WRITING
Selected articles, essays and fiction from the late 1990s to now
July 2020: ‘Dissolving the People’, in How To Win, an anthology of writing and artworks by Tories Out Propaganda Unit (TOPU),
16 May 2020: ‘This isn’t a virus, it’s a time machine’, Mute Magazine: “Benedict Seymour takes Fredric Jameson’s 2015 essay ‘In Hyperspace’ as a starting point to compare the current UK government’s Covid-19 and Brexit policies – a device to effect a collective leap into the future, only with the twist that this leap into the ‘future’ is actually a radical leap into a reactionary past, a rapid leap backwards.”
– Stefan Kalmár in ICA Daily, 24 May 2020
March 2020: ‘La Rejetée’. Essay-fiction on film, financialisation and social media. In The Memory of it Sometimes Comes to you – Encircling the Image of Trauma, Centre d’Art Contemporain/Archive Books, Geneva. Matei Bellu and Emilie Bujès, eds
September 2018: ‘Art and the Utopia of (Non-)Reproduction’. In: John Chilver and Brighid Lowe, eds. Manual: Parts and Labour. Osan: Gwak Sang-wook, Osan Culture Foundation, pp. 22-23
August 2017: ‘The re-Jetée: 1971, Recurring’
Treatment for a non/reproduction of Chris Marker’s La jetée. Published in WdW Review Vol.1 (2013-16): Arts, Culture, and Journalism in Revolt (book), edited by Defne Ayas, Adam Kleinman. Anthology of Witte de With’s online platform WdW Review since its inception in 2013
September 2014: ‘Primer'’
Speculative fiction on commissioned for the catalogue of the Bergen Biennale. David Riff; Ekaterina Degott and Jill Winder, eds. Monday Begins on Saturday. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014, pp. 123-163
April 2014: ‘The re-Jetée: 1971, Recurring’
Fiction-theory for WDW Review, Rotterdam, 1971 section
Sept 2010: Creativity’s Rainbow
Speculative fiction reworking Thomas Pynchon and Philip K Dick’s post-war scifi to imagine the aftermath of the creative class post-austerity and reaction. English and Russian translation in catalogue for Shockworkers Of The Mobile Image, the First Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art 2010, Ekaterinberg, Russia. Edited by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff and Cosmin Costinas. Reviewed in Frieze magazine
November 2009: Proud to be Flesh – A Mute Magazine Anthology (book), editor and contributor, Mute Publishing/Autonomedia, London, 2009. 624 page book collecting writing and art from 15 years of Mute Magazine. Features three of my essays including: ‘Drowning By Numbers: The (Non)Reproduction of New Orleans’. Disaster-catalysed primitive accumulation as strategy of the white supremacist US economy in decline
5 Jan 2012: ‘La jetée’s Spiral’, Mute Magazine, Review of Les Marques Aveugles at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva. Modernist film tropes and their afterlife in the loops of post-Fordist restructuring
July, 2011: ‘Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback and Culture’, Mute Magazine, Vol3, no.1. A theory of cybernetics as a mode of non-reproduction of capital, and of Cagean aesthetics as anticipation of neoliberal ‘dematerialisation’ and social reproductive crisis: ‘doing more with less’
July 2010: ‘Eliminating Labour: Aesthetic Economy in Harun Farocki’
Mute Magazine, Vol2, no.16. Devalorisation and the art of destroying (constant) capital
Sept 2009: ‘Something is happening but you don’t know what it is’
Essay in ‘Finance’ – Stanley Picker Gallery Lectures on Art part 4, by Benedict Seymour and Anthony Davies with Ian Hunt, editor Dean Kenning, pub. Centre for Useless Splendour, Kingston University, London, 2009
12 August 2009: ‘Notes on the Last Days of Jack Sheppard: Capital Crimes and Paper Claims’
May 2008: ‘Blurred Boundaries: Sport, Art and Activity’, Mute magazine, Vol.2, no.8. Loren Goldner, CLR James, Melville and Marx converge on all-sided praxis
2007: Editor, ‘Scum of the Republic – Banlieuesards and the Left’, a short pamphlet on the 2005 riots in France. Published by Mute Books, London
21 December 2006: ‘Drowning by Numbers: The Non-Reproduction of New Orleans’
After the actual hurricane that hit New Orleans in late August 2005, came the second hurricane of neo-liberal looting.
