Artist as Theorist – Artists' Writing from e-flux

Some of the most urgent contemporary writing on politics, media, technology, colonialism, ecology, and the image is being produced by artists. Since it began publishing in 2008, e-flux has been at the forefront of commissioning such writing. 
The Artist as Theorist brings together a selection of exemplary essays from this larger archive. Written over the past two decades by artists working across different generations, geographies, and mediums, the texts collected in this volume engage with some of the defining conditions of contemporary life to produce an intellectual infrastructure for contemporary art. Many of these figures define key terms, positions, and debates, which reciprocally inform their work on exhibitions, films, research platforms, institutions, and collective practices. 
Artists have always written, however these essays reveal the emergence of a distinctive genre in recent years. They are neither artist statements nor secondary commentaries on individual works. Rather, they comprise independent contributions to and interventions into broader intellectual and political debates. Deftly moving between theory and practice, interpretation and speculation, analysis and imagination, they each demonstrate how artistic practice is uniquely well-placed to generate concepts, frameworks, and forms of understanding to illuminate realities often overlooked by more straightforward academic disciplines.
Organized into six thematic sections—on definitions, the image, dark epistemologies, systems of persuasion, contested territories, and open futures—the anthology traces a set of recurring themes that have shaped artistic thinking over the past few decades. The contributors approach these thematics from different positions and through different methods, yet collectively they reveal a shared commitment to understanding the social, political, technological, and historical forces that structure contemporary experience. 
Rather than presenting artists' writing as secondary to artistic production, The Artist as Theorist considers these essays as works in their own right.
This volume, as the only such title collating contemporary artist theory, will be of key interest to art historians and theorists, cultural practitioners, artists, and teaching staff and graduate students across curatorial studies, theory, philosophy, cultural studies, philosophy, and art history programmes.