During the spring of 1979, The Red Krayola and Scritti Politti toured together in England. Despite the two bands' very different origins and career stages at the time - The Red Krayola started in Houston in 1966 as an avant-garde psychedelic group and had by then recorded several albums, including collaborations with Art & Language, while Scritti Politti was a young English post punk band with only a few singles released - the match was perfect. As Scritti Politti member Green Gartside put it, Scritti Politti made 'music with the questions built in and the assurances left out'.¹The Red Krayola did exactly the same.

In an interview made on the occasion of that tour and published in the music fanzine After Hours in 1979, the members of Scritti Politti discussed several concerns they had as a band. Although neither this interview nor Scritti Politti's work was part of the editorial discussion when we chose the contents of the current issue of Afterall, they provide the ideal access point to its central issues.


…the idea is that substantial decisions about what the group is doing are made by a larger number of people than actually pick up instruments at present, and play and call themselves Scritti Politti.²



At a time when a still buoyant art market privileges the figure of the individual producer and considers his or her work independently from the context of production, it seems important to reflect on alternative modes of making art that focus on networks and collaborations. Not only because these might provide an alternative to predominant ideas about how art can or should be made, but because these modes may make possible a more nuanced understanding of the position of both art and the artist within society at large. This results from the conviction that, as Gartside says, many of the problems raised by artistic practice 'aren't actually encountered at the stage of writing or performing a song per se'. Rather, the problems are located at 'the interface between making music and the rest of your life'. The work of gelitin, Chto delat?, The Red Krayola, Asco and Kai Althoff, featured in this issue of Afterall, constitute examples of how this conviction and those problems can be reflected within contemporary artistic or cultural practice. Gelitin's dynamics as a long-standing artists' group, Chto delat?'s interdisciplinary production involving artists, writers and activists, The Red Krayola's constantly changing formations and collaborations, Asco's group performances and Kai Althoff's numerous co-authored projects (including music albums as the group Workshop) make visible alternative modes of occupying a space within the cultural arena, and allow a questioning of the official mechanisms of distribution and interpretation. This is important because, as Scritti Politti member Nial Jinks says, 'Music is not constructed through our intentions as musicians, but is constructed socially through the people that we come into contact with.'

Gartside suggests that if the meaning of cultural products is (at least to some extent) constructed through social relations, both at the stages of production and reception, then questions about the artists' agency and its political implications are raised - so that part of the artists' task might then be to 'deal with some of the … concrete problems that people have when they try to make or control their own culture.' This might involve, as in the work of Chto delat?, an explicit reflection on issues of organisation or distribution or, as in the case of Asco, Althoff, Hito Steyerl or Jim Shaw - artists also featured in the current issue - a reworking of popular culture imagery that attempts to release it from role it plays within the social and production relations of diverse economic systems.

To some extent, as Gartside says, making art might simply respond to a desire to 'disturb some thought, disturb some language, disturb some relationships… disturb complacency'. This can be effectively done not by creating a fully new vocabulary, alternative to that of domination, but by articulating the vocabulary that is available in order to disrupt the language of domination. That vocabulary, as this issue of Afterall shows, might contain crass, goofy or even just silly elements, from Spider-Man cartoons and the big-breasted women of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) to body parts turned into musical instruments and tags on the walls of art institutions. But although their popular nature seems to render any politic goals associated with the work moot, there is always a chance for a different kind of effect. As the lyrics of Scritti Politti's 'P.A.s' (1979) say, 'Bas(s)es shake / And speakers rattle / Doledrums roll us into battle / It's jokey - Well, maybe.'

If that is the case, it is possible to situate the re-workings of popular culture that are showcased in this issue as a part of a disruptive, or even emancipatory project - that ranges from The Red Krayola's recent experiments with the pop song format (which perhaps not surprisingly have strong parallels with Scritti Politti's recent album White Bread Black Beer, 2006), Jim Shaw's recycling of low-end cultural production and Kai Althoff's appropriation of Christian and German iconography, to Hito Steyerl's and Chto delat?'s more explicitly politicised use of capitalist and socialist imaginaries. Such work remains aware that utterances made in any song, or in any artwork, are not necessarily 'about something': songs or artworks, Gartside continues, 'aren't conversations or political tracts, and a new way of writing, of using language is necessary to maximise [their] potential'. This issue of Afterall explores, among other things, how these vocabularies function - and, ultimately, whether they all go down the drain.
This approach has allowed Afterall journal to stray into unexpected territories at times. The first issue included a fascinating and important essay by Gertrud Sandqvist, titled 'Art and Social Democracy', on the problematic legacy of Swedish social democracy and its controlling impulses in relation to art, architecture and design; ten years later, issue 20 features an imaginative and significant proposal about the future of the Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine by Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman. Nevertheless, our central focus has remained the production of art by individual artists and how their ability to speak about (their) life through art can offer ways of thinking about the world in a different way. The privileging of this direct relationship to art remains crucial if art is to have more than a merely instrumental role in understanding how abstract concepts such as economy, democracy or society function, and what effects they have on people's lives.

Over the years, Afterall has adopted a steadily more critical tone, in a literal sense: we have not only covered issues and artists that we find important, but we have also touched upon subjects that feel in need of more thorough inspection, and have introduced a back section that looks at specific events, exhibitions and artworks that seemed relevant for our times. In the current issue, these include Julian Myers's discussion of Harald Szeemann's sprawling exhibition 'Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk' (1983), a diagnosis of a failed European drive towards utopia figured in aesthetic terms; or Stacey Allan's analysis of Louise Lawler'sBirdcalls (1972/81), a work that reminds us of the unresolved issues of gender equality that have been a battleground for art at least since the early 1970s. These are accompanied by three artists whose practices intersect with other modes of image-making: Goshka Macuga's research and 'curatorial' strategies, Enrico David's craft and design work, and Lothar Baumgarten's investigation on language. Perhaps more importantly, the lines of enquiry of this issue run both into the future - as in Hilal, Petti and Weizman's contribution - and into the past, in Omer Fast's investigation of the technical means of historical representation, Baumgarten's account of excluded histories and Dieter Roelstraete's discussion of the renewed importance of magic and religion in his opening essay.

It is interesting to write this introduction in late 2008, a moment in which the events in the world economy are still barely comprehensible, but suggest the possibility of a paradigm shift. The past ten years have seen almost unprecedented wealth being invested in art, especially the art of our own time. This has produced many opportunities, for good and ill, of which people have been able to take advantage in different ways. The early 2000s may represent in paradoxical fashion the swansong of certain forms of art's dependence on patronage and economic success, while also being the first stage in an ongoing process of global redistribution. The current turn of events is therefore likely to offer new challenges and ask for new responses. Certainly, Afterall will reflect these changes, but still maintaining that tension between close reading and broad analysis that has characterised the journal in the past. If new models are indeed called for, this is less in terms of detached theoretical work than in terms of, to use an old phrase, 'what, how and for whom?' - questions that may occupy us all much more in the years ahead.

— Pablo Lafuente