fettesans

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Top, photograph by the US start-up Campus Guardian Angel, An armed drone from Campus Guardian Angel flies through a school building to track down and fight an assassin, Texas, April 2025. Via. Bottom, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Sincerely Yours, A Reply (monster number 1, after Rosalind Krauss' mind), 2023, Aluminium, 75 x 135 x 135 cm, part of the exhibition Accidents at Stavanger Secession.

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“Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.”

That may sound like something said yesterday, following US strikes on Iran.

But it wasn’t.

Those words were delivered by United States President George W Bush on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, as he marked the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

Hanna Duggal, from Sounds familiar: Was this said about Iraq in 2003, or Iran in 2025? - With Israel and the US engaged in an escalating conflict with Iran, Western leaders are using words that sound all too familiar from the lead-up to the Iraq war, for Aljazeera, June 23, 2025.

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When I enter the hospital room, Robert cries out, My friend! and shakes my hand. He can’t seem to believe that I always come back and tells me he prays to god that I will. When I met him, I didn’t want to be his friend. Helpful, sure, but not his friend. Maybe if I had been pushier about his feet, this wouldn’t have gotten out of control and we could have remained neighbors. Now Robert may need more than a neighbor, especially if he’s permanently disabled. (And anyway, if you’ve cried with someone, I think that’s grounds for something like friendship, at least.) I’m alone! I have nobody! This is what Robert yelled on Thursday morning while I stood beside him with his cup of coffee, waiting for him to get it out of his system. I could have contradicted him, but with what? I care about you, but I won’t blow up my life for you. What kind of care is that? I’ve given him cash. I’ve washed his clothes. I’ve helped him pee. I’ve touched his shoulder while doctors told him scary things. I’ve listened, bored and annoyed, as he invents religions and spins out on conspiracy theories (Is someone trying to kill me? he sometimes asks. No, no one here wants to hurt you, I reassure him, knowing that we both know that this isn’t precisely true). I’ve brought him Kinder eggs and orange juice. My girlfriend and boyfriend bring him gifts, my friends ask how he’s feeling. It’s not enough. I’ve offered Robert my help, but I fear he’s not in a reality where he can receive it.

Davey Davis, from Fuck it. I'll take a risk. - a case study of American healthcare and homelessness, May 29, 2025.

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Top, photograph by Gary Leonard, National Guard troops at First and Alameda. A Barbara Kruger mural is legible on the wall of The Museum of Contemporary Art in the background, Los Angeles, California, May 2, 1992. Via. Bottom, photograph by Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images, National Guard troops beneath Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Questions), 1990/2018, June 2025. Via.

WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES TIME? WHO FOLLOWS ORDERS? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?

Untitled (Questions) was always a protest of its own, though it didn’t initially have much to do with Trump. The mural was commissioned by MOCA in 1989 and was initially meant to feature the text of the Pledge of Allegiance. Even though Kruger began conceiving the work two years prior, the gesture seemed to refer obliquely to conservative handwringing in 1988 over attempts to keep the Pledge of Allegiance out of classrooms, with George H. W. Bush, then vice president under Ronald Reagan, claiming that such a gesture was unconstitutional. One Republican representative’s spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that Kruger seemed like “a left-winger blowing off smoke.”

Alex Greenberger, from This Barbara Kruger Mural from 1990 Has Become the Year’s Most Poignant Artwork, for artNews, June 12, 2025.

See also, Carolina A. Miranda, In advance of the midterms, Barbara Kruger reprises MOCA mural that asks ‘Who is beyond the law?’, for the LA Times, October 18, 2018.

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It was the first time since 1965 that a US president had authorised the National Guard’s deployment to a state without the governor’s permission. The last time was to protect civil rights protesters who were marching through segregated Alabama and faced threats of violence.

Catherine Opie, Mariela's Tacos/Uprising, 1992

Most recent Apple Maps view of Mariela' Tacos, in the same location 33 years after Opie's photo was taken.

Opie's show at Regen Projects last year (review / artist's walk through) featured several photographs made during the 1992 uprising, when the National Guard was called out to quell actual violence. 63 people were killed and thousands injured. It would be nearly impossible to find anyone here who experienced the summer of 2020, let alone 1992, who believe the National Guard or Marines were needed in Los Angeles this week.

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Top, un-credited and un-dated photograph taken in a subway in Amman, Jordan. Don’t let any fucker whose belly is full tell you to wait patiently for hunger to pass. Via. Bottom, photograph by Nan Goldin, Thora with teddy bear, Brooklyn, NY, 2020 , Archival pigment print, Open edition, Signed by Nan Goldin, 5 x 7 inch, $250. Via.

In direct response to the onslaught of anti-trans legislation and rhetoric sweeping the country, artist Nan Goldin is holding a benefit print sale and donating all proceeds to Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), and The Trans Income Project (TIP)—three organizations chosen for our commitment to trans lives and expression.

“Hundreds of anti-trans bills are threatening trans people’s safety, stability, and health. Transphobia has long plagued legislation and culture, and this print sale centers the needs of trans people, raising funds for organizations directly working with, responding to, and supporting them.”

