Archive Books announces No Order: Art in a Post-Fordist Society :: This editorial research and investigation project focuses on the relationships between contemporary art systems and capitalism’s production processes.

By means of an investigation into current creative industries — and their social, economic and semiotic assemblages — the magazine contributions (essays, articles, interviews and dialogues as well as artists’ projects) aim to deconstruct, analyse and intervene within the ambit of the procedures and forms of cognitive capitalism. It will concentrate, in particular, on the phenomena of the ‘biennalisation’, ‘financialisation’ and ’spectacularisation’ of the political, beginning with the control and distribution of forms of artistic education, production and display on a global scale.

The Editorial Board is comprised of a series of transversal figures from various geographic and cultural environments, and includes Asef Bayat, Harun Farocki, Peter Friedl, Maurizio Lazzarato, Sylvère Lotringer, Achille Mbembe, Angela Melitopoulos, Christian Marazzi, Nelly Richard, Florian Schneider, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas and Françoise Vergès.

Amongst the numerous contributors to the first, 400 page issue are: the curators Roger M. Burgel, Vasif Kortun, Charles Esche, Viktor Misiano; the sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato and the economist Christian Marazzi; the filmmakers Deimantas Narkevičius, Harun Farocki, Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi; the Russian philosopher Alexei Penzin; the Chilean theorist Nelly Richard and the German art historian Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt. There are artists projects by Stephen Willats, Erick Beltrán, Warren Niedich, Société Réaliste, Falke Pisano, the Argentinian collective Etcetéra, Rossella Biscotti, Luca Frei, Oliver Ressler and Vangelis Vlahos, who contribute with essays, graphic designs or maps and cartographies.

No Order is published annually and is bilingual (English and Italian). It is edited by Marco Scotini, published by Archive Books (Berlin), and promoted and supported by NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano. Beyond the normal divisions and pre-established formats of periodical art magazines, this editorial project is structured into an assemblage of three sections: Time Zone, Play Time, and Time Machine.

The cartographies in Time Zone trace out emerging artistic ’systems’, geographies of governmental disparities, and different dynamics of cultural work. What is at stake here is the position that these local systems are adopting in the globalised system of contemporary art. This section focuses on the way the role of cultural industries is affecting various economic scenarios around the world. Time Zone is quite simply a rewriting of the opening section of art magazines – that of news and appointments. In this issue: Russia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Croatia and Turkey.

Play Time corresponds instead to the central section of an art magazine, which is generally dedicated to monographic essays on particular artists. Categories like ‘author’ and ‘work’ are concepts that belong to a particular historical period — that of the modern age — but they are no longer able to analyse and portray the processes of contemporary production. Deconstructing the hyper-visibility of certain organisations and giving visibility to the invisible networks and processes that permeate the space of art, in a collective chain of Education/ Market/ Display, thus becomes the only possible form of action in today’s state of ‘work’.

The section Time Machine aims to complete the issue by questioning the position of time at the heart of capitalism, but no longer in its ‘modern’ form, which based the production process on the contrast between use value and exchange value, and thus, by extension, on the dialectic between reality and representation. On the contrary, time — which is based on potential/ actual relationships — is now the basis for the information economy. At a time when appearance has entirely replaced reality, the subject is always a ‘power’, insofar as it is memory, on the point of manifesting itself. The last section of art magazines is given over to art reviews, and the category it deals with is always the time dimension of ‘after’.

The cover picture is taken from the demonstrations at the Milan Triennale in 1968. The underlying theme of the XIV International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and Modern Architecture was ‘Large Numbers’. The XIV Triennale never opened. It was occupied by students during the demonstrations and all the exhibition areas were destroyed. ‘Why not try to start again, precisely here in Milan? In that same space in which the great process of social transformation was interrupted?’