Current Issue

1.14 / May Days

May 6, 2010. “It is not yet the end of May for us,” Jeffrey Stuker writes in his essay on Michael Asher, recalling the Paris strikes of 1968, but also asserting that we cannot swear off the potential for rupture and collapse of law, a law always on the verge of martial law.  Those words echo across Matthew Rana’s examination of regulations that deny to some the very rights they grant to others. And as these writers (and the artist who are their subjects) question the legitimating forms of visibility, their inquiries reverberate across the acrimonious national debate surrounding Arizona’s new immigration statute.  As the philosopher Blanchot notes, the movement of refusal is rare and difficult, though equal and the same for each of us.^[1] How do we embrace, then, an aesthetics of refusal?  - PM 

^{[1] Maurice Blanchot,"Refusal," in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Bloomington: Stanford University Press, 1997), 111.}