In this interview on his work and life, Adam Phillips talks about psychoanalysis, literature and the relationship between the two – both in terms of his personal activity and what it is that comprises them as fields of human understanding and intervention. Phillips is a psychoanalyst, literary critic and essayist with a vast and diverse oeuvre that has been translated into many languages. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Observer and The New York Times and is currently coordinating the new Penguin complete works of Freud. In this quick-moving conversation with the interviewer Afonso Dias Ramos, the British academic talks about the world today, the changes that have occurred and those that may yet take place. He suggests that we should be attempting to have more open and flexible conversations.

"It was my turn to repaint a new image of some of the masterpieces of the Prado Museum through photography. As I have been using the technique of double or multiple exposures on analogue film for years, I considered it a fitting formula to build my imagery." In his descriptive memoire written for Electra about this work, the renowned photographer Alberto García-Alix, a Spanish National Photography Award winner, tells us about his relationship with the Prado, which began as a child when he was taken there by his mother, and talks about the method he used to create photographs based on the Museum’s artworks. Some of these previously unseen photographs are presented in the ‘Scoop’ section of this issue. They show how images can give continuity to other images in a way that veils them as much as it reveals them, in a journey to a world which is recognisable one moment and unrecognisable the next.

A few lines before the above quote, which is the focus for this discussion, Woolf wrote a curious sentence: ‘My profession is literature.’ I would certainly never write those words.

The other day, while out on my short daily walk designed to enable me to cope with working from home without a self-certificate or exemption form, my eyes drifted downwards as I thought of the prisoners who end up losing their sight as they are never able to look as far as the horizon. In solidarity with them, I stared at the edge of the pavement in front of me, and caught sight of an orange rectangle. I picked it up. To my surprise, it looked just like a €50 bank note. I was already rejoicing in this modest treasure when I noticed that it differed from the notes I was used to; it was decorated with a female figure – not an allegory of the Republic, Fertility or Justice, half-naked and wearing a Roman tunic, like most of the female figures on bank notes.

In this review, Afonso Dias Ramos reads four books that reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic and how the world has changed and will continue to do so. He stresses that the books, written by four Portuguese authors with different backgrounds and views, show ‘a rare critical willingness to confront a contemporary event’ and underlines that the current context requires ‘a different kind of writing’.

Once in circulation, there are certain words can seem strange to anyone who is literate. Some come to stay and settle. Others flit about but never roost, and sooner or later take flight and are gone. When it comes to words borrowed from other languages, there are those that invoke the mysterious nemesis we call ‘the nature of the language’ – its identity. Perhaps the best approach is to be practical. Such words can come in handy; that is all. It is even possible that the ‘nature of the language’ may have something to do with it.

When the end of one year is the beginning of the next, there is a hidden stoppage in this visible passage that makes time an intimate voice to remind us of what we have forgotten. This whispered voice is like that of the slow, mysterious songs that give a sun of light its moon of shadow. In every year that ends and surrenders to each year that begins, in a contiguous discontinuity, there is our will to measure, mark and change the time in us and us in time. This is how poets scan their verses so that the music leaps like a spark from a fire or a bird from a tree. There is an interval that we open only within ourselves to repeat the words of Paul Gauguin’s painting: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’. 

It is said that while in Madrid to open an exhibition of his work they took him to the Prado Museum, which he had never visited before. He passed through the vast rooms with fleeting steps and set gestures, where from the walls the works of Velázquez and Goya, Fra Angelico and Rafael, Bosch and Dürer, van der Weyden and Caravaggio cast their forms and colours, lines and lights. This swift visit was barely enough for a distracted, distant glance at the masterpieces that time has selected to show us. It took no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. At the end of this whirlwind-visit, he went into the museum-shop and looked around for more than half an hour. With keen attention, care and curiosity, he examined, among other products and gadgets, the reproductions and replicas, posters and prints of the works whose originals he could not be bothered with. Such was Andy Warhol ...

‘Contemporary art’ is the operative but undefinable term that refers to the vast, heterogeneous realm of current artistic expressions, strongly influenced by the triumph of the new media, without that implying the extinction of classical media, especially since the modernist idea of ‘overcoming’ is no longer valid. The object of endless debate and controversy, contemporary art has been besieged by questions of value, aesthetic criteria, and autonomy in relation to institutions and the art market. Never before has art had so many institutions at its service: contemporary art centres, museums, fairs, biennales and galleries have created a ‘system’ with its own rules and codes and have multiplied and hierarchised spaces of celebration, but also new modes of legitimation. This dossier on contemporary art that we have prepared from an eclectic perspective, focusing on art criticism, sociology and economy, reflects not only on aesthetic issues and artistic forms, but also on the way the system works and its determinations. We have invited internationally renowned artists and theorists to write about the various aspects of contemporary art: Camille de Toledo, Yves Michaud, Paul Werner, Jovan Mrvaljevic and Gregory Sholette.

Interview with the French artist and writer Camille de Toledo where, on the topic of contemporary art, we talk about the cynicism of art, curators, the vagueness of ‘contemporary’, and above all, about the potential time that breaks with the blocked time of ‘presentism’, about potential art that rejects aesthetic ‘melancholism’ and the discourse of finitudes.