Books by Ina Blom
Art and Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism
by Hal Foster, Ina Blom, Oliver Brokel, Caroline Busta, Stefan Deines, Stefanie Heraeus, Jutta Koether
Many contemporary artworks evoke the human figure: consider the omnipresence of the mannequin in current installations of artists like John Miller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Heimo Zobernig, or David Lieske. Or consider the revival of a minimalist vocabulary, which embraces anthropomorphism as in the works of Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison. This book brings together contributions from the eponymous conference, all of which seek to speculate on the reasons as to why, since the turn of the millennium, we have encountered so many artworks that tend to reconcile Minimalism with suggestions of the human figure. It proposes that this new artistic convention becomes rather questionable when discussed in the light of Franco Berardi's theory of semiocapitalism—a power technology that aims squarely at our human resources. The participants of this conference were asked to offer possible explanations for this wide acceptance of anthropomorphism—could it be that this is a manifestation of the increasingly desperate desire for art to have agency?
Contributors
Ina Blom, Oliver Brokel, Caroline Busta, Stefan Deines, Hal Foster, Stefanie Heraeus, Jutta Koether, Magdalena Nieslony, Michael Sanchez
Institut für Kunstkritik Series
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The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (Sternberg Press)
by Ina Blom
In this innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that analog video was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Reversing standard accounts of artistic uses of video, she follows the reflexive unfolding of a technology that seemed to deploy artists and artistic frameworks in the creation of new technical and social realities. She documents, among other things, video's emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. Enlisting a distinctly media-archaeological approach, Blom's new book—her second from Sternberg Press—is a brilliant look at the relationship between video memory and social ontology.
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On the Style Site: Art, Sociality, and Media Culture (Sternberg Press)
by Ina Blom
This book takes its cue from a simple observation. During the last 30 years or so, the term style has all but disappeared from art critical or art historical terminology. For new art history it was an increasingly problematic term, associated with the taxonomist and historicist concerns of "old" art history, not to speak of its fixation on the figure of the great artist. For contemporary art criticism the term seemed simply irrelevant: Faced with artistic activities that challenged traditional ideas of the work of art and its relation to aesthetics itself, new critical paradigms had to be invented. As interventions in social reality, an art of actions and events, replaced preoccupations with visual style and shape, the politics of social sites replaced the language of forms.
But while style has all but disappeared from art historical and art critical discourse, artistic practice since the 1960's onwards has seemed increasingly focused on the stylistics of the life-environment, the way in which everyday life itself is formed, designed or stylized. This development calls for a new reading of the relationship between art and the question of style, one that approaches the question of style itself not just as an art historical "tool" or method of explanation but as a social site in which relations between appearance, recognition and social identity is negotiated. The question or crisis of the contemporary style site is related to the significance of stylistic issues in contemporary politics and economics that capitalizes on life itself and that is perhaps best understood through its particular production of subjectivity. The works discussed in this book treat style as precisely such a site, and should therefore be discussed in extension of what is generally known as "site specific practices" in art. However, the style site works radically change the notion of the politics of this type of art, and may in the end also contribute to open the question of the life-art practices of the avant-garde to new interpretations.
Ina Blom is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and is also active as an art critic.
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