Discontent Issue 5

Like Freud’s prototypical baby, we struggle over whether to keep our body together or to give it away. We all live these scenes of bodily loss. Freud and Marx both sing harmoniously: what we give up, we give under duress. We are not easy with what we’ve been tasked with, but the task has been the same since birth, doubled in the name of emancipation: first, there’s nothing less than to survive alienation and exploitation, then there’s staying alive for one another’s sake. Perhaps the storied antagonism between Freud and Marx turns on the difficulty of holding these tasks together, balanced on the knife’s edge that separates self-interest from collective liberation.

Capitalism does not produce itself all alone, no matter its disciplines and political-economic constraints on the reproduction of society. If Marx taught us anything, it’s that capitalism produces its own gravediggers, the proletariat—“the unreason of reason,” he quipped, where the dominant social order encounters its unconscious element. Through the bad exchange of capitalism comes a gothic reversal, from preconscious life to premature death, where workers end up burying themselves instead of the system that provides the grave plot. That exchange is felt internally, in a rift that cleaves open the self. Freud, for his part, helps us describe how political economy hammers our lives into unreasonable and reasonable shapes, imaginary and real, as countless and heterogeneous as the individual faces in a collective mass. For each and for all, we bring psychoanalysis to bear on the political-economic problems we suffer in common.

King Ketamine. Beyond the vibecession. Austere Mothers. Sick at Work. Money, Feces, Babies, Gifts. Essays by Juliana Spahr, Peter Coviello, Nicolás Medina Mora, Jyoti Rao, and Hannah Proctor. Images of Red Vienna from Wilhelm Reich’s camera, dispatches from Lebanon, and more.

Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, co-editors at INCA Press (along with Irena Borić), are the guest-editors of this issue of OEI: it contains essays, artworks, and archival materials by 21 artists, theorists, writers, and artist-run spaces (mostly from the Americas).

The subject of the issue is art and neoliberalism, and it encompasses essays, images and other works by Dorothée Dupuis, Max Jorge Hindered Cruz, Luciano Concheiro, Yvonne Osei, Diego Bruno, John Riepenhoff, Suhail Malik, Good Weather, The Luminary, Bikini Wax, Beta-Local and more.

INTERVIEWS Dave Eggers by Jim James Jun Kaneko by Mark Mack Lotus L. Kang by Lara Mimosa Montes Reverend Joyce McDonald by Katherine Cheairs Rodney McMillian by Dave McKenzie Ruth Ozeki by Hannah Tinti Samora Pinderhughes by Jason Moran Debra Priestly by Nancy Grossman Elaine Reichek by Sabrina Gschwandtner

FICTION Isabelle Fang, Yuri Herrera, Claire Vaye Watkins
NONFICTION Shaan Sachdev
POETRY Adedayo Agarau, Elena Alexander, Kelsey Day
PORTFOLIO Shraddha Ramani and William Villalongo
COMIC Margaret Barry
EDITOR’S CHOICE Reflections on new works from Horse Lords, Valeria Luiselli, Nicolás Pereda, Julian Radlmaier, and Paul Yoon and a monograph on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

On the cover: Detail of Rodney McMillian, shaft, 2021–22, latex, acrylic, Flashe, ink, and paper on canvas, six panels, 80 × 4 feet diameter. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the artist, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Petzel, New York City.

BOMB Magazine is a quarterly of artists in conversation begun in 1981 in New York. BOMB publishes interviews across disciplines like visual art, literature, performance, music, dance, film, and is founded on mission of delivering the artist's voice. Publishing print seasonally, BOMB also publishes interviews, flash fiction, studio visits, excerpts, and essays five times a week on our website. 

This issue uses the font designed for german news magazine Spiegel by amazing Lucas de Groot. The color poster is part of the full print of the series “Les Filles d’Amsterdam” by photographer Jean-Luc Moulène. It is the first time this series is printed in book form and in an exclusive interview the artist tells the story of that work.

Contributors: Lily Wittenburg, Maren Grimm & Jakob Krameritsch, Michael Milano, Assaf-Evron, Sophie Thun, Juliana Huxtable, Interview with Jean-Luc Moulène, poster by Jean-Luc Moulène, Magda Tóthová, Peter Machen on Brenda Fassie, Mariah Garnett, Shady El NoshokatyTommy Støckel

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.