Art and culture are exposed to immense challenges due to various populistic agendas. This has an immediate effect on contemporary art and its complex habitat between the local, national and international. When publishing spaces are becoming more restricted in favor of ideological and market-driven communication – there is an urgency for expanding critical conversations, formats and languages. With utmost integrity, we aspire to modify ways on how to relate to art and the world at large. Through the function of art, aesthetics and the artworld, can we further understand how the development of the democratic nation state that emerged out of modernity – is deeply rooted in colonialism and capitalism?
2020 was a year dominated as much by uprisings, as the repression of these, a crisis of social reproduction and health, and various forms of nationalist, logistic-economic and socio-physical reconsiderations. Since the early spring , Paletten Art Journal has gathered writers from various perspectives, under the headline “Editorial meeting.” The emphasis on the notion of the ‘editorial’ was first meant to physically gather people in open editorial meetings, to discuss, determine and propose alternative methods for future work. While these meetings had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the conversation between editors and invited contributors continued, fueled by critical reflections on the distribution of resources, concepts of care, a rising wave of populism and conspiracy theories, and the role of editorial work and writing, in relation to various forms of political organising. The planned meetings were:
Criticism as care and collective project
What is care (in the context of art), who provides care and who receives it? How can art criticism contribute to the improvement of cultural workers’ conditions? Can we collectively establish joint criteria and values? What do we as critics tell and share, and what stories are being heard? Furthermore, the meeting had a focus on the geopolitical interface – both between Malmö and Copenhagen as well as the material and identitarian divisions that characterise our work and our lives in past, present and future. How do these relationships impact the textual content and the writers who produce it? This meeting was planned and organised in collaboration with Inter Art Center (IAC), Signal - Center for contemporary art, and the podcast series Critical Dialogues (Christine Antaya and Matthew Rana). The resulting texts were edited by Matthew Rana and Frida Sandström. Invited contributors were: Jakob Jakobsen (Copenhagen), WeRCurious (Malmö), Critical Dialogues (Malmö) and documentations.art (Paris), Gregory Sholette & Agata Craftlove and Metood för konstnärlig frihet (MFK).
The history and contemporaneity of editorial self-organisation
In collaboration with the independent art space Mint, this meeting had a focus on 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. This meeting was planned and organised in collaboration with Mint (Asrin Haidari and Emily Fahlén). The resulting texts were edited by Frida Sandström. Invited contributors: Ana Teixeira Pinto (Berlin), Michele Masucci (Stockholm), Santiago Mostyn (Stockholm) and Kim West (Stockholm).
While the initial plan was to use the editorial meeting as a means to extend the scope of a singular or a few editors, making space for unforeseen encounters to result in unforeseen contributions, the physical restrictions dominating the year cancelled this plan. In collaboration with the co-editors Patrik Haggren and Matthew Rana, local and international writers were invited with an attempt to both broaden an easily Northern-European centered discussion, and to dive into locally complex cases in the format of a number of exhibitions reviews. The invited writers in question are: Vivienne Chow, Gigi Agyropoulou, Toni Tora Botwid, Marit Marjavaara and Mermia Dizdarević. The resulting texts were edited by Patrik Haggren and Frida Sandström.
The resulting texts, recorded conversations and multimedia montages form attempts to examine practical possibilities of art criticism today. Publishing this with technical and graphic assistance from PWR Studio, Milena Karlsson and Isabella Folkesson, we wish to investigate the methodological means and formats of art criticism, and hence establish and contribute with perspectives that not only scrutinize art but also alter ways of encountering art. We will do this by critically examining, within and around text, the material preconditions on how to view and write about art. Similar to workers’ art and its socio-economic and context critical methodologies, we ask: what infrastructures does the writer with their text maintain, change or create – and how does this relate to the social encounter with art itself? Our hope is that this compilation will contribute to expand the critical reflections and methods of the field, with an emphasis on that what is being rewritten is as crucial as the text’s how and why. Matters that aren’t less important at the end of this year, than it was at the beginning of it.
One can talk about life, and one can talk from the standpoint of life. One can talk about conflicts, and one can talk from the midst of conflict.
– Invisible Committee, Now (2017/2015), 11.
Caption: Farid Fairuz, Leap Into the Work (2002 – )
Enabled by:
Isabella Folkesson
Patrik Haggren
Milena Karlsson
Matthew Rana
Frida Sandström
PWR Studio
Editorial meeting – A Gathering Towards a Critique of the Contemporary was commissioned by, and funded by Regionsamverkan Sydsverige.