"International Art English," published in Triple Canopy in July, has circulated widely and generated debates about the relationship between language, legibility, and power in the art world. The authors of the article, Alix Rule and David Levine, analyze a corpus of press releases circulated by e-flux in order to describe the language of contemporary art. They trace the particularities of this language to English translations of critical texts published in the 1970s in journals like October. The widespread use of the Internet has, they argue, accelerated the development of IAE, turning it into a kind of lingua franca; the proliferation of international variations—French IAE, Scandinavian IAE, Chinese IAE—ends up diluting the authority of critics, "traditionally the elite innovators of IAE." Given these developments, Rule and Levine ask: "Can we imagine an art world without IAE? Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?"

With this forum, Triple Canopy hopes to provoke a critical response to the article, consider questions and perspectives eschewed by the authors, and solicit the perspectives of those who work with (or resist working with) IAE, whether they are critics, curators, educators, or publicists. Specifically, the discussion will focus on the political implications and uses of IAE, within and outside of the art world. "Thanks to International Art English, the artist can still appear vaguely subversive and the host state committed to openness, a mutual saving of face," writes Mostafa Heddaya in a recent essay for Hyperallergic. How does such "critical" language direct attention away from the suppression of political dissent, especially when employed by institutions—and their proxies—operating in environments marred by human-rights violations, such as China and the UAE (or even the US)? How does obfuscation slip into propaganda? And do those who regularly produce IAE experience the language as burdensome or liberating, a welcome tool for the diffusion of power or another step toward a global standard of ambiguity and opacity?

The forum will be facilitated by Nathalie Anglès, Wenzel Bilger, Lauren Cornell, Mariam Ghani, Mostafa Heddaya, David Levine, Alexander Provan, Yael Reinharz, Alix Rule, Lumi Tan, and Hrag Vartanian.

Participants
  • Nathalie Anglès is cofounder and executive director of Residency Unlimited, a New York-based nonprofit arts organization that fosters customised residencies for artists and curators through strategic partnerships with collaborating institutions. From 2000 until 2008, she was the director of Location One’s international residency program. In 2008 she received the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government.
  • Wenzel Bilger is regional program director of the Goethe-Institut New York.
  • Lauren Cornell is the curator of the 2015 triennial, digital projects, and Museum as Hub at the New Museum in New York. From 2005-2012, she served as adjunct curator at the New Museum and executive director of Rhizome, an organization dedicated to the creation, presentation and preservation of art engaged with technology.
  • Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and data. Ghani has exhibited and screened at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Met Breuer and Queens Museum in New York, and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the CCCB in Barcelona, the Rotterdam and CPH:DOX film festivals, the Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials, the Dhaka Art Summit, and dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul and Kassel. Her writing recently has been published by e-flux journal, Frieze, and Foreign Policy, as well as in the books Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency and Cultural Production, Critical Writing Ensembles, Dissonant Archives, Social Medium: Artists Writing 2000–2015, and Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom. Ghani has received fellowships, awards, grants, and residencies from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which gave her its inaugural Changemaker Storyteller award in 2017.
  • Mostafa Heddaya is a writer in New York and the coeditor of American Circus.
  • David Levine is an artist and writer based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include “Some of the People, All of the Time” at the Brooklyn Museum; Light Matter at Fondation Cartier (Paris); “Bystanders” at Gallery TPW (Toronto); and Private Moment with Creative Time in New York. He won an OBIE in 2013 for his performance installation Habit and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. His writing has appeared in n+1, Triple Canopy, Cabinet, Frieze, Parkett, and Theater. Best Behavior (53rd State Press), an anthology of his writings on theater and performance, will be published this fall, as will the artist's book A Discourse on Method (Shonni Enelow). Levine is a professor of the practice of performance, theater, and media at Harvard University.
  • Alexander Provan is the editor of Triple Canopy and a contributing editor of Bidoun. He is the recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and was a 2013–15 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. His writing has appeared in the Nation, n+1, Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, and in several exhibition catalogues. His work has been presented at the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Museum Tinguely (Basel), 12th Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador), New Museum (New York), Kunsthall Oslo, and Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York), among other venues. Measuring Device with Organs was recently published by Triple Canopy as an LP.
  • Yael Reinharz is executive director of Artis, an independent nonprofit organization that broadens international awareness and understanding of contemporary art from Israel, and provides important resources, programs and platforms for artists and art professionals to develop lasting partnerships with the global art community.
  • Alix Rule is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. She earned a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in 2017. She is the cofounder of Useless Press, a publishing collective that creates “eclectic Internet things.” Her writing has appeared in Dissent and Harper’s Magazine, among other magazines.
  • Lumi Tan is an assistant curator at The Kitchen in New York and associate editor of The Exhibitionist: Journal for Exhibition Making.
  • Hrag Vartanian is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and critic. He is the editor of Hyperallergic and a member of the Triangle Arts Association board.