ARTIFICIAL HELLS

Acknowledgements
This book took a long time to write. My chosen subject matter seemed to
demand a completely different methodology to ones I had previously used,
and I too frequently relied on friends and colleagues for feedback. All my
thinking experiments were undertaken in public, inflicted on dozens of audiences
who patiently listened to my rambling before offering advice or, more
frequently, attacking me for daring to criticise or defend the art under discussion.
I am indebted to all those audiences who gave me constructive feedback,
but even more to my long- suffering students at the Royal College of Art,
CUNY Graduate Center, Hunter College and Cátedra Arte de Conducta,
who were the most stimulating interlocutors I could hope for. You are too
many to name individually, but I’m so grateful to you all for your incisive
questions, comments, ideas, references and help with translations.
I owe abundant thanks to all the artists, curators and art historians I’ve
talked to in the last six years, raiding their brains and archives: Allora and
Calzadilla, Paweł Althamer, Doug Ashford, Uthit Atamana, Carlos Basualdo,
Jérôme Bel, Ed Berman, the team at The Blackie (Bill Harpe, Neil
Johnson, Sally Morris), Stuart Brisley, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer,
Graciela Carnevale, Paul Chan, Phil Collins, Mark Cousins, Teddy Cruz,
Ekaterina Degot, Jeremy Deller, Stephan Dillemuth, Mark Dion, Elmgreen
and Dragset, Charles Esche, Alex Farquharson, Briony Fer, Tom
Finkelpearl, Milija Gluhovic, Romy Golan, Dominique Gonzalez- Foerster,
Simon Grennan, Boris Groys, Daniel Grún, Nicolás Guagnini, Vit
Havránek, Jens Haaning, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Thomas Hirschhorn,
Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler, Pierre Huyghe, IRWIN (especially
Miran Mohar and Borut Vogelnik), Margaret Iversen, Alfredo Jaar,
Roberto Jacoby, Lu Jie, Yelena Kalinsky, Mira Keratova, Barbora Klimová,
Alison Knowles, Surasi Kusolwong, Pablo Lafuente, Lars Bang Larsen,
Pablo León de la Barra, Kamin Lerdchaiprasert, David Levine, Ana
Longoni, Sven Lütticken, Francesco Manacorda, Aleksandra Mir, Viktor
Misiano, Christian Philipp Müller, Joanna Mytkowska, Victoria Noorthoon,
Linda Norden, Oda Projesi, Roman Ondák, Boris Ondreicka,
Tomas Pospiszyl, Andrzej Przywara, Maria Pask, Dan and Lia Perjovschi,
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