2006: ‘Mutiny in the Mainstream’, Journal of Visual Culture, Volume: 5 issue: 1, page(s): 112-114 https://doi.org/10.1177/147041290600500115
4 April, 2006: ‘Fear Death by Water – the Regeneration Siege in Central Hackney’, The London Particular, Mute Magazine, 26. Artist’s project by Benedict Seymour and David Panos on the racialised gentrification of central Hackney
June 2006: Text and images of regeneration mapping project in Else/where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2005, ed. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. Scholarly anthology on techniques and contemporary applications of mapping https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/else-where
6 March 2003: ‘Involuntary Victims of the Aztecs’
Isomorphisms with contemporary empire at the Royal Academy Aztecs exhibition. Is ours a culture of sacrifice that simply lacks the luxuries granted to the ‘savage’ sacrificial man?
July 2002: ‘Back to Zero’ Mute Magazine 21
Jean-Luc Godard’s Maoist films as ambiguous experiments in (old) new media
10 March 2002: ‘Bio-Pics’ On Pasolini’s Salo, Trilogy of Life, and Agamben, Mute Magazine 23
March 2002: ‘When Worlds Collide’ – article on painter, Nigel Cooke, Frieze 65.
Exploring an art of apocalypse as state of exception
March 2002: ‘Do the Right Thing! The Anti-Globalisation Movement after S11’
Texte Zur Kunst, no.44
10 Dec 2001: ‘The Last Picture Show’ – on closure of the Lux cinema, Mute Magazine, 22.
Rent and artists’ cinema in the east end
10 July 2001: ‘Blockbusting the Election’, Mute Magazine, 20.
May 2001: ‘Nationalise This!’ – Analysis of ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, Radical Philosophy, 107.
April 2001: ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Her’ – Urban regeneration in London, Mute Magazine, issue 19
April 2001: ‘The Battle of Seattle’ for Log magazine: rap about ‘anti-globalisation’
Feb 2001: Review Chad McCail, Laurent Delaye Gallery, London, Frieze 57
Jan 2001: Review Jeremy Deadman, Five Years, London, Frieze 56
Sept 2000: Review ‘Club Circuits’ Southampton, Public Art Journal
June 2000: ‘Rabble Rousers’ - Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, Mute 18
May 2000: ‘Coral Maze’ review of Mike Nelson at Matt’s Gallery, Mute 17
April 2000: Review ‘Wooden Heart’, AVCO London, Art Monthly, 235
Dec 1999: ‘Everything Must Go’, Creativity, capitalism and the ‘CRASH! Corporatism & Complicity’ exhibition at the ICA, Mute 16
Sept 1999: Review Henry Bond, Emily Tsingou, London, Frieze 54
June 1999: ‘Rehabilitating the Subject’ – review of The Ticklish Subject by Slavoj Zizek, Mute 13
August 1998: ‘The Situationist City’ by Simon Sadler, review in Mute 11
‘Fifth Column’ blogs on Metamute.org
8 July 2014: ‘Game of Thralls – an Art & Labour Fantasia’
Organizing in the artworld?
29 May 2014: ‘Notes on Normcore’
A response to Tom Frank's analysis of the normcore trend. Rory Rowan responded in turn in ‘So now – On Normcore’, E-flux! Issue #58 October 2014
April 2014: ‘Domino, No No No!’
Culture and Gentrification in Williamsburg
March 2014: ‘Nuff Aura: Absolute artwork meets absolute desperation’
Hip hop as asset class
Dec 2013: ‘A Christmas gif(t): On gifs, time and the carnivalesque’
April 2013: ‘Keep Calm and Carrion: Two Funerals and a Reflection’
Thatcher death parties in UK
October 2012: ‘Nothing is Better than Love: How not to repeat Weimar in Greece’ Critique of Paul Mason on Grexit
August 2012: ‘Crime Scene Investigation’ Bullets in Broadway Market, Hackney
July 2012: ‘Alternative Olympics’ The London Riots and the Olympics as ‘negation of negation’
July 2012: ‘Anish Kapoor/Vanish the Poor: 3 Olympic Symptoms’
Art and the elimination of labour (aka the working class)
June 2012: ‘Slave to the Rhythm, or The Promissory Form of Labour’
Workfare, mass ornament, and jubilee