Dear friends,
I also feel very sad about Steve passing away. The news comes as a
shock, even though he had already indicated that he wouldn't be there
for long; in March he wrote about the work on the new book and said, "My
time is short. ..."
I remember how impressed I was by him and the Critical Art Ensemble when
they came to perform at the V2_ in Rotterdam for the Next 5 Minutes 2 in
1996. They cohered like a rockband, but they were doing this very sharp
art-theory thing, very serious and yet not academic at all. Weird and
amazingly inspiring. Like the books, the lecturing, the artworks.
I don't know whether I have come across somebody who was like Steve, at
the same time so incredibly bright, brave and gentle, critical and
caring. And with such a great, dry sense of humour which he didn't even
seem to lose in times of utter desperation. (Remember what Steve went
through after the death of his wife, Hope, in 2004 from which a
four-year judicial ordeal ensued...)
When in September 2016 we prepared an invitation for him to come to
Germany the following winter, he wrote a message from which I would like
to quote:
"We need to start thinking environmentally through the lens of death as
well, which no one wants to talk about, because when management and
death come together traditionally bad things have happened. The
situation is even more complicated by the fact that ecological science
is mostly beyond the human capacity to model making it very difficult to
think environmentally through reason. Then there is the problem of
anthropocentrism. The idea that we can escape it is absurd to me. We can
only adjust the predisposition. This is the kind of thing I have been
thinking about. These topics are incredible difficult and I am not sure
that I am smart enough to work through them (but when has that stopped
me before?)."
He signed his message last March, "Onward, Steve." It's now the sad
moment of responding: onward, Steve, and thanks for everything.
Andreas
--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: [email protected]
