Minor Compositions

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 17 Militant Aesthetics with Martin Lang 

For this episode we talk with art historian and painter Martin Lang about this book Militant Aesthetics: Art Activism in the 21st Century. How are practices of art activism changing in the current political and media climate? What tensions exist within these forms of political engagement and how can they be productively worked with rather ignored or denied?

“Protest art is not a new concept and yet this book argues that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 distinctly 21st-century forms of art activism emerged. On the one hand these became militant as artists retained belief in the possibility of radical political change through art. On the other hand, this belief developed in a hostile environment, when anti-terror legislations reclassified activists and artists as terrorists. Militant Aesthetics sheds light on numerous international case studies of modern art activism and the different ways they can be classified as militant. Combining these examples with the pioneering thought of Badiou, Žižek, Rancière and Mouffe, Lang investigates the instances, attributes and rules of militant art in order to introduce a new overall theory of 21st-century militant aesthetics.”

Bio: Martin Lang is Senior Lecturer in fine art at the University of Lincoln, UK. He trained as a painter before completing a PhD in History & Philosophy of Art, researching militant forms of art activism. He makes paintings, photographs and activist actions that tackle themes of authenticity, science fiction, political imagination and post-truth. Martin's research in art and politics has been widely published in academic journals including Art & the Public Sphere, Ekphrasis and the Hazlitt Review. His book Militant Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2024) has been described as "a significant remapping of activist and political art" (Karen van den Berg). He also writes for Trebuchet magazine and the Conversation. 

Intro / Outro Music: Joseph Beuys - Sonne statt Reagan

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 16 Sports & the Avant-Garde with Przemysław Strożek 

For this episode we talk with Przemysław Strożek about the relationship between avant-garde arts and sports in the 1920s and 1930s. We discuss two of his books, one as editor: Sport and the European Avant-Garde (1900–1945); and one as sole author: Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads: Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR, 1920–1932. What was the role of avant-garde artists in the emergence of working class sports cultures during this period? How did they contribute to the shaping of the politics of mass sporting events such as the Workers’ Olympics? And what might these histories tell about the relationship between sports, politics, and art for today and into the future?

Bio: Przemysław is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences and Research Associate at the Archive of the Avant-garde in Dresden. He has a PhD habilitation and occupies himself with the history of avant-garde, modernism and contemporary art. He sometimes curates exhibitions and also wrote a book about how sport and art have intermingled. 

Intro / Outro Music: Stuart Pearce - Theme From Red Sport International

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 15 Class, Disasters, and Mutual Aid with John Preston and Rhiannon Firth

For this episode we talk with John Preson and Rhiannon Firth about the relationship between class, disasters, and mutual aid. The conversation is formed mainly around re-visiting their 2020 book “Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom” but branches off to discussing broader issues including nuclear war, live sociology, and conspiracies. 

“This book considers how the UK government’s response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic disadvantages the working class, and how mutual aid, based on anarchist principles, can be used as a force for social change. 

The authors draw on Marxist and anarchist thought in class theory and social movement analysis to demonstrate that the virus and its material and discursive consequences are an active part of continuing class struggle and class interpolation. Preston and Firth examine how plans for quarantine and social isolation systematically work against the needs of the working class, and rely on classed assumptions about how markets and altruism operate. 

In the face of neoliberal methods of dealing with a pandemic, ranging from marketization, disaster capitalism, to a strengthening of the State, Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom explains how radical alternatives such as social movements and mutual aid can be implemented to better cope with current and future crises.” 

Intro / Outro Music: Dead Kenny G's cover the Dead Kennedys "Kill The Poor” 

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 14: Revolutionary Love & the Deep Commons with Matt York

For this episode we talk with Matt York about his book Love and Revolution: A politics for the Deep Commons

“Based on award-winning research, Love and Revolution brings classical and contemporary anarchist thought into a mutually beneficial dialogue with a global cross-section of ecological, anti-capitalist, feminist and anti-racist activists – discussing real-life examples of the loving-caring relations that underpin many contemporary struggles. ​ Such a (r)evolutionary love is revealed to be a common embodied experience among the activists contributing to this collective vision, manifested as a radical solidarity, as political direct action, as long-term processes of struggle, and as a deeply relational more-than-human ethics. The theory developed in this book is brought to life through the voices of Tom at the G20 protests in Toronto, Maria and her permaculture community in Mexico, Hassan on the streets in Syria, Angelo and his comrades occupying squares in Brazil, Dembe and his affinity group in Kampala, and many more.” .


