Marina Vishmidt

Marina Vishmidt (May 6, 1976 – April 26, 2024) was an American writer, editor and critic. She lectured at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London in the MA program Culture Industry, and taught Art Theory in the MA Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her research mainly concerned the relationship between art, value and labour. She further explored this through works on debt, social reproduction and artistic entrepreneurialism.

Life Vishmidt came to New York City with her mother and grandparents when she was three during the 1970s Soviet Union aliyah. She studied at the Bronx High School of Science and went to Sarah Lawrence College. In 2013, she completed her PhD entitled Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital at Queen Mary, University of London. In the Summer Semester, 2022, Vishmidt was the Arnheim Visiting Professor at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In October 2023 she started a new position as Professor for Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Vishmidt died on April 26, 2024 after a long cancer illness.

Writing Vishmidt wrote and edited several publications including Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (2016) together with Kerstin Stakemeier and Media Mutandis (2006) edited jointly with Mary Anne Francis, Jo Walsh and Lewis Sykes. Her 2018 monograph Speculation as a Mode of Production was praised for bringing "the full weight of critical theory – with its characteristic ambition of intellectual scope – ... to bear on art and politics in the age of financialisation".

Vishmidt contributed to various publications, such as Undoing Property? (Sternberg Press, 2013), Mobile Cinema (Archive Books, 2017), On Performance (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2012), the Exhibition catalogue for Grace Schwindt's exhibition Run a Home, Build a Town, Lead a Revolution. An Exhibition in Three Acts (1362), at MARCO - Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo, and The Grand Domestic Revolution GOES ON (2010) and Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning (2018) both published by Casco, Utrecht. She authored several chapters in the Routledge Companion to Art and Politics which discusses the complex relationship between art and politics and was published in 2015.

She was also a frequent contributor to various journals, including Afterall, E-flux, Mute Magazine, and Texte zur Kunst.

In her teens and early twenties, Vishmidt was active in the US zine subculture, using the penname "Miss Mary Mack."

Collaborations Vishmidt frequently collaborated with various artists and activists. In 2010, she contributed texts to the 4th instalment of the project Lying Freely by artist Ruth Buchanan which took the form of a book.

She was also part of a longterm research group of artists, writers, architects and musicians who worked together on the historical and contemporary presentation, documentation and reception of Victory over the Sun a Russian Futurist opera that premiered in 1913 in Saint Petersburg. The collective research efforts have been gathered in the publication Anfang Gut, Alles Gut - Actualizations of the Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun 1913.

Vishmidt was part of the working group of Cinenova a London-based feminist film and video distributor. She also collaborated with the Full Unemployment Cinema, a collective which screened films in independent, self-organised venues around London. The films focus mostly on themes of work, non-work, refusal and struggle.