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Group Material Resistance: Anti Baudrillard, 1987, White Columns, New York.
Photo : Ken Schles, courtesy of Group Material

Fashionably Late

Steve Lyons
85 - Taking a Stance Feature Group Material
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Over a span of six minutes in the summer of 2009, Fox News pundit Glenn Beck occupied the airwaves, waving a small blue book and imploring his audience to read it. He declared that this was an important book, a dangerous book, a call to arms for the radical left, a revolutionary tract for the twenty-first century.1 1 - See Glenn Beck, “The One Thing: The Coming Insurrection,” Fox News video, 6:55, July 1, 2009, accessed March 3, 2015, http://youtube/ZKyi2qNskJc. The book was The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, newly translated from the French by an anonymous group of artists and intellectuals in New York and published by Semiotext(e), the press most notable for turning New York’s art scene on to the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and Antonio Negri in the early 1980s. Beck’s unlikely endorsement of The Coming Insurrection dramatizes a collision between opposing ideological camps, calling us to consider how some of Europe’s most radical thinkers have hit American shores — sometimes out of context and occasionally decades late. Semiotext(e)’s latest succès de scandale also calls upon us to take stock of the strange and shifting contours of an intellectual market that has sprung up in the margins of the mainstream.

The delivery system for radical theory from the French and Italian left has certainly been transformed in recent years, and with the growing market for English translations of so-called post-’68 theory, numerous political theorists emerging from the student movements of 1968 have found themselves travelling the global circuit of art fairs, biennales, and art magazines. We have seen Jacques Rancière speaking about art and politics at the Frieze Art Fair, Bifo surfing the global biennale circuit from Kiev to Kassel to Montréal, Semiotext(e) appearing as an artist at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and Artforum dedicating entire issues to the legacy of ’68. In this essay, I want to untangle one knot in this art–theory love affair. Focusing on the proliferation of the Semiotext(e) brand of radical theory in Artforum in the past decade, I explore why a magazine best known for its girth and glossy ads for blue-chip commercial galleries and high-fashion labels may have been bitten by the Semiotext(e) bug, and what this coupling may tell us about the present conditions under which theorists must work.

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This article also appears in the issue 85 – Taking a Stance - Taking a Stance
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