Cabinet

Cabinet This is the home of Cabinet, a quarterly non-profit cultural magazine based in Brooklyn.

NEW ARTICLE: James G. Harper and Philip W. Scher discuss German anthropologist Julius Lips’s groundbreaking treatise on ...
06/12/2025

NEW ARTICLE: James G. Harper and Philip W. Scher discuss German anthropologist Julius Lips’s groundbreaking treatise on African, Indigenous Australian, and Oceanic depictions of foreigners, “The Savage Hits Back, or, The White Man through Native Eyes.”

Link in bio and below.

Images:

1) Detail from a fragment of a sixteenth-century ivory saltcellar, from the Kingdom of Benin. It is one of the oldest artifacts included in “The Savage Hits Back.” The symbol of the cross was clearly familiar to the ivory carver, and yet he has carved it upside down, suggesting that the familiarity is nascent and incomplete.

2) Late nineteenth-century henta—an apotropaic image from the Nicobar Islands (Indian Ocean) that would originally have been installed in a house. The painted wood-and-spathe panel represents the moon and at its center is the Deuse, or “Chief of the Spirits.” In the pictorial tradition of Nicobar hentas, the power of the Deuse is represented through the things shown floating or orbiting around him. In this example, the artist has mingled native animals and indigenous objects with distinctly European items. This set of floating objects even includes a European at bottom left.

3) Detail from early twentieth-century door panels by Yoruba artist Olówè of Isè from the palace of the Ogoga (king) of Ikere in present-day Nigeria. Here we see Captain W. G. Ambrose, a British commissioner traveling in a hammock. The carvings offer an African perspective on British colonialism at the very moment that the British were consolidating authority in the region.

4) Early nineteenth-century Vili drum from the Loango Kingdom, whose territory lay in present-day Gabon and the Republic of the Congo. The base of the percussion instrument depicts a seated European sailor. As Lips wryly observes, “the most essential object is what the figure holds in his left hand, the whisky flask.” The bottle and its drinker’s red squinting eyes suggest drunkenness, a trait commonly associated with Europeans. When the drum was actually used, the drunken sailor took a beating from above, likely to the mirth of the audience.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/69/harper_scher.php

In Berlin? Or within one week’s hiking distance? Come visit Cabinet at the Miss Read art book fair next week hosted by H...
06/05/2025

In Berlin? Or within one week’s hiking distance? Come visit Cabinet at the Miss Read art book fair next week hosted by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). We will be selling books, magazines, and posters, and would love to meet our readers!

In February 2004, French-Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan filed a libel suit in Paris against philosopher Alain Finkielkraut...
05/16/2025

In February 2004, French-Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan filed a libel suit in Paris against philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. The previous year, Sivan and Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi had released “Route 181: Extracts from a Palestinian-Israeli Journey”—a four-and-a-half-hour travel documentary tracing what remains, in the memories of the landscape and its inhabitants, of the violent expulsion in 1947–1948 of som­e three-quarters of a million Palestini­ans from the territory that would become the state of Israel. During a radio program, Finkielkraut had launched an aggressive critique of Sivan, arguing that he was representative of a “particularly painful, particul­arly frightening reality—Jewish anti-Semitism,” in that “Route 181” was premised on a false analogy between the events of 1947–1948 and the N**i Holocaust.

For Sivan, however, it is the very possibility of acknowledging the continuity between the Shoah and the Nakba that could establish the condition for sharing a single democratic state between Jews and Palestinians. “The problem is that we Israelis must take responsibility for the deeds of our parents, deeds for which they refused to take responsibility. In the eyes of Claude Lanzmann [director of Shoah] or Finkielkraut, if they acknowledge the crime of 1948, then Israel does not have the right to exist.” Sivan speaks instead as one who accepts that right, but differently—as a citizen. For the citizen, the experience of the partition and its remainders can only issue in a sense of the inevitability of sharing: “We share the history of the land, we share a memory of the Nakba/Independence, we share a destiny. This is a basis for thinking equality.”

