Infrastructural Critique

A theory of art and infrastructure by one of the most brilliant critical theorists of her generation

As we search for ways to imagine a life beyond capital and its drive to extinction, the dream of the institution as a critical refuge from existing social relations becomes less and less credible.   

Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counter-praxis. By treating the contemporary art institution as a resource base and site of struggle, Vishmidt reanimates critique by connecting it to the effort to erode capitalist authority over the means of our existence, build power and seize resources for new practices of social invention.  

A tour-de-force of Marxist philosophy, art criticism, Milanese radical feminism and AppleTV+ dinosaur documentaries, this book, edited in the wake of the author’s tragic early death, weaves in the gaps of theory and praxis to assess the main infrastructurally critical artmakers at work today. Approaching their practices as ‘crystal drills’ – at once means of seeing, and practical cutting implements – the text showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her generation.Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024) was a philosopher, organiser and art theorist. One of the major critical theorists of her generation, her writing spanned art theory, feminist social reproduction theory, finance, ecology, labour and labour organising, value-form theory, black studies, and film. A lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and Professor of Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, her first book was Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value-Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2018)

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London who teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her most recent book is What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023).

Danny Hayward is a poet and critic whose most recent books are Training Exercises (Both are Worse, 2024) and Loading Terminal (87 Press, 2022).  

Kerstin Stakemeier is a writer in Berlin and educator at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. With Marina Vishmidt, she co-authored Reproducing Autonomy (Mute, 2016).