dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts
A note is a trace, a word, a drawing that all of a sudden becomes part of thinking, and is transformed into an idea. This publication project follows that path, presenting the mind in a prologue state, in a pre-public arena. As a prelude to, and central element of dOCUMENTA (13), the publishing project 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts took the form of one hundred “notebooks,” comprising facsimiles of existing documents, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations. With contributions by authors from a range of disciplines, such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, economic and political theory, language and literature studies, as well as poetry, these publications can be seen to have activated an arena of intuitive knowledge mirrored in the wider scope of dOCUMENTA (13) itself. Published over a period of two years (2010–12) 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts was conceived and edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Chus Martinez, and Bettina Funcke.
Series Titles
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Roland Barthes despaired of keeping a diary. Too boring. Too frustrating. The diary disease, he called it. But there was one point of interest, and that had to do with re-reading an entry several months or years later. This could provide pleasure due to the awakening of a memory not in what was written but in “the interstices of notation.” For instance, on re-reading the entry relating his having to wait for a bus one disappointing evening on the rue de Rivoli in Paris, he recalls the grayness—“but no use trying to describe it now, anyway, or I’ll lose it ... -
The documenta exhibitions of contemporary art held in Kassel, West Germany, are now well known. They are awaited and received with great expectation and occasional controversy. Having established a reputation for historical prognosis and the legitimization of the present, they have become a focal point for ideological as well as aesthetic discourse surrounding contemporary art. In the summer of 1987, Kassel hosted documenta 8. But the first documenta exhibition, held in Kassel in the summer of 1955, was not necessarily conceived as the beginning of a series. It was simply called “documenta: Art of the Twentieth Century,” and in that ... -
October 25, 2010 My dear friend, I have been away from home now for two years, and there are so many things to tell you. But information is not the obvious objective of any communication today. May I ask you where you are reading this, and whether you are comfortable? I read a story on the Internet the other day, when I was looking for some inspiration so that I could perform my daily exercise of writing to you, and I came across a tale of origins, which I would like to share. But before I tell you that tale, there are a ... -
1. History is layered. But the layers are not stacked neatly. The disrupting force of the present puts pressure on the past, scattering pieces of it forward into unanticipated locations. No one owns these pieces. To think so is to allow categories of private property to intrude into a commonly shared terrain wherein the laws of exclusionary inheritance do not apply. The history of humanity demands a communist mode of reception… -
Notes on Georg Simmel’s Lessons, 1906/07, and on a “Sociology of Art,” c. 1909 dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsThe black notebook marked “LAK 529” contains two periods of note-taking by György Lukács, written two years apart, which constitute part of the bequest that was recovered from the so-called Heidelberg suitcase. In 1973, with the help of a current biography, an employee of the Deutsche Bank in Heidelberg identified the owner of the material as Lukács, who had deposited them in 1917, prior to his return from Germany to Budapest. In addition to 1,600 letters and text fragments, this material also contained Das Gericht, which was presumably written in 1913 and dedicated to his first wife, Ljena Grabenko, as ... -
In the last weeks preceding the collapse of his rational powers, Nietzsche wrote, “I am a rendezvous of experiences”; the word is indeed rendezvous. He meant that he had spent his life running toward the world and that the world had been running toward him.This double attraction, this movement, had been central. The immense generosity of his mind had made him the meeting point of cosmic forces, of the social currents of his time, and of the ideas that he seemed so often more to capture than to create. This generosity was a form of love. He showed us in ... -
With a radical imagination, the work of Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) refutes a common sense that bases technology in frigid thought. A mathematician, nuclear physicist, and expert in digital technologies, Kurenniemi established the electronic studio at the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University in 1961–62. He collaborated with the composer Terry Riley on the first Happening to take place in Finland, with the artists group Dimensio and protagonists of the underground music scene, such as M. A. Numminen and the band Sperm. In the late 1960s, he made non- narrative short films that he hesitated to call art; a kind of ... -
If in fact there is a context… -
On Saturday, September 28, 1889, representatives of eighteen countries gathered in Sèvres, outside Paris.They were there to bring the world under the measure of a single meter known as M and a single kilogram, K — to bless a particular ruler and a particular weight.The conference arbitrarily chose one meter stick and one sample weight from thirty nearly identical copies, declaring: “This prototype of the meter will from now forward represent, at the temperature of melting ice, the metric unit of length. . . .This prototype [of the kilogram] will be considered from now on the unit of mass.” Each ... -
But we can understand Descartes’ premise of equality far more basically and radically, not as an assertion of fact, but as a presuppositional act: equality is a supposition we must make in advance. For it has nothing to do with the socially acquired capacity of reason (in which we are unequal, and about which we disagree). Equality pertains to a presupposition of reason. It does not refer to a capacity of reason that we possess, but to the potential for practical training in reason, for its acquisition. In that and that alone—in this potential—are we equal. Equality is an equality ... -
A painter arrived in a desperately wounded condition in a network of galleries