Forms of Abstraction engages with abstraction not as a formal option in art, or as an airy theoretical speculation, but as an operational force that has redesigned our world, and continues to do so.

The first selection of Social Distances includes María Belén Sáez de Ibarra’s “Cosmopolitics of the Living” from What about Activism?, edited by Steven Henry Madoff; Martin Herbert’s “On and Off the Grid: Agnes Martin,” from Tell Them I Said No; as well as Fernando García-Dory’s “Inside Us: A Dinner as an Aesthetic and Agro-political Excursion” and Chris Fite-Wassilak’s “Species of Specialties: St. Louis’s Provel Cheese”—both featured in Politics of Food.

The second packet includes chapters from Hubert Fichte’s The Black City: Glosses, Ingo Niermann’s Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris, and Charlotte Birnbaum’s Bon! Bon! On the Charms of Sweet Cuisine, as well as the introduction to Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai, edited by Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza. 

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fourth installment focusing on issues of representation and decolonization. The late Senegalese artist and poet Issa Samb questions the “representativeness” of race and art in a 1989 text reprinted in his monograph WORD! WORD? WORD!; art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes about depictions of South African eco-racism in Uriel Orlow’s monograph Theatrum Botanicum; artist Pedro Neves Marques looks toward alternative Indigenous science fiction in the anthology Futurity Report; artist and theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva identifies the disco’s black light as a device for Black feminist thought in Otobong Nkanga’s monograph Lustre & Lucre; media theorist Andrea B. Braidt turns to queer subjectivity and affect in the anthology On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency; and art historian T. J. Demos links global geopolitics and visual culture in Against the Anthropocene.

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fifth installment focusing on issues of democracy and protest. From Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere, philosopher Oliver Marchart proposes an aesthetics of agitating, propagating, and organizing. Artist and researcher Sonia Boyce reconciles the aesthetic strategies of collage and montage with the political address to racism and nationalism in artworks by Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chamber, included in The Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain. We turn to artist Amar Kanwar’s video installation The Torn First Pages—referring to the Burmese bookshop owner who was imprisoned for tearing out pages with government propaganda in the books and journals he sold—and scholar and critic Erika Balsom’s essay on this work in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book. Architect Eyal Weizman identifies the role of the roundabout as a site of eruption in recent uprisings and revolutions in The Roundabout Revolutions from the Critical Spatial Practice series. And to conclude this selection of attachments, writer and performer Johanna Hedva steers away from an ableist discourse on political participation and renders visible care as the most anti-capitalist protest there is, in their essay included in Where are the tiny revolts?