This is the home of Cabinet, a quarterly non-profit cultural magazine based in Brooklyn. The magazine also operates event spaces in Brooklyn and Berlin.
Cabinet is a quarterly non-profit magazine of art and culture based in Brooklyn. The non-profit also publishes books and organizes exhibitions, screenings, events, symposia, and conferences. Cabinet operates an event space in the Gowanus Canal area of Brooklyn and a second space in the Schöneberg area of Berlin.
Mission: Founded as a non-profit in 1999, Cabinet is a quarterly magazine of art and culture based in New York that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Its hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal to create a sourcebook of ideas for an eclectic international audience of readers, from artists and designers to scientists, philosophers, and historians. Using essays, interviews, and artist projects to present a wide range of topics in language accessible to the non-specialist, Cabinet is designed to encourage a new culture of curiosity, one that forms the basis both for an ethical engagement with the world as it is and for imagining how it might be otherwise. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous traditions of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine designed for the intellectually curious reader of the future.
"The political grammar of Black freedom requires the abolition of the given terms of the political, classical, and philosophical ontology of freedom." From Che Gossett's "Abolitionist Alternatives," the second essay in our new Kiosk series "Imagination and the Carceral State" organized by Joshua Bennett.
https://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/gossett_che_15_december_2020.php
Black radicalism and the refusal of reform
"But maybe it’s that the world we desire is the absence, the recess, the fold: the hole left behind by the prison that we refuse to fill." Elleza Kelley's "No Man’s Land," the first essay in our new Kiosk series "Imagination and the Carceral State."
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/kelley_elleza_8_december_2020.php
The architecture of abolition
"What forms of conviviality, evasion, recalcitrance, and play have the incarcerated, the undocumented, and the unsung cultivated in order to survive?" Introducing "Imagination and the Carceral State," a series of Kiosk essays organized by Joshua Bennett.
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/miscellaneous/bennett_joshua_8_december_2020.php
Join us online on 5 Dec at 12:30 pm EST / 6:30 pm Central European Time for a conversation between artist Simon Leung and writer Barry Schwabsky on Leung's 2011 film about the life of Warren Niesłuchowski. The event is for the opening of the exhibition "And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There" at Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery.
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/events/leung_schwabsky_war_after_war.php
Date: Saturday, 5 December 2020, 12:30–2:00 pm Eastern Standard Time / 6:30–8:00 pm Central European Time Venue: Online via Zoom. Please register here. The discussion will also be streamed live on Youtube. We will post the Youtube link on this page a few minutes before the event. Moderated by Jo...
There have been dream interpretation guides since antiquity. But, writes Christopher Vandegrift, the early 20th century saw the proliferation of novel forms of “dream books” used by African Americans playing new games of chance such as policy & numbers.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/vandegrift.php
Dreaming of lucky numbers
Once more popular in the US than horse racing, greyhound racing began a steep decline in the 1980s. What was to be done with all those specialized four-legged athletes? Brad Bolman on the emergence, and ethics, of canine blood banking.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/bolman.php
Canine blood-banking and the question of animal welfare
How did US settler culture come to imagine itself as indigenous to the land it violently stole? Indiana Seresin on how Ernest Thompson Seton’s fantasies of “playing Indian” were adopted by the nascent summer camp movement and helped shape the lie of white indigeneity.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/seresin.php
Native minstrelsy and the American summer camp movement
Western cultures have largely decided that dreams are private expressions of an inner world, but others—writes Matthew Spellberg, guest editor of issue 67’s “Dreams” section—have developed complex protocols for making dreams into a communal resource.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/spellberg1.php
The social contract of sensuous imagining
Is it a dream? Or is issue 67 finally here? And what is this? It has a theme section on “Dreams,” guest-edited by none other than Matthew Spellberg? And are there really articles on dream sharing, dream monitoring, dream books, Wittgenstein’s dream, divine dreaming, the tedium of listening to complaints about having to listen to other people’s dreams (oy!), and more? And if I wake up? Is it true that I can also read about the history of Technicolor, terrifying non-anatomical dentures, Roland Barthes’s love of wrestling, the Situationists’ surprising affection for Giorgio de Chirico, Native minstrelsy in the US, a single sentence by Samuel Beckett, greyhounds and canine blood banks, and a cocktail recipe guide that tells you “what you'll get with what you've got”? All this in one issue? Pinch me! http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/
For some American Islamophobes, the enemy, though multitudinous, is also hidden; Muslims, they claim, can resort to the doctrine of taqiyya to lie about their true religion. But to unveil this subterfuge, the patriotic guardians of the republic have no choice but to adopt a similar tactic. Joshua Craze on how the encounter between American political paranoia and a minor doctrine in Islam produces a hall of mirrors in which lying becomes the only way to defend the truth.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/craze_joshua_29_october_2020.php
An American History of Taqiyya
Around 1800, Novalis wrote, “Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.” Some 150 years later, Theodor Adorno would instead propose that “ethics today means not being at home in one’s house.” Join us online for a discussion with philosophers Cecilia Sjöholm & Sven-Olov Wallenstein to discuss the history of the idea of homelessness in the history of thought.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/events/sjoholm_wallenstein_homelessness_cosmopolitanism.php
Tuesday, 3 November 2020, 12:30–1:30 pm Eastern Standard Time / 6:30–7:30 pm Central European Time Venue: Online via Zoom. Please register here. The discussion will also be streamed live on Youtube. We will post the Youtube link on this page 10 minutes before the event. Moderated by Joanna Warsz...
