Infrastructural Critique - by Marina Vishmidt (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A theory of art and infrastructure by one of the most brilliant critical theorists of her generation

As we search for ways to imagine a life beyond capital and its drive to extinction, the dream of the institution as a critical refuge from existing social relations becomes less and less credible.

Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counter-praxis. By treating the contemporary art institution as a resource base and site of struggle, Vishmidt reanimates critique by connecting it to the effort to erode capitalist authority over the means of our existence, build power and seize resources for new practices of social invention.

A tour-de-force of Marxist philosophy, art criticism, Milanese radical feminism and AppleTV+ dinosaur documentaries, this book, edited in the wake of the author's tragic early death, weaves in the gaps of theory and praxis to assess the main infrastructurally critical artmakers at work today. Approaching their practices as 'crystal drills' - at once means of seeing, and practical cutting implements - the text showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her generation.

Review Quotes

"Marina Vishmidt speaks with unfailing clarity about how value feeds on devastation and how art's institutions sit inside the chain of extraction rather than outside or above. Infrastructural Critique is essential reading for anyone who despite all is not ready to give up on the artworld as a place for collective struggle, and who not only wants to experience how 'infrastructural critique' pulls conditions of possibility into the frame -- above all, the material conditions of reproduction -- but more importantly, crack open the impasses and alibis of institutional critique. What makes this book, her last gift to us, so generative is that it never stops at the diagnosis: between reproduction and abolition it opens ground for new forms of origination."
--Anselm Franke

"Marina Vishmidt's articulate and incisive volume examines the conditions under which art is made and circulated. Here, solidarity is not an ideal, but a necessary strategy capable of antagonising and retooling the infrastructures that organise everyday life and culture. Exposing the creative industries' entanglements with infrastructures of domination, her uncompromising analysis builds a careful yet ambitious argument for an art that goes beyond mere representation or commentary. In its place, she narrates examples of art work that actively divests from systems of social neglect, and reconfigures labour relations through forms of collective organising, institutional abandonment and self-abolition. An essential handbook for cultural workers seeking to understand and transform their workplace, this is nothing short of a call for a collective rebellion."
--Mason Leaver-Yap, associate curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art

About the Author

Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024) was a philosopher, organiser and art theorist. One of the major critical theorists of her generation, her writing spanned art theory, feminist social reproduction theory, finance, ecology, labour and labour organising, value-form theory, black studies, and film. A lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and Professor of Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, her first book was Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value-Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2018)

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London who teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her most recent book is What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023).

Danny Hayward is a poet and critic whose most recent books are Training Exercises (Both are Worse, 2024) and Loading Terminal (87 Press, 2022).

Kerstin Stakemeier is a writer in Berlin and educator at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. With Marina Vishmidt, she co-authored Reproducing Autonomy (Mute, 2016).