Kim West (PhD Aesthetics, Södertörn University) is a critic, researcher, and editor, based in Stockholm. His research focuses on the critical development of contemporary aesthetic thought, the cultural history of popular avantgardes, and the institutional and technological transformations of art’s forms of mediation. Among recent publications are “Autonomy and Automation” (e-Flux Architecture, 2019), and ”Concepts for the Critical Study of Art Exhibitions as Media” (in the anthology Theatre, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, Sternberg Press 2019). Coming publications include catalogue essays on Asier Mendizabal and Tris Vonna-Michel, and anthology contributions on Peter Weiss’ experimental films and Simone Weil’s Factory Journal. He is currently writing a book on anti-fascism and cultural policy experimentation. West has translated books by among others Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault, Jean Genet, Michèle Bernstein, and Mark Fisher into Swedish. He is the convenor of the independent research group Agentur, which is during 2020-21 conducting the research project The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts (see agentur.ooo). Together with Gustav Strandberg he has founded the publishing house 1|21 Press, which will be launched during the spring of 2021 with titles by Marc Bernard and Georges Bataille.
Agentur is an independent research group for critical cultural production, based in Stockholm. Committed to an ideal of social equality, it seeks to invent new forms, methods, models, and functions for progressive cultural work in a new, postdigital public sphere and an increasingly precarious labor market. Agentur operates as a multidisciplinary critique bureau. It conducts longterm research projects on issues of public interest in a polarized and fragmented present. Among Agentur’s participants there are poets, artists, critics, researchers, designers, and public servants. During 2020–21, Agentur conducts the research project The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts.
This panel conversation was initially planned to take place in collaboration with the independent art space Mint, run by Asrin Haidari and Emily Fahlén, in Stockholm. Taking its departure in a planned, open editorial meeting at Mint, the focus of this conversation was the material relationships that art criticism both presupposes and perhaps creates, including populistic notions that criticism meets and inhabits today. By departing from Mint’s investigation of the phenomenon “workers’ art”, historically and today, the meeting will further examine if there exists a workers’ critique, and if so, how it takes shape in contemporary populistic and conservative environments. The focus of the meeting departs from notions such as aesthetic autonomy, labor, and the editorial self-organisation’s history and contemporaneity.
The panel took place online, on 19 April 2020. The panel contributors were, in order of appearance: Michele Masucci, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Kim West and Santiago Mostyn. The panel was moderated by Frida Sandström.
One problem that is central to the current work of Agentur – an independent, multidisciplinary research group which was formally founded in Stockholm in the winter of 2019 – is how we should attend to apparent analogies in history.