Mapping the Drift

Our present cultural moment: 20-effing-26, and all its bitter losses to life and quality of life, is not particularly unique from other moments in intensity but certainly in type, due to the confluence of technology, information, and the weather. This moment (no doubt like other moments before this one) feels like things are taking a turn for the worse. The things that we need don’t work well, and the things we don’t want work too well against us. And within the ideological field of art in the West, we have tended to expect that at least some institutions of art provide relief from the prevailing miserable order. Many of those institutions also broadcast themselves as aiming to provide that relief, or, more often, a space to dream and think what that relief might look like. But, as is deftly summarized on the back-cover text of Marina Vishmidt’s Infrastructural Critique: Contemporary Art Between Reproduction and Abolition (Verso, 2026): “As we search for a life beyond capital, the dream that galleries and museums can function as a refuge from existing social relations appears less credible by the day.”

Vishmidt, since she landed in London’s DIY-culture in the late 1990s, wrote extensively on art, film, books, and the politics of and surrounding the (re)production of culture. Yet, my favorite of Marina’s contributions to the discourse is her critique of the conditions that surround and facilitate the production of artworks (broadly speaking). Throughout her published work, Marina elucidated a tendency of art institutions to conceal their profit-extracting mechanisms, and recognized their enthusiasm to represent positions of alterity in their programming so long as the conditions that guarantee their existence and their social and financial power continue. Art institutions’ gestural benevolence, their insistence on a determinate boundary between art and life (40), and their coterminous distribution of material violence are three conditions that that govern the activities that take place within their containers. What tends to be concealed, as aforementioned, is that those who site their activities within institutions of art are participating in a labor relationship that no doubt has particularities but is decisively unexceptional from other ways of working.

Having built our awareness of these institutional dynamics in previous books and essays, Marina’s Infrastructural Critique breaks further ground, offering a sharper lens for viewing contemporary art and its contexts. More importantly, however, the book offers a strategy for organizing life beyond capital while also challenging the boundary between what is art and what is life, or politics, or social relations. Her writing has a reputation for being complex, requiring some work and attention on behalf of the reader to understand. Maybe the work is complex because the violence is often complex, though not complicated. And neither is the writing. When I was trying to learn to read and speak Marina, I found listening to her YouTube recordings provided effective translations of the written, baroque sentences. This new book, her third (after Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill, 2018) and Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis, and Contemporary Art (Mute, 2016) with Kerstin Stakemeier) is one of her most accessible. In Infrastructural Critique, more than in her previous books, Marina gives readers generous roads into understanding her field of inquiry: “In all of my work, I try to keep coming back to categories as ways of staking out relations of antagonism, rather than categories as fixed classes of things, or identities. […] I remain committed to the notion that capitalism is the total enemy (relation) that incorporates and generates all others” (43). This metacommentary makes it possible to follow the book without having years of academic study in historical materialist thought, while also articulating the characteristic indeterminacies that create the conditions for artistic practices and all other types of labor that occur within and alongside a supposedly exceptional artistic one.

While framed in relation to contemporary art and its specific infrastructure, the book deals with a familiar fact of life. A traditional understanding of infrastructure would be defined in concrete physicalities—roads, telephone lines, water filtration systems. Marina’s definition of infrastructure does not deal so much with what it is but rather how it functions. Infrastructures unconsciously repeat and reproduce themselves, often to harmful or noxious ends. But through the cut or misuse, they can be reproduced otherwise and toward other ends. Marina’s critical lens takes advantage of the inherent contradictions of how infrastructure works (or doesn’t). Infrastructure, more importantly than what it is, should be understood by how it materializes at the nexus of “domination and care” (53), and how in total paradox it “makes possible only insofar as it also makes impossible” (138). Characteristically two-sided, infrastructures can, Marina argues, easily be “collectively transformed for different ends” than those which they are intended to serve (53). Marina highlights a netted polarity in every aspect of our condition as laborers. Reproduction, for example, can be both the “‘fate worse than death’” and the “logic of resistance on the way to a non-capitalist form of social organization” (118).

So then, what is Infrastructural Critique? Marina lays out infrastructural critique as a materialist theory of conditions that are both constraints and possibilities (156). Viewing conditions as hinderances that also simultaneously make something else (we might need) possible is characteristic of Marina’s approach to the limits of the institution. That approach holds contradiction tight. At the same time, the infrastructural critique methodology that Marina describes is dispassionate about the moral transgressions of capitalism’s agents while remaining invested in being in relation with institutions of art. That relation, for Marina, is what makes possible, and even energizing, the repurposing of whatever is already in those spaces to use toward building a life beyond capital—a strategy of conscious “misuse.” I think of infrastructural critique as a type of double(d) work: the compulsory work and its negation, two types of work whose distinction is indeterminable or mutable at best, even sometimes the same work.

