is an urgent call for food sovereignty and local commons systems through politicized agroecology and permaculture.
Online at https://voidnetwork.gr/2020/04/09/feeding-dual-power-food-sovereignty-anti-fascism-and-other-pandemic-struggles/
Online at https://voidnetwork.gr/2020/04/09/feeding-dual-power-food-sovereignty-anti-fascism-and-other-pandemic-struggles/
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2019. This paper was presented at the Historical Materialism 16th Annual Conference, London, 8 November 2019.
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2019. This paper discusses the rise of fascist mass movements today in relation to planetary meltdown. It was presented at “The Contemporary State and Its New Agents of Violence,” a panel discussion at State of Concept, Athens,... more
2019. This paper discusses the rise of fascist mass movements today in relation to planetary meltdown. It was presented at “The Contemporary State and Its New Agents of Violence,” a panel discussion at State of Concept, Athens, co-organized with Antifascist Culture, on September 28, 2019, in the context of the exhibition of Forensic Architecture “Violence, Fast and Slow.” The paper was presented jointly with a paper by theorist Angela Dimitrakaki, the two together engaging with how the fundamental premise of fascism advocating the existence of internal (Dimitrakaki) and external (Ray) enemies operates today, and how it contributes to the gradual normalization of fascist thought.