We miss already the beautiful, extraordinary Matt Freedman—our longtime collaborator and contributor, and president of our board of directors—who passed away on Saturday. Matt was brilliant, humble, generous, funny, loving, kind, and always able to see and focus on what was unique and interesting in each person. He could draw and write his way out of any puzzle or situation, and even when given his cancer diagnosis in 2012, he continued to draw and write about that, most brilliantly in his book “Relatively Indolent but Relentless.” From his strange and adventurous mind sprang the 2002 exhibition “The Paper Sculpture Show,” and working with him on the performance event “Iron Artist” remains the most luminous experience we have ever had. In the videos circulating online of the madcap live reenactment of the Superbowl that he and his partner Jude Tallichet mounted in 2010 (one of a series of such live enactments of major sports events see), you see what made all of Matt’s ventures special: a maximal amount of work would go into every project without ever calibrating the time and effort against the usual metrics. Everything was done with full intensity, joy, and love. We miss already beautiful, extraordinary Matt; we will miss him forever.
An eight-century BC palace relief of three Assyrian soldiers smashing the sculpture of a king, and a viral video from 2015 depicting Islamic State fighters doing the same thing in the Mosul Museum. Why this persistent drive to destroy images? Why make other images showing their destruction? These are the questions addressed in Aaron Tugendhaft’s new book “The Idols of ISIS.” Join us on 1 November, 12 pm NY time, for a discussion between Tugendhaft, artist Michael Rakowitz, writer Rijin Sahakian, and scholar Wendy M. K. Shaw to discuss the political power of images. An event co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/events/tugendhaft_basha_rakowitz_sahakian_shaw_idols_of_isis.php
Date: Sunday, 1 November 2020, 12–2 Eastern Standard Time / 6–8 pm Central European TimeVenue: Online via Zoom. Please register here. Note that the Zoom link for the event itself will be emailed to all registered guests on 30 October.
Join us online for “War After War," a discussion with artist Simon Leung and writer Barry Schwabsky addressing questions of belonging, homelessness, and radical hospitality raised by “War After War” — Leung’s 2011 film on and with Warren Niesluchowski — and by Schwabsky’s 2011 article on Niesluchowski titled “The Perpetual Guest.” The discussion is on Thursday, 29 October, at 1:30 pm NY time. Registration info can be found at the link.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/events/leung_schwabsky_war_after_war.php
Date: Thursday, 29 October 2020, 1:30–2:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time / 6:30–7:30 pm Central European Time Venue: Online via Zoom. Please register here. You can also stream the discussion live on Youtube. Link to live stream will be available shortly before the start of the event. Moderated by Joa...
The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, chartered in 1865 by the US Congress, was meant to offer a path toward financial stability for the millions of newly emancipated African Americans. Yong Kwon on the symptomatic demise of the bank, which went bankrupt in 1874, leaving most of its customers with heavy financial losses.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/kwon_yong_13_october_2020.php
The Freedman’s Bank and the abandonment of Black America
“In 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, selected post offices in German cities offered customers a new service in the form of TV-based viewphones.” For our new "Kiosk" essay, Vera Tollmann looks at the long history of video telephony.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/tollmann_vera_1_september_2020.php
A long history of videotelephony
What kind of republic does the US want to be? A republic of violence & inequity, or a republic of letters? The latter needs a healthy postal service, as imagined in section 8 of the Constitution. Nancy Pope, historian at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, talks to Joshua Bauchner on the remarkable story of one of our most important institutions.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/47/bauchner_pope.php
Going through the mail
Since 2006, Congress has done its best to make the USPS fail. The USPS is a vital institution for any fucntionaing republic; it is a heroic enterprise dependent on its many heroic workers. Meet the extraordinary Raymond Bullard, Cabinet's mailman for many years, whom we celebrated in a special postcard in our Infrastructure issue. (And yes, that background is nicked from Van Gogh's portrait of his own beloved postman Joseph Roulin.)
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/41/postcard.php
When continental wars made European travel difficult in the 18th century, well-to-do Britons abandoned their Grand Tours for a new form of virtual travel: the cartographic board game. Colton Valentine on a conception of travel that is still with us today.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/valentine_colton_13_august_2020.php
The rise of the cartographic board game
In 1955, the “Hiroshima Maidens”—25 young Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bomb—arrived in the US for reconstructive plastic surgery. Their journey was covered in magazines and on television; they were even made the subject of a special episode of “This Is Your Life” in which they were introduced to one of the airmen who had piloted the "Enola Gay." David Serlin on the “Hiroshima Maidens” and the US government’s attempt to recuperate the stigma of dropping the bomb using the aura of benevolent science.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/11/serlin.php
Plastic surgery after the atomic bomb
In the 1990s, the West declared that the ecological disaster in the former GDR was due entirely to the failures of communism. In our new Kiosk essay "Animal Farms," Thomas Fleischman looks at how the history of pig farming in the GDR counters this condescending, insular narrative and reconnects farming in the GDR to global environmental history.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/fleischman_thomas_6_august_2020.php
A porcine history of East Germany’s rise and fall
“Heaven,” the Talking Heads sang, “is a place where nothing ever happens.” What sort of heaven is that, and do we want to go there? For our new “Kiosk,” Becca Rothfeld takes St. Augustine to the movies to watch the band's 1984 concert film “Stop Making Sense.”
In heaven with St. Augustine and the Talking Heads
In his 2002 essay on the history of the rock formation known as the Six Grandfathers, Matthew Buckingham worked with geologists to imagine what erosion will have done in 500,000 years’ time to the four colonialists' faces carved into the rock. May the Six Grandfathers, and the Black Hills, be returned to their rightful owners soon.
The image above shows what geologists believe the Six Grandfathers will look like in the year 502,002 CE Located just south of the geographic center of the continental United States in the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, this mountain has also been called Slaughterhouse Peak, Cougar Mountain, and is now....
"Time" has just interviewed Lily Scherlis about her excellent essay for us on the history of the term "social distancing," which had been used loosely until US sociology adopted it after the 1919 Chicago race riots as a tool for analyzing racial divisions. Original article is here: http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/scherlis_lily_30_april_2020.php
While it may seem to be a product of the COVID-19 moment, the term has a long history
Francophone friends! “Hell Is for White People,” Alexander Nagel's recent essay for our Kiosk platform, has been published in French by Lundi Matin . Available here: https://lundi.am/L-Enfer-est-fait-pour-les-blancs-Alexander-Nagel
In “This Head, This Body,” Ana Isabel Keilson examines the dance of illiberalism as performed by Viktor Orbán and asks: How have we imagined the relationship between the body politic & the head? And most importantly: Why is *that* head on *this* body?
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/keilson_ana_isabel_18_june_2020.php
Viktor Orbán and the Dance of Modern Politics
A year ago today, Warren Niesluchowski, one of the most extraordinary figures in the cultural world, passed away. In October, Cabinet will present an exhibition, organized by Joanna Warsza and Sina Najafi, on Niesluchowski as a practitioner of an ethical, ontological homelessness—one made possible by the postwar order even as it rejected many of its principal tenets. The accompanying book will be co-published with Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie/ Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
http://cabinetmagazine.org/exhibitions/warsza_najafi_niesluchowski_was_there.php
In “Hell Is for White People,” Alexander Nagel examines a 1515 Portuguese painting that does something rarely seen in European art: It depicts Europeans, then setting out to subjugate the world, as simply one more tribe, and one especially worthy of punishment. In the sixteenth century, the painting forced its self-assured viewer to ask: Is this my tribe? It now asks: What was this tribe, and what is my relation to it?
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/nagel_alexander_10_june_2020.php
A Painting from 1515 Turns a Mirror on Its Viewers
In a 1920 fragment, Franz Kafka—who loved swimming—imagined an Olympic swimmer who returns home in triumph only to confess that he does not know how to swim. Aaron Schuster examines Kafka's writings on swimming, an activity deemed impossible by the Czech writer.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/schuster_aaron_28_may_2020.php
The Champion of the Impossible
Machu Picchu was a pleasure palace built by Inca elite wishing to escape the flu-like contagion that hit their capital, Cuzco, every summer. While they retreated to safety, the citizens and warriors left behind were to cleanse the empire by means of elaborate rituals. Adam Herring on what the ruins of Machu Picchu can tell us about our current contagion.
http://cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/herring_adam_21_may_2020.php
The coronavirus arrives in Peru, with historic irony
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Stuck at home and need to exercise? Don’t despair. All you need to conjure an invisible running machine into existence is some dishwashing detergent!
In 1849, the first US patent for a paper-folding machine was given to Edward N. Smith of Massachusetts based on his knife-folding technique. Originally patented to standardize page size for bookbinding, these machines are now primarily marketed as commercial letter folders—increasing office efficiency and productivity while processing paper “at speeds up to 7,400 sheets per hour."" The knife technique has since been replaced with the Buckle technique, which relies on high speeds and friction to fold paper. Here's to our attempts at increased office efficiency!