You can read the full translation of the Sivan vs. Finkielkraut trial as well as Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman’s introduction via the link in bio or below.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/keenan_weizman.php

Soviet calendar for 1929–1930 showing rest days for each of the five worker groups, designated here by different colors....
05/01/2025

Soviet calendar for 1929–1930 showing rest days for each of the five worker groups, designated here by different colors. In this version of “nepreryvka,” the continuous workweek, workers had every fifth day off. The text at bottom reads: “Just remember your color and you’ll always know your rest day.” The five days with red stars indicate official holidays on which no one worked.

Read more about calendar reform and the continuous working week in Tony Wood’s article “Labor Day: Reinventing the Workweek in the Soviet Union” from issue 61.

Link in bio and below:

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/61/wood.php

“The olive’s steadfastness, durability, and extraordinary longevity are all acutely representative of the Palestinian st...
04/11/2025

“The olive’s steadfastness, durability, and extraordinary longevity are all acutely representative of the Palestinian struggle against Israel’s settler colonialism and its occupying regime,” writes Irus Braverman in her introduction to our new artist project by Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez. “The olive acts as both an anchor and an archive, standing for the Palestinians by witnessing and testifying to what is no longer there. Planting and cultivating olives becomes a project of Palestinian resistance.”

Link in bio and below.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/69/broomberg_gonzalez.php

NEW ARTICLE: Reed McConnell’s “Academic Discipline: A History of Prisons and Privilege at German Universities,” which in...
03/21/2025

NEW ARTICLE: Reed McConnell’s “Academic Discipline: A History of Prisons and Privilege at German Universities,” which investigates the tradition of Karzer, German university prisons where students (such as Karl Marx) were sent for a range of offenses: dueling, making a nocturnal racket, and leading vagabond-like lifestyles.

“Karzer were ultimately as much an instrument of privilege as of punishment, especially over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Young men at German universities could expect far better treatment than their working-class counterparts when it came to punishment for the same crimes and infractions. It was easy for these young men to treat their punishment as a farce because it was, in fact, a farce. In the meantime, beggars were being thrown into workhouses as punishment for their poverty, a practice that continued through the early years of the twentieth century. And the Karzer was not only a playground for the middle class and the rich, but specifically for middle-class and rich men. Women only appeared in Karzer in wall inscriptions lamenting the absence of girlfriends and in murals depicting n**e, large-breasted female bodies. Save some exceptional cases, it was not until the early twentieth century that women students were even allowed to study at German universities, and by that point, Karzer had been all but phased out.”

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/69/mcconnell.php

Images:

1) The Heidelberg Karzer, active until 1914.
2) The Marburg Karzer. The scene above the door’s top-left corner depicts a guard admonishing a student.
3) The Heidelberg Karzer. Photo Andrew Cowin.
4) The Marburg Karzer. The central painting depicts Rector Prof. Mirbt, who lords menacingly over a scene of two students, Siefart and Hasselbach, who took an evening walk in their nightgowns in 1909—the cause of their incarceration.
5) The Heidelberg Karzer. “G. v. Protopopoff” is the Russian nobleman Georg von Protopopoff, who wasted no time immortalizing himself during five days of imprisonment in 1906. Photo Andrew Cowin.

Two of Cabinet’s editors recently had the opportunity to chat about the past and future of the magazine with book critic...
03/20/2025

Two of Cabinet’s editors recently had the opportunity to chat about the past and future of the magazine with book critic Alexander Wells. Read the full interview in this month’s issue of

Please join us on Wednesday, 19 March at 7 pm for the New York launch of ’s new book “After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno...
03/17/2025

Please join us on Wednesday, 19 March at 7 pm for the New York launch of ’s new book “After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions” (Yale University Press). The evening will include a discussion between Díaz and artist Trevor Paglen moderated by Sara Reisman, a performance by musician Nick Hallett, and a film screening by Allora & Calzadilla.

