ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Archive for November, 2011

material concepts

Posted on November 13, 2011

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, Bauhaus Building Block Set, circa 1923 Every art is material—and can be only material. The possibility of using concepts, projects, ideas and political messages in art was opened by the philosophers of the “linguistic turn” precisely because they asserted the material character of thinking itself. Thinking was understood by these philosophers as the operation and manipulation of language. And language was understood by them as thoroughly material—a combination of sounds and visual signs. Now the real, epoch-making achievement of conceptual art becomes clear: it demonstrated the equivalence, or at least a parallelism, between language and image, between the order of words and the order of things, the grammar of language and the grammar of visual space. –Boris Groys, “Introduction–Global Conceptualism Revisited,” e-flux journal…

new feature: facebook field notes

Posted on November 13, 2011

Dear readers, today is the premiere of a new feature here on Archiving the City: facebook field notes. For many years, I avoided the draw of facebook, but when I joined the Strelka Institute, I was asked by program organizers to join facebook, in order to make participation and communication with colleagues easier. In recent weeks, I have found myself involved in extended conversations about my Moscow life with friends from around the world. It now occurs to me that these conversations are in fact an extension of my “Shop Talk” series (cross-disciplinary conversations about method), and so I have decided to post some excerpts of chats and emails here, as “field notes.” (Of course, these excepts appear in edited form, in order to…

  

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