[artinfo] Contemporary art web site

[Alexa Csizmadia]

Multitudes is pleased to announce the inauguration of its new website, 
Multitudes-Icônes, which is dedicated to contemporary art:
http://multitudes-icones.samizdat.net

Multitudes-Icônes was launched during a workshop organized by 
Multitudes at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany (Documenta Halle, June 
25-28, 2007). The site brings together three parallel projects: 
Multitude's counter-project in response to the invitation to 
participate in Documenta 12; an artist residence project in which 
artists have been invited to engage with the site in order to produce a 
specific project; and, finally, archives of texts and Icônes portfolios 
(projects about and by artists) published in the journal since its 
inception in March 2000.

Multitudes was asked by the Documenta 12 organizers to respond to the 
exhibition's three questions/themes ("Is modernity our antiquity?"; 
"What is Bare Life?"; and "What is to be done?"). The journal's answer 
was to create a counter-project on Multitudes-Icônes called Critical 
and Clinical Documentation. On the site, the three questions were 
reformulated (that is, appropriated and détourned) and addressed to 
artists in a provocative way. Artists were asked to situate their work 
in relation to Documenta 12's themes but also in relation to their 
participation or non-participation in the exhibition. The ensemble of 
responses-visual, verbal, sonorous-constitute alternative, multiple, 
and ironic points of view, or "critical and clinical" perspectives, 
regarding the exhibition's themes and Documenta itself. The website's 
organization of the artists' responses provides an open framework, 
allowing users to articulate relations between replies, creating hybrid 
interventions, and transforming each user into a curator-artist of 
another, virtual-real Documenta.
For its inauguration, the Residence space is linked to Critical and 
Clinical Documentation and presents three projects in response to 
Documenta's themes. In a direct or indirect manner, each project 
interrogates the themes' significance. Here, John Beech, Birgit 
Jürgenssen, and the Société Réaliste critically probe the notions of 
modernity, bare life, and education.
Taking as its point of departure Multitudes' theoretical practice, the 
site Multitudes-Icônes develops the journal's previous interventions in 
the field of contemporary art, calling into question the relations 
between aesthetics and politics. The site brings together previously 
published Icônes portfolios as well as a collection of texts that 
engage pressing issues regarding the aesthetic field. Artists have also 
been invited to reactualize and "reanimate" their contributions to 
Multitudes.

Multitudes is a political, philosophical, and cultural journal in which 
the transversal objective is to intervene within the field of 
intellectual and artistic production and to make the question of 
alternative processes of subjectivation and collective individuation 
central to this field. Its goal is to experiment with new conditions of 
political enunciation and agency while sketching out problematics that 
cut across the fields of the political economy, philosophy, artistic 
practice, and the emergent cultures of cyber-freedom. Multitudes is one 
of the first French-language journals to publish its editions, 
available for free, on the Internet.
By engaging the Internet as a media that enables the multiple 
possibilities engendered by contemporary social transformations, the 
journal follows from the experience of the BBS in the United States, 
Radio Alice in Italy, Radio Tomate and the Minitel Alter by Felix 
Guattari, as well the anticipation of a "postmedia era" in the 1980s.

The archive of published articles can be consulted at: 
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/


Multitude's three Documenta 12 questions détourned and addressed to 
artists:


Is modernity (y)our aftermath?
For D12, modernity haunts our common planetary horizon like a zombie, 
caught between death and life. How do you feel about modernity's fate 
with respect to its universalism qua totalitarism/antitotalitarism 
refrain: nostalgic, compromised, critical, terrified or still yearning 
for postmodernity? In light of your participation/non-participation in 
D12, how do you wake up from post/modernity's night of the living dead?


Is bare life your apocalyptic political dimension?
If bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no 
measure of security will ever protect us, how do you feel in your real 
life with regard to your participation/non-participation in D12? 
Tortured, lyrical or even ecstatic? Is the concentration camp a useful 
paradigm for you? How can bare life be experienced by an audience? (Did 
you ever read Agamben in a state of exception? Crying or laughing?)


What is to be done after the D12 Bildung programme?
Will your participation/non-participation help you not to feel lost 
between the devil (didacticism, academia) and the deep blue sea 
(commodity fetishism)? Did reading Schiller make you feel romantic? 
Have you walked through Habermas's public sphere? Are you sharing 
Rancière's distribution of the sensible? Would you still prefer to fly 
with Deleuze & Guattari? Develop as you wish, with or without reading 
list.



Editorial conception: Eric Alliez, Giovanna Zapperi
Realization: Benoît Durandin, Marika Dermineur, Thomas Mery
Multitudes-Icones was produced with the support of DICREAM / CNC et MRT 
/ Ministère de la Culture et Communication.