International Art English

International Art English
Alix Rule & David Levine with Mariam Ghani & Alexander Provan

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.

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.

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.

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.

International Art English was published as part of Triple Canopy’s Immaterial Literature project area, which receives support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Opaline Fund of the Jewish Community Endowment Federation and Endowment Fund. Issue 24, Risk Pool, was made possible through the generous support of VIA Art Fund.

In “International Art English,” Alix Rule and David Levine describe the language of contemporary art by analyzing a corpus of press releases sent by e-flux, which is paid to do so by museums, biennials, publishers, and art fairs in order to reach a subscriber base of more than ninety thousand art professionals. The essay appeared in 2012 and soon surpassed the popularity of every other Triple Canopy publication. “International Art English” generated innumerable conversations about the relationship between language, legibility, and power in the art world: columns in the Guardian, polemics in e-flux’s online journal, debates at conferences for art historians, and spirited threads on MetaFilter and Reddit. Suddenly, IAE was inescapable.

This ebook—which is functional on all common devices, not to mention being accessible offline—includes “International Art English”; sentence trees that illustrate IAE’s lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features; a forum on IAE convened the year after the essay’s publication; a response by the artist Mariam Ghani, who participated in the forum; and a retrospective evaluation of the IAE phenomenon by Triple Canopy’s Alexander Provan, who edited the essay.

Rule and Levine trace the particularities of IAE to translations of French and German critical texts published in the 1970s in academic publications 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?”

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