Open access version of the book can be found here: https://www.deepcommons.net/book-love-and-revolution

Bio: Matt York lectures in political theory and philosophy at University College Cork.

Opening / outro music: Gogol Bordello, “Oh No!” (from Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 13: Up Against the Real with Nadja Millner-Larsen

For this episode we talk with Nadja Millner-Larsen about her book Up Against the Real Black Mask from Art to Action.

“With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.”
Bio: Nadja Millner-Larsen is visiting assistant professor in the Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program at New York University.

Opening / outro music: Refused, “Poetry Written in Gasoline” (from The New Noise Theology)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 12: The Subhumans & Punk Historiography with Ian Glasper

For this episode we talk with Ian Glasper about his book Silence Is No Reaction: Forty Years of Subhumans. In the conversation we cover broader issues of ‘punk historiography’ and documenting more marginal musical, artistic, and political milieus that one is a part of (rather than falling on or relying about existing dominant narratives). Ian has ben writing about punk since starting his first zine in 1986, switching to writing books in the early 2000s as he grew increasingly frustrated that existing histories of punk tended to focus on the best known and most visible artists, completely neglecting the much wider and vibrant array of bands and musics.

Bio: Ian Glasper is the author of numerous books on the history of punk including Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984 (2004), The Day The Country Died: A History Of Anarcho Punk 1980 – 1984 (2006), Trapped In A Scene: UK Hardcore 1985 – 1989 (2009), and Armed With Anger: How UK Punk Survived The Nineties (2012).

Opening / outro music: The Subhumans, “All Gone Dark” (intro) and “From the Cradle to the Grave" (outro)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 11: Italian Operaismo with Gigi Roggero

This episode of the Minor Compositions podcast is recorded as part of the Ultradependent Public School exhibition at BAK (https://www.bakonline.org/program-item/ultradependent-public-school-2/)
For this episode we are talking with Gigi Roggero about his book Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method. In this conversation we cover a range of topics including the birth and development of operaismo as a political tendency, the concepts of class composition and political formation, and rethinking how we approach and re-activate radical histories in the present.

“Italian Operaismo provides a clear overview of the central moments in that tendency's development: from the Italian labor movement's crisis of direction in the 1950s, the encounter with the “new forces” within the working class at FIAT and elsewhere in the early 1960s, and the political journals Quaderni rossi and Classe operaia, to the experience of Potere Operaio and other organizations a decade later. Roggero provides a rereading of operaismo that is both salutary and provocative, one that stresses above all the role within it of subjectivity and political engagement, demonstrating the continued relevance of its subversive method as a tool for reworking the categories of radical and revolutionary thought.

Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 10: Autonomia and Art with Jacopo Galimberti https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/minor-compositions

This episode is a discussion with Jacopo Galimberi about this book Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988)

“During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello.This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Classs signposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio’s exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians’ zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group’s experiments with Gestalt theory. Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.”  

For more on Jacopo’s book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2800-images-of-class

Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 9 Compound Lyricism

This episode intersperses a performance by experimental Indonesian doom folk metal band Senyawa (recorded in Folkestone in April 2022) with a discussion with their vocalist and lyricist Rully Shabara. The interview covers topics including his approach to writing lyrics, use of allegory and imagery, and how this has changed over Senyawa’s musical evolution since their formation n in 2010 in Yogyakarta. This episode serves as a preview for the first translation into English of Rully’s lyrics for Senyawa, which will shortly be published by Minor Compositions.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 8: After the Internet

For this episode we have a discussion with Tiziana Terranova about her recently released book After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common. We cover a range of topics including the shift from the internet as open network to the rise of corporate platforms, the psychopathologies of digital culture, and capitalism’s need to continually impose scarcity whenever new forms of social cooperation and commoning threaten its dominance over social life. What are the possibilities today for using digital tools to build new forms of commons both inside and against, and outside of the walled gardens of the corporate platform complex?

This discussion is a preview of the “Promoting Commons Presents and Futures Symposium” symposium that planned by the Centre for Commons Organising Values Equalities and Resilience on February 17th, 2023. For more information on that go here: https://www.essex.ac.uk/events/2023/02/17/promoting-commons-presents-and-futures-symposium

Opening / Outro song: “Combat pop” by Lo Stato Sociale (2021)