Infrastructural Critique

Marina Vishmidt speaks with unfailing clarity about how value feeds on devastation and how art’s institutions sit inside the chain of extraction rather than outside or above. Infrastructural Critique is essential reading for anyone who despite all is not ready to give up on the artworld as a place for collective struggle, and who not only wants to experience how ‘infrastructural critique’ pulls conditions of possibility into the frame – above all, the material conditions of reproduction – but more importantly, crack open the impasses and alibis of institutional critique. What makes this book, her last gift to us, so generative is that it never stops at the diagnosis: between reproduction and abolition it opens ground for new forms of origination * Anselm Franke *
What is to be undone? How? With whom? Ensnared in capital’s negative totality, it is tempting to imagine that we can find refuge in experiences of care, reproduction, and life before and beyond capitalism, or, alternatively, that we can decree capital’s integral abolition. In this indispensable book, Marina Vishmidt – with the intransigent generosity that marked her life and work – demonstrates that ‘critique as a material practice of antagonism’ must eschew abstract radicalism to fight instead on the terrain of infrastructure, where value and waste, relations of production and relations of destruction, intersect. Vishmidt teaches us that ‘there is no opposition between breaking and building.’ Infrastructural Critique is an irreplaceable invitation and guide to the work of abolition. * Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism *

Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024) was an American writer, editor, and critic born in Kharkiv, in the former Soviet Union. She was Professor of Art Theory in the Department of Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, until April 2024. She was a fellow at the Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture and Society, Lüneburg, in 2024. She held the Rudolph Arnheim Guest Professorship in Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin, from April to September 2022 and a Visiting Professorship at the Department of Critical and Cultural Theory, Södertörn University, Stockholm, from September 2020. She lectured at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London from 2016 to 2023 and taught art theory at the Netherlands Art Institute in Arnhem from 2014 to 2018.

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