Thinking art: materialisms, labours, forms

The contributions to this second volume of essays derived from events organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) have their source in the conference ‘Thinking Art’, held at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) London on 29 February 2020, immediately prior to the Covid-19 lockdown. The unifying conceit, on this occasion, lay in repeating a trope from the ICA’s past – ‘Thinking Art’ – not in order to return to that time, but rather to take the measure of the present’s distance from it, registered in current preoccupations and concerns. What unifies the essays is not any particular theoretical stance, but a concern to maintain a thinking of art and its related discourses that is sceptical of all attempts to use the new eco-naturalisms and vitalisms as an alibi for stopping thinking about art socially.