The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. The shifts that occurred in the art field during this time were accompanied by explicit critique and academic analysis that aimed to make the genesis of these transformations comprehensible. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out. Expanded to include the sphere of individual aesthetic experience, these systems are not formulated as solipsism, or in terms of purposefulness, but as a means to compare relations within the productivity of open and incalculable connectivity, relations that allow aesthetic experience to be read out as the liquefied labor and lifetime of concrete others. Designed by HIT.

Produced on the occasion of Allan Sekula: Photography at work at Beirut Art Center. The late american artist was an influential photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic whose works have been a unique reference in debates and conversations about photography, art and politics for over 40 years. Allan Sekula’s work is largely invested in social and economic critique, particularly regarding the politics of global commodity exchange and economic processes. Sekula began exploring the american middle-class of the West Coast at the time of late modernism and in its wake. Turning his camera to his own surroundings allowed him to discover the world he was living in, and assess that staging reality critically was the best way to document it. As an artist, he considered photography a medium for continuous social engagement and action.

SSS: How to imitate the sound of the shore using two hands and a carpet is, at first glance, exactly what it claims to be: an in-depth manual for staging a private (or public) performance, in which one uses both hands and a carpet to imitate the sounds of water making contact with land. Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek’s book includes diagrams and photographs, which illustrate possible methods for producing this effect, while also addressing theoretical and methodological issues related to the representation of nature.

SSS is the second book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Design by Julie Peeters

Booklet for On Kawara’s Pure Consciousness project in Münster for the archival exhibition on the history of the project (1998–2017), on display at the Pablo Picasso Art Museum, within the framework of the Skulptur Projekte 2017, 10 June–1 October, 2017.

“The Skulptur Projekte 2017 (SP17) have staged the first venue for Pure Consciousness since Kawara’s death in 2014, ushering in a new era in the work’s existence. The Münster presentation was reserved exclusively for the children at the Berg Fidel day-care centre, and purposely took place in the spring of this year, that is, before the actual Skulptur Projekte dates. The documentation on view here sheds light on the exhibition in the Münster kindergarten as well as on the previous venues of Pure Consciousness since 1998.”—Exhibition wall text excerpt

Edited by Helen Hughes, with editorial assistance by Amelia Winata, designed by Robert Milne & Fabian Harb.

Five of the seven essays in this issue are adapted from papers given as part of the TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation lecture series. This series was formulated as an extension of the Biennial, co-curated by Victoria Lynn, Helen Hughes and Discipline, and as a site for delving into its research focuses on the physical, economic, visual, vir­tual and discursive channels through which artworks circu­late today, and the iterative structures of journals and recursive exhibitions (like biennials, triennials and documenta).

A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17, 2017, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing, it reorients conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.

The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists, writers, cultural critics, and art historians such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles, manifestos, and letters from significant publications as well as interviews, some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials, rare ephemera, and an art-historical overview essay.