—Nan Goldin

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The illusion that language could be a shield against the monstrous was, for me, among the first to be shattered and destroyed. Language is not immune to acts of genocide and annihilation. It too can be destroyed, become unable to endure, get lost. I had never felt myself to be a master of language—more that language had mastered me. And accepting its brokenness, its actual feebleness, has allowed me to continue working through decades of the pain and injury inflicted on Palestine.

Adania Shibli, interviewed by Max Weiss for the Paris Review, March 10, 2025. Via.

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Top, Heidi Bucher, OT-TO-TO-TO-TO-TO-TO, 1975, Mother of pearl pigment, textiles, latex, 190 x 80 cm. Via. More. Bottom, screen capture from Ayanna Dozier, Bounded Intimacy, 2024. Via.

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(...) the chart has two axes: Mommy-Baby and Tyrant-Serf. In any given relationship, each person occupies their own position on the chart. In many romantic relationships, two people will be diametrically opposed in their positions, but not always. These are relational characteristics, and so it’s possible be Mommy Serf in one relationship and Baby Tyrant in another, although most people do probably gravitate toward a certain quadrant in most relationships.

You might find yourself wondering what the difference is between the Mommy-Baby and Tyrant-Serf spectrums. Though the two may seem a bit similar, they refer to two distinct aspects of relationships. Mommy-Baby is primarily about care-taking. A paradigmatic Mommy is watchful, attentive to the needs of the other, and perhaps uncomfortable being taken care of. Meanwhile, a paradigmatic Baby enjoys or needs to be taken care of. Meanwhile, Tyrant-Serf is about setting the agenda/calling the shots. A Tyrant dictates what goes on in the relationship or in day-to-day life, while a Serf complies. Mommy Tyrants and Baby Serfs are often drawn to each other, as are Mommy Serfs and Baby Tyrants.

Within a given relationship, each person’s position will usually not be totally fixed - everyone gets a chance to be Baby sometimes!

Julia Golda Harris, from Mommy, Baby, Tyrant, Serf - A new paradigm for love, June 19, 2023.

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Fette Sans, La Reprise (Dérive) #260, June 8, 2025.

4h 20min of film, or 260 weeks of work. Watch each minute here.

[fettesans]

Top, screen capture from The Hole, directed by Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998. Via. More. Bottom, Nina Frommelt, Reject Tradition, Embrace Modernity, 2024, square timber, candle, derby shoes, 75 x 10 x 35 cm. Part of the exhibition The Hollow Bite at ACUD, Berlin, April 24 – May 18, 2025. Via.

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There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room . . . It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared).

Jean Baudrillard, from America, 1986. Via.

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But he also remembered a glimpse at another possibility for the device: Last October in Hong Kong, an older man with thinning hair had used a leaf blower to redirect tear gas away from protesters. The innovation hadn’t caught on with other Hongkongers, residents of a highly urbanized environment, but a video of “Leafblower Uncle” had gone viral worldwide.

S.I. Rosenbaum, from The radicalization of the leaf blower, July 30, 2020.

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Top, screen capture from ian alan paul's Bluesky account, posted June 9, 2025. Via. Bottom, screen capture from a BBC video, Watch: National Guard on LA streets as unrest erupts, June 8, 2025. Via.

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If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because "violence" is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo. Conditions that the state characterizes as "peaceful" are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of health care, and many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating. When state actors refer to "peace," they are really talking about order. And when they refer to "peaceful protest," they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state. The more uncooperative you are, the more you will be accused of aggression and violence. It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, from Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, 2023.

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Top, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled", 1990. Installed in Tattoo Collection at Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris, France. June 3 – July 18, 1992. Conceived by Air de Paris and Urbi et Orbi. Via. Bottom, Hanne Darboven, Bilddokumentation, 1978, Offset printing on paper. Via. More.

AdP’s basic instructions survey on the consignment form say the tattoo can be bought by anyone, should be black, and should be placed on the “ankle or wrist.”

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The history of modern democracy is, at bottom, a history with two faces, and even two bodies—the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body, on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state-and more precisely the plantation and the penal colony... The colonial world, as an offspring of democracy, was not the antithesis of the democratic order. It has always been its double or, again, its nocturnal face.... As Frantz Fanon indicated, this nocturnal face in effect hides a primordial and founding void—the law that originates in nonlaw and that is instituted as law outside the law. Added to this founding void is a second void—this time one of preservation. These two voids are closely imbricated in one another. Paradoxically, the metropolitan democratic order needs this twofold void, first, to give credence to the existence of an irreducible contrast between it and its apparent opposite; second, to nourish its mythological resources and better hide its underneath on the inside as well as on the outside. In other terms, the cost of the mythological logics required for modern democracies to function and survive is the exteriorization of their originary violence to third places, to nonplaces, of which the plantation, the colony, or, today, the camp and the prison, are emblematic figures.

Achille Mbembe, from Necropolitics, 2011. Via.

