Join us at e-flux on Thursday, February 5 at 7:00pm for a discussion with Steven Henry Madoff about his new book Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics (Stanford University Press, 2025). Madoff will be in discussion with Barry Schwabsky.
In Unseparate, Madoff proposes that at the root of contemporary installation art and performance, the practices of early Modernists, ranging from Wagner and Cézanne to Hugo Ball, Duchamp, and Gropius’s Bauhaus, can be thought of as proto-networks and give rise to a network aesthetics. This revision, seeing modernism not only as a traumatic expression of fragmentation but also as systems of interconnectivity that link bodies and organizational structures in space as collectivities, points toward later practices from Warhol’s Factory to e-flux and the Rebuild Foundation, and to artists and collectives as diverse as Joan Jonas, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hito Steyerl, Anne Imhof, ruangrupa, and many more. From the time of the early modernists, the engines of war, political propaganda, and new technologies have driven these practices toward visions of wholeness. Blending history, phenomenology, media theory, and network theory, the book deepens our understanding of classic modernism and contemporary practices, while also suggesting ways in which network aesthetics can model societal structures in our increasingly divisive times.
