Infrastructural Critique

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

As we search for a life beyond capital, the dream that galleries and museums can function as a refuge from existing social relations appears less credible by the day. In response, Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counterpraxis. By treating contemporary art institutions as a site of struggle as well as a resource, Marina Vishmidt reanimates critique.

A tour de force of Marxist theory and art criticism – embracing such disparate subjects as Milanese radical feminism, dinosaur documentaries, and the water crises of Flint and Detroit – Infrastructural Critique, edited in the wake of the author’s tragic early death, blends theory and praxis to assess the work of artists such as Cameron Rowland, Dora Budor, and Carolyn Lazard. This volume showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her era.

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).