Dynamics of the Intransitive

A volume about artistic processes and practices that do not pursue an explicit political or critical agenda, yet nevertheless have a unique potential for intervention.

Artistic interventions are generally understood as procedures and practices that pursue an explicitly political or critical agenda. However, the arts can also influence social structures in non-obvious ways: questioning or reconfiguring them, interrupting routines, or disrupting processes. This type of artistic intervention is characterized by a specific non-directionality that can be understood as intransitivity. Even if these interventions are not directed toward a goal, they irritate, disturb, and interrupt. Their methods are those of repetition, refraction, and displacement. This volume presents artistic procedures and practices—framed through ideas of improvisation, obstinacy, and objectlessness—that illustrate intransitive dynamics. It examines the potentials and limits of intransitivity and puts the concept of the intransitive itself up for debate.