Sweet Sixties is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media, and educational contexts in Europe, the Middle East, western and central Asia, Latin America, and northern Africa. Involving a particular group of experimentally oriented arts and research groups as well as individual artists, researchers, and media, Sweet Sixties investigates hidden histories or underexposed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolutionary period of the 1960s.

In the 1960s, the landscapes and cities of protectorates and former colonies from India to the Maghreb, from the Soviet Republics to the new states in the southern hemisphere were replete with the spirit and forms of modernity, forms that transmogrify and then dissolve into the thin air of the vernacular. The air of the 1960s echoes a spirit of emancipation. And the newly arising art-scapes are interspersed with double agents: diasporas bring their academies; the streams between Soviet, North and South American, Western European, Non-Aligned, etc., are full of interlocutions, hidden pathways, and narratives of trade routes beyond the seemingly stable hegemonies of the blocs. The stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde, whose silhouettes have yet to be found on the walls of the Western canon, are the theme of this publication.

A collection of notes written along the years by Spanish curator and Head of Institut Kunst in Basel Chus Martínez. Aimed at her students, this notebook gathers personal thoughts on artists who inspire Martínez’s ongoing practice.

“I’ve been writing these notes continuously for years but I never thought about publishing them. These pages gather some thoughts on artists who continue to be a source of motivation for me to invest in complexity and who also all possess a rare sense of humor. I write these texts mostly at the end of a working day or in the very early morning, which for me are not the hours for argumentation. They expose no foreseeable line of research or an unequivocal sequence of arguments. However, through continuous exchange with the students at the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, I came to the conclusion that it would be useful to publish this peculiar research as a strange textbook. Its sole goal is to motivate the students to keep our conversation going and to further open this possibility up to others.

These pages attribute an incredible intensity to certain artistic practices; they entangle personal passages with an interest in artists I would love for you to fall for too: Melquiades Herrera (1949–2003), Pedro Pietri (1944-2004), Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos (1939–1992), Jorge Bonino (1935–1990), and many others who aren’t included, at least not yet…”

After a short period of “unbearable lightness of being,” the social gravitation begins to be felt again. In his book Joshua Simon describes and analyzes the growing weight of the technical, economic, material basis of our society. The author’s sensibility for today’s Zeitgeist is at the same time entertaining and precise.—Boris Groys

Since the so-called dematerialization of currencies and art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970, we have witnessed a move into what Joshua Simon calls an economy of neomaterialism. With this, several shifts have occurred: the focus of labor has moved from production to consumption, the commodity has become the historical subject, and symbols now behave like materials.

Neomaterialism explores the meaning of the world of commodities, and reintroduces various notions of dialectical materialism into the conversation on the subjectivity and vitalism of things. Here, Simon advocates for the unreadymade, sentimental value, and the promise of the dividual as a means for a vocabulary in this new economy of meaning.

Reflecting on general intellect as labor and the subjugation of an overqualified generation to the neofeudal order of debt finance—with a particular focus on dispossession and rent economy, post-appropriation display strategies and negation, the barricade and capital’s technocratic fascisms—Neomaterialism merges traditions of epic communism with the communism that is already here.

Design by Avi Bohbot.

Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others. He also drafts possibilities for a logic and a support structure that can offer some purchase of their own, beyond the gravitational pull of business as usual. Ultimately, Traction calls for a renewed sense of profession, somewhere within the corridors of power where, for better or worse, contemporary art has long arrived. Design by Aude Lehmann, Zurich.

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. A large part of the artist’s role in today’s professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge. Essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York.

Composed in the space between the page and live performance, Latimer’s recent essays and poems collected here examine issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making. Shifting between written language and live address, between the needs of the internal and the external voice, Like a Woman retrieves the refrain, the litany, and the chorus, exploring their serial ecstasies and political possibilities.