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Meta in recent months has recruited former Pentagon staff to join its ranks, an effort to navigate the labyrinth of the defense procurement process. In November, it opened up its AI models for military applications—a new business line for a company whose profits have been powered by online advertising. In a statement, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the EagleEye technology will help U.S. soldiers to “protect our interests at home and abroad.” Meta and Anduril have jointly bid on an Army contract for VR hardware devices, worth up to about $100 million. If awarded, it would be Meta’s most significant tie-up with the Defense Department. The contract is intended to vet headset prototypes that are part of a larger $22 billion Army wearables project, of which Anduril became the lead vendor in February after Microsoft failed to deliver a functional VR headset.

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Screen captures from a video produced by the French government using AI to pay tribute to the resistance fighters and posted on Instagram and TikTok, since then removed, May 27, 2025. A new version published on May 29th is available. Via. More.

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I love a good narrated diptych

if you need me I'll just be over here imagining a world where Sturtevant and Spike Jonze ran into each other while shopping for owl clips at the iStockVideo megastore in Paris

images: still from Her, dir. by Spike Jonze (2013), from a gif by @bladesrunner; installation view of Sturtevant's Simulacra (2010) at Freedman Fitzpatrick in 2019

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Top, screen capture from The Trial, directed by Orson Welles, 1962. Via. Bottom, Skip Arnold, Gruezi, 2002. On the occasion of Art Basel/33 & Art Unlimited, Basel, CH. Performed every day during the duration of the fair and exhibition. Via.

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It is in the Virtual that we have the ultimate predator and plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent. Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality, the final consequence of the process begun with the abstraction of objective reality - a process that ends in Integral Reality. What we have in virtuality is no longer a hinter world: the substitution of the world is total; this is the identical doubling of the world, its perfect mirroring, and the matter is settled by the pure and simple annihilation of symbolic substance. Even objective reality becomes a useless function, a kind of waste that is ever more difficult to exchange and circulate. We have moved, then, from objective reality to a later stage, a kind of ultra-reality that puts an end to both reality and illusion.

Jean Baudrillard, from The Intelligence of Evil: or, The Lucidity Pact, 2004. Via.

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Top, Moyra Davey, The Coffee Shop, The Library, 2011, 25 C-prints, tape, postage, ink, each 12 × 17.5 inches. Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Via. Bottom, Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2021, Epson UltraChrome HDX inkjet on linen, 84 x 69 inches. Via.

Elisabeth Lebovici: Most of your recent photographic work is folded and mailed, through the postal service, like the old aerograms. But the address, in this case, is written on the side of the photograph—writing and image are on the same side. Why is this arrangement so important to you?

Moyra Davey: I started to do it not as art; it was just something expedient. My friend John Goodwin asked me to fold up some photographs and mail them to him so he could make a small poster. When I was living in Paris two years later I was asked to be in a show at Murray Guy in New York, and thought, Oh, it would be so simple to take some photos in Paris, fold them up, and mail them to the gallery. That’s how it started, and then I realized all the formal potential in this—the folds, stamps, the addressee, and the colored tape creating an abstract pattern on the surface of the photograph. And then of course there’s the whole epistolary idea, which is, for obvious reasons, very seductive to me. Turning a photograph into a letter, into a kind of aerogram, a giant postcard, as the novelist and filmmaker Chris Kraus called it—all of those ideas are in the photographs unfolded and displayed.

EL: It’s also immediately making an archive of the image.

MD: Yeah, and I’m actually doing that more and more. I’m re-photographing very old photographs and repurposing them. I recently used a portrait of my siblings and myself taken in Ottawa in 1971. It appeals to my sense of frugality, making use of things that already exist, bringing them back into circulation. Photography comes with this anxiety of overproduction; you can just keep shooting and shooting and you end up with so much material (Garry Winogrand, for instance). Pulling something out of the so-called archive is a way to mitigate that anxiety.

Moyra Davey interviewed by Elisabeth Lebovici for BOMB Magazine, October 1, 2014.

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The mirror is thus at once an object among others and an object different from all others, evanescent, fascinating. In and through the mirror, the traits of other objects in relationship to their spatial environment are brought together; the mirror is an object in space which informs us about space, which speaks of space. In some ways a kind of picture, the mirror too has a frame which specifies it, a frame that can be either emptied or filled. Into that space which is produced first by natural and later by social life the mirror introduces a truly dual spatiality; a space which is imaginary with respect to origin and separation, but also concrete and practical with respect to coexistence and differentiation.

Henri Lefebvre, from The Production of Space, 1974. Via.

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Top, Konrad Maciejewicz, Untitled, 2025, aluminium, socks, 50 x 9 x 9 cm. Via. Bottom, screen capture from Bird, directed by Andrea Arnold, 2024.

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Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed . . . The afferent nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance traveling through the sensory nerves and propagated in the brain is an image too . . . To make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is in truth a contradiction in terms, since the brain is by hypothesis a part of this image.

Henri Bergson quoted in Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, 2020. Via.