The event will be held at Cabinet’s Brooklyn event space at 300 Nevins St. No RSVP necessary.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase, and can even be signed by the author using an excellent fountain pen.

We are saddened to learn that artist Rutherford Chang recently passed away. In March 2004, Rutherford, a recent graduate...
02/13/2025

We are saddened to learn that artist Rutherford Chang recently passed away. In March 2004, Rutherford, a recent graduate from Wesleyan College, submitted a rather unusual poster for our “Average” issue: a version of the front page of the New York Times in which all the words from each section of the original had been cut out (by hand!) and reordered alphabetically. When we asked him if he could redo the poster, using a more recent front page for our forthcoming issue, he replied, “if I am going to alphabetize another document, I need to begin soon, as the process is rather laborious.”

What Rutherford produced remains to this day one of our favorite artist projects.

More information about Rutherford’s project is linked in our bio and below.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/15/chang.php

In his “On the Natural Faculties” (179 CE), physician and philosopher Claudius Galen explains the growth of animal organ...
01/31/2025

In his “On the Natural Faculties” (179 CE), physician and philosopher Claudius Galen explains the growth of animal organisms by using the image of a balloon—or rather the balloon of antiquity, an inflated animal bladder. “Children [in the district of Ionia] take the bladders of pigs, fill them with air, and then rub them on ashes near the fire, so as to warm, but not to injure them. … As they rub, they sing songs, to a certain measure, time, and rhythm, and all their words are an exhortation to the bladder to increase in size. When it appears to them fairly well distended, they again blow air into it and expand it further; then they rub it again. This they do several times, until the bladder seems to them to have become large enough.” Large enough to play with, that is. Galen’s focus, however, is on the increasing thinness of the bladder’s membrane. Were human bodies to grow in the same way, they might be “torn through,” and to prevent this, Nature provides “nourishment to this thin part.” Through nutrition, Nature alone possesses “the power to expand the body in all directions so that it remains un-ruptured and preserves completely its previous form.” Without nutrition, Galen’s image suggests, human bodies would pop, like over-distended balloons.

Galen’s balloon metaphor for bodily growth reflected antiquity’s conception of the “pneuma,” a breath-borne soul-like entity assumed to circulate and affect the body through what is now understood as the arterial system. The church fathers Christianized the pneuma, infusing it with monotheistic import, and indeed the word pneumatology is still used today to describe the study of the Holy Spirit. … By the mid-nineteenth century, however, respiration was understood primarily in mechanistic terms. An 1869 lithograph in London’s Wellcome Collection, documenting the work of anatomist Francis Sibson, shows the lungs of a dissected cadaver ballooning outwards beneath an exposed ribcage as the result of air supplied through a tapped pump inserted into its trachea...

Jonathan Allen’s “Pop Art: Inflationary Aesthetics” is now unlocked.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/37/allen.php

“Harpo loses himself in the practice of being Harpo, and I lose myself in contemplating Harpo.”Wayne Koestenbaum’s artic...
12/26/2024

“Harpo loses himself in the practice of being Harpo, and I lose myself in contemplating Harpo.”

Wayne Koestenbaum’s article “Harpo’s Bubbles” is—like the rest of issue 37—now unlocked! Link in bio and below.

“In close-up, Harpo—as if being called, pointed to, named—looks at the camera, his mouth a baby’s O, blowing bubbles, marveling at his own capacity to be astonished.

Witness the fascinated mouth and gaze, Harpo fascinating us, showing himself fascinated, fastened into fool-identity: I’m me, I’m on the horse, I can’t help my predicament or posture. Embodiment is an ineluctability and a miracle, what Pierre Legendre calls an “inestimable object of transmission”: also inestimable is Harpo’s basket, revealed in jockey pantaloons, with intricate buttons at the crotch. In this flattering picture, Harpo’s waist is more cinched than anywhere in his oeuvre. Harpo, the beyond-price, the matchless, responds to the crowd’s notice by whipping the horse’s bottom.“

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/37/koestenbaum.php
koestenbaum

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