Marina makes slight mention, and I think it’s worth giving it greater focus, that this mindset is already dichotomous, as if to say: don’t try to make sense of it, learn how to misuse it! Applying this attitude of misuse can free up a lot of effort, brainpower, and emotional and psychological distress (see Hannah Proctor, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024)) that is expended (in 2026!) formulating gestural critiques within hosting institutions that support those critiques insofar as, as mentioned above, the institutions remain intact.

On the other hand, as I have understood Marina’s position on organizing, all tools can be considered, and no tactic need be completely discarded. The argument that Infrastructural Critique makes is a case for adding other tactics to the already well-trodden practice of gestural pronouncements. The book highlights that we do indeed have other options that we need to explore if we are to build the other forms of relation or other subjectivities that we wish to realize. These other subjectivities should effectively reappropriate the masses’ heretofore unavoidable conscription to have a job—conscripted because while participation in institutions of art is largely self-selected, in this world most people (and most artists) are at the very least are judged against their ability to perform some form of labor.

Concepts can sometimes become clearest in relief, and Marina’s provision of a short critical history of “institutional critique” helps make visible the “drift” (69), as she calls it, toward antagonisms that are actually more infrastructural in formulation and mode of address. Institutional critique, according to Marina, is characterized aesthetically by “the oscillation between the functional, the critical, and the aesthetic familiar from conceptualism’s penchant for contracts (Michael Asher, Seth Siegelaub) and other administrative tools (Adrian Piper), as well as […] reorderings of space, inventory, and fixtures (Asher, Fred Wilson, John Knight)” (177). The contradiction between embodying an entrepreneur of the self and enacting gestural disturbances became a limit. Namely, that there are “bounds […] around the type of critique artists could level at the institutions of art, while also embodying it professionally, socially, psychologically, and economically […]” (65). Institutional critique, as a lens for interpretation as well as an aesthetic, receives an adroit yet civil lambast in this book, taken to account for being “too invested in preserving the frame as a condition of its legitimacy” (113). Establishing the limitations of institutional critique assists Marina in limning the nature of the “drift” toward infrastructural critique that has emerged in artistic practice, proposing that drift not necessarily as an organized movement but rather as a way that art that critiques has had to change in order to remain critical.

Marina prescribes an “‘infrastructural’ tack, in order not merely to reveal, reflect, or educate audiences on ‘empirical reality’ but to emulate aspects of this reality in ways that unhinge the omnipresent fatalism rooted in its violence, thus shaping and constructing it instead” (81–82). This suggested pragmatism has a speculative quality, holding an institution “at arm’s length so it can be enacted differently” (86). Marina finds elements of this thinking as early as the 1990s and 2000s, in the practice of Marion von Osten, who was known for working simultaneously as an “artist,” “curator,” “writer,” or even some other thing within each of her projects. Her multivalent approach to accessing institutions challenged both the division of labor within them as well as their readiness to view that multivalence as a conflict of interest, foreclosing the legitimacy undivided labor.

Important to understanding the drift from institutional to infrastructural critique are Marina’s reflections on Cameron Rowland’s work. Rowland often displays “a piece of infrastructure [that] relates a history of property and dehumanization through the way it functions, rather than in what it uses artistic means to depict” (58, emphasis mine). This is the key distinction: infrastructural critique materializes through an object’s circulation more than its form. While Rowland and other artists represented in the book, including Ghislaine Leung and Dora Budor, have all presented projects that share aesthetic similarities with institutional critique, Marina points out that their artworks not only depart from or intervene in the material conditions of their situation in a gallery but also, crucially, intervene on conditions that are not limited to the container or framework of artistic practice. Whereas institutional critics need the gallery to remain unchanged in order for their work to make sense, infrastructural critics view the institution in an expanded field of structural violence (67). They participate in gallery contexts not in order to bid for inclusion in the “supposedly normal conditions of exploitation” (107) but rather to allow for an emergence of other conditions entirely. Marina does not directly address what those conditions might be, but she describes how they might feel: “critique that makes cuts and lets in air” (92) into our established modes of relation within that expanded field of structural violence. In this sense, any desired misuse of an institution can have a greater impact through approaching the gallery container as an aspect of infrastructure or as evidence of an expanded infrastructure of which the critique is (an obfuscated) part.

A concept that resonates with the instability of our times, infrastructural critique seems to me as if it can mainly be waged in the contingency of infrastructure, in the delay, transfer, or the blockage of valorization. The critique itself is girded on an awareness that interventions can be made into the conditions that produce our labor environments (the gallery, for one). These interventions also make those conditions a central focus of both the labor and the discourse. It seems that infrastructural critique is situated as class struggle in the expanded field of art but not limited to artistic stakes. Rather, infrastructure is ontological, for example as the material basis of the reproduction of race. Or, in other words, infrastructure builds the very efficacy of persistent and fundamental social hierarchies.

Marina’s work brings attention to systems that would otherwise go unnoticed: the labor that facilitates, or doesn’t, the 8:07 Overground train to Stratford, for instance; the route that Transport for London (TfL) has mapped to get from Lewisham to Brixton by bus, which feels like it takes forever; or the state of the universal healthcare system in the UK, which might make it nearly impossible to receive adequate care, time lost in a clinic that feels like more like brainteaser bureaucratic game than a medical facility. Marina highlights these mechanisms as a call to action rather than a cry for empathy: “there is a concern with making visible while avoiding the closures of representation” (170).

As an explication of infrastructural critique, the book’s central focus is on the material conditions of labor. But I’m thinking about other conditions that produced the book I read, released posthumously and edited by long-time collaborators Danny Hayward, Kerstin Stakemeier, and Larne Abse Gogarty. From what I know of Marina, I don’t think she would have ever entertained reflecting directly on her own illness inside of this book, but I do wonder if she would have tolerated me raising the question of her illness, my illness, our illness: anyone reading the book in all our varying stages of incapacitation, whether acute or chronic, as part of the conditions of her theorizing. Following her (and others’) concept of capitalism as the total enemy (43), necessarily, capitalism = illness and premature death. Instead of using her own experience, Marina approaches the structuring capacity of illness through Carolyn Lazard’s writing on disability as a social condition, which deviates from capitalist understandings of health and serves as a ground to critique and organize differently (127). As many have argued, capitalism is disabling.

And so how could one not read infrastructure as the conditions within which our (art) works circulate, without tasting a bitter pill of the resonance between the theory Marina developed and the material conditions that we (every laboring human) all navigate. Our politics are intertwined with, as well as hindered by, our physical conditions, as in literally our health. And thus the physical disabilities that we endure are not only socially constituted because they demarcate us as “unfit” for types of labor, as Lazard points out, but also socially constituted because they are the physical symptoms that arise from absorbing hits or accumulating losses in the expanded field of systemic violence.

As such, I thought that I would feel anguish upon receiving the book. That I would be flicking through pages with resentment toward the way things are, preferring that Marina still be with us. Walking to the bus en route to her memorial in London in 2024, I felt a downward pain motion so sharply cramped that I thought I was coming on my cycle. I paused in the park and got down into a “child’s pose.” It instinctively felt like the only way I could be comfortable, pouring the discomfort down my back and onto the grass. Reversing the dam. After some moments, I stood up in slight awe of my own capacity for sensation. Over the last two years, simply making space to let a feeling simmer—to be witnessed—has been one of my versions of doing infrastructural critique as that which creates awareness and lets in air. As Marina points out, infrastructure conceals just as much as broken infrastructure reveals (94). In a social context in which disassociation is as compulsory as labor itself, cultivating awareness can be thought of as an albeit granular method for breaking infrastructure, or misusing it. Marina writes: “there’s no opposition between breaking and building if you approach the parameters of reality speculatively” (180). As if to say, our breaking down in these years that we have been celebrating Marina necessarily builds something new (and hopefully it’s what we need) as we work amid the overlapping relations of friend, colleague, comrade. I leave it there, acknowledging the extended network of all of those who have engaged and will continue to engage in this book as a part of the friendship they shared with Marina.

Is this interesting? Perhaps one last comment via the complexity of the text, a consistent feature in Marina’s writing. She honed a way of stringing together phrases in what I have already described as a somewhat baroque sentence structure. Speculative, her syntax often does what the work describes, creating moments of indeterminacy marked by sharp cuts through to new understanding. In the “Abolition” chapter of Infrastructural Critique, Marina writes: “The role of criticality in artistic discourse, functioning as it has in recent years as the marker of conflicted empathy with the victims of unchangeable social conditions, becomes increasingly superfluous, and thereby inflationary, in line with the production it concerns itself with” (158). And while it feels like here she’s referencing a specific mode of art magazine criticism, like reviewing, she articulates an astute conception of a kind of writing that is ambivalent on naming violence while also accepting it as just how things are. With Marina (and also with Danny, with Kerstin, and with Larne), writing is a mode of acting in the public sphere. She writes about infrastructural critique, but her writing is also itself infrastructural critique in and through an expanded field of theory/ politics/ art. With this book she exercises critique as a “material practice of antagonism” (182).

Taylor Le Melle is a writer; her novella They Set Up Parliament in Hell (Vleeshal, 2026) is available at www.san-serriffe.com. 

Cover image courtesy of Verso Books

All other images: Courtesy of the author