In an anniversary challenge trying again on three many years of artwork and cultural criticism, Austrian journal springerin brings collectively companions of the journal in a ‘reflexive self-ethnography’. Artists and writers replicate on the hopes and beliefs of the mid-Nineties – notably relating to the guarantees of the then-novel web and its potential for critique – and the methods by which a lot of these hopes have been upset, if not shattered.
Thinker Boris Buden units the grim tone of the problem, homing in on a despairing entry by artist and common springerin contributor Brian Holmes in Nettime after Donald Trump’s re-election: ‘The issues that have driven this mailing list for more than 30 years lie shattered before us. The chance of a more open and just world, which we all believed in one way or another, has been swept away by a gigantic wrecking ball.’
Nettime and springerin, Buden writes, shared not simply this idealism but in addition the expertise of residing in a ‘common world and a common historical epoch’. Central to each tasks was an activist ethos that thought-about tradition to be ‘everywhere’ and ‘everything’ to be tradition – ‘including history’. Artists, theorists and activists had the sense of belonging to ‘to an elite of historical progress, if not to an avant garde.’
On reflection, writes Buden, this was simplistic progressivism, an ideological ‘creature of its time’ rooted in a perception in benevolent ‘westernization’. Whereas artwork, concept and activism usually succeeded in ‘changing the world for the better’, they may not stop ‘the world changing for the worst’.
springerin 1/2025
When the primary challenge of Springerin appeared in 1995, the wars within the Balkans had been raging just a few hundred kilometres south of Vienna; in July, the Srebrenica bloodbath came about.
However progressives, claims Buden, had a blind spot for ethnic cleaning and nationalist hatred; and so the wars had been ‘Balkanized’ and ‘cut off from western civilization’. The determine of the ‘benevolent westernizer’ spawned a ‘swarm of monstrous creatures’ that thirty years later dominate the political stage.
Altered landscapes
Critic Yvonne Volkart fondly recollects the tech-optimism of springerin’s early years and the way she used to fax in her contributions, which had been put on-line within the ‘Net Section’.
‘The editors, their authors and artists worked on an aesthetic of adequate forms and media: not in an art-historical, let alone formalistic manner, but from a post-feminist, media-ecological, interdisciplinary and curatorial leftwing perspective coming from cultural studies.’
Whereas new political frontlines look like producing an identical collective feeling amongst ‘artistic producers’ at the moment, the panorama has altered. The previous protagonists of ‘internet practices and online communities’ have moved on, many into creative analysis:
‘Art is not just an artwork and criticism is not its afterthought, but both are jointly developed methods of searching, of wanting to know more precisely and sharing knowledge, of forming alliances – of being restless, of making restless. springerin does the same.’
Areas of battle
Artwork criticism has misplaced its combativeness, writes Süreyyya Evren in an article on pugnacious creative practices. One instance is a efficiency by which the artist Hiwa Okay. and thinker Bakir Alo (each Iraqi-Kurdish) took half in a bodily and verbal boxing match over the Kurdish query.
‘What Hiwa K. wanted to question is whether it is possible to talk about politically and culturally sensitive issues without conflict. In his opinion, normal conversation proved inadequate, and so the transition to wrestling seemed quite natural.’
One other instance is Dana Hoey, who organized Thai boxing and jiu-jitsu programs for residents and policewo*males to focus on police violence in Detroit (2017). ‘Her combat training for women’, writes Evren, ‘extends the metaphor of conflict to everyday problems and shows that art can actually empower disadvantaged people and need not be limited to criticizing institutional power dynamics.’ Criticism, Evren proposes, ‘should actively create spaces for today’s conflicts, make voices audible, and facilitate wise discourse that exceeds the established order’.
Locations of protest
Artist duo Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, professors on the Academy of Tremendous Arts Vienna, reply two questions posed by the editorial staff: ‘What spaces will be open to the advanced sectors of the contemporary art scene in the future? Where and in what narrower milieu was the springerin project located three decades ago?’
Two situations of protest bracket their response: one early in 2025, when college students of the Academy protested the upcoming coalition in Austria between the conservative ÖVP and the far-right FPÖ; and the opposite 30 years in the past, in opposition to the exhibition Deutschsein at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, which aimed to boost German self-confidence in a nationwide local weather characterised by Nazi rallies and assaults on migrants.
The distinction between the 2 lies in at the moment’s perpetual dwell commentary in social media and the strain and paranoia it creates, write Creischer and Siekmann. Noting that the academy is not the place for unpoliced expression, as a consequence of concern of repression from the far proper, they flip to springerin to formulate one other imaginative and prescient:
‘The editorial office could be a place where you practice being present, writing articles together, drinking coffee, making time, where you lose your smartphone, that is, where you learn to strike.’
Illusions of subjectivity
Hans-Christian Dany recollects his private historical past with springerin and adjoining on-line actions, on the similar time charting how the beliefs of the cultural left have more and more converged with the far-right, identitarian politics of antisemitism.
He chalks up this improvement to the critique of ‘objective truths’ formulated by thinkers like Donna Haraway, who coined the time period ‘divine trick’ for illusions of objectivity. ‘At the end of the last millennium, when Haraway wrote this, exaggerated counter-truth seemed a suitable means of breaking patriarchal hegemonies.’ However in a decade of ‘the politics of affect’, it opens the door to what Adorno known as ‘crypto-antisemitism’ (Adorno).
With the controversy on Israel and Palestine reaching new dimensions, Dany invokes the tasks of media-literacy vis-à-vis on-line imagery, notably from an editorial standpoint: ‘Making magazines means writing the present’ – however not simply the current one needs to see.
Overview by Kathrin Heinrich
