A theory of art and infrastructure by one of her generation's most brilliant critical theorists

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. In response, Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counterpraxis. By treating contemporary art institutions as a site of struggle as well as a resource, Marina Vishmidt reanimates critique.

A tour de force of Marxist theory and art criticism - embracing such disparate subjects as Milanese radical feminism, dinosaur documentaries, and the water crises of Flint and Detroit - Infrastructural Critique, edited in the wake of the author's tragic early death, blends theory and praxis to assess the work of artists such as Cameron Rowland, Dora Budor, and Carolyn Lazard. This volume showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her era.

"Marina Vishmidt speaks with unfailing clarity about how value feeds on devastation and how art's institutions sit inside the chain of extraction rather than outside or above. Infrastructural Critique is essential reading for anyone who despite all is not ready to give up on the artworld as a place for collective struggle, and who not only wants to experience how 'infrastructural critique' pulls conditions of possibility into the frame -- above all, the material conditions of reproduction -- but more importantly, crack open the impasses and alibis of institutional critique. What makes this book, her last gift to us, so generative is that it never stops at the diagnosis: between reproduction and abolition it opens ground for new forms of origination." - Anselm Franke