Afterall 52 Winter 2021/2022

Issue 52, ‘New Politics’, explores a certain contemporary structure of affect as a response to what are indeed new types of claims leading to new aesthetic positions and artistic sensibilities. And if all are not ‘new’, the plural geographies and the ‘minor’ archives they excavate and bring to the fore shape an artistic landscape that articulates a different idea of the global that feels both contemporary and inactual, contributing to shifting the positions within sensible configurations and to estranging modes of saying and doing.

This issue opens with two new essays on the work of Jonas Staal. Written by art critics and theorists Sven Lütticken and Kim West, these texts look at two essential tools of politics as explored by Staal, respectively the assembly form and propaganda. Lütticken looks at how Staal’s assemblies gather agents that are usually excluded from conventional political arenas, while West draws a constellation between the propagandist strategies of Staal, Captain America and Willi Münzenberg and champions a ‘socialist case for the autonomy of art’.