This is about affirmation. This is about critique. This is about critique and affirmation. Critique itself is generally understood as a negative position, oppositional, of being against something rather than for another thing, and this is important but at the same time it tends to hamper the very negativity it engenders, in that critique itself ends up getting defined by and wrapped up in the very thing it is trying to criticise.

Against this tendency, the maligned task of critique seeks to undo not only that which it opposes but also and of course itself. Stripping itself back, revealing its underpinnings and at the same time levelling the selfsame at that which it seeks to oppose. Critique is positioned here as both an against and an underneath motion. The force of such motions function best in relation to a solid and proportionally larger form. Otherwise critique is just pushing against or tipping up air, a void.

If the object to oppose is not clear enough critique risks falling into self-reflexive conservatism, always doubting what has just been said, backtracking and delimiting. If the object is over determined it overwhelms and post-determines the critique proffered. In order to engage fully and still negatively with these issues, critique must encounter its own complicity in the situation at hand. At least in this sense, there is some possibility for self initiated action. The problem is how this complicity can adequately avoid, or encounter, the same oppositional pitfalls and perpetuations.

This is about affirmation. This is about critique. This is about critique and affirmation. Affirmation appears as anathema to critique, the very idea of being 'for' anything as redundant to the task. Yet, at the same time, if being against something generally rules in favour of the something over its antithetical antagonist, then perhaps there could be some potentiality in affirmation. Not an affirmation that posits a self-known but one that risks advocating an unknown and currently untrue. A negative affirmation, fictive, fashioned and fabricated through artifice with all its radical embellishments. If it is not against or underneath then perhaps it is outside of and other than. For something that isn't yet and could be.

For AS Against includes works by Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Kathy Acker and Atalia ten Brink (formally Shaw) and Tom Kalin.