Profiles

New York’s energetic community of experimental music and film venues

One hundred years of John Cage

‘Film themes, ska, tango, Phil Spector-esque girl groups, and loungey instrumentals are all part of the mixture’

David Weiss, who together with Peter Fischli formed the Swiss artist duo that for more than three decades walked the line between irony and sincerity, physical comedy and conceptual rigor, died of cancer on Friday 26 April 2012 in Zurich.

‘You Killed Me First: The Cinema of Transgression’ at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin, is a first-time museum presentation devoted to a group of New York underground filmmakers of the 1980s. To this end the institution has painstakingly converted its exhibition spaces into a kind of über-gritty dungeon, vying, it seems, to deliver as authentic a backdrop as curatorially feasible to present 18 films for a strictly 18+ audience. The theme park-like recreation of the once sketchy, run-down Lower East Side featured touching details like professionally executed out-of-control smudges of black paint covering all windows, minutely stopped short from spilling over to the walls.
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Friends and collaborators remember his life and work

A new translation of Julia Kristeva’s book on the art of beheading

The Esperanto Museum and the Department of Planned Languages in Austria’s National Library

The filmmaker Romuald Karmakar is redefining his oeuvre – and cinema itself – on YouTube

Ursula Bogner is a forgotten pioneer of electronic music – at least according to the Berlin musician Jan Jelinek

Klaus Walter stellt die neue Ausgabe von frieze d/e auf byte.fm vor.

Marxist arguments permeate Jacques Rancière’s philosophy – including his aesthetic theory

Five contemporary painters, from Charline von Heyl to Tauba Auerbach, discuss the role of abstraction

The fourth novel from New York-based writer Ben Marcus is a powerful allegory about language

The French composer's purpose was to find a breach in the fortress of musical tradition, open up ‘fissures of randomness for the poetic adventure to slip through’

A rediscovered film sheds new light on Rudolf Schwarzkogler and the Vienna Actionists

On postcards and an encounter with a Basel pioneer of Conceptual art

Erik Morse on the translation into English of a 52-part French TV programme featuring philosopher Gilles Deleuze

From the failures of Roland Barthes to the joys of sustained looking, four new publications on photography

In recent years, artists in the UK have increasingly turned to narrative cinema and mainstream TV, a shift that has coincided with a renewed interest in the video and new-media practices of the 1970s and ’80s. How does this relate to issues of funding, ideology, duration and display? A round-table discussion with artists Ed Atkins, Melanie Gilligan, Anja Kirschner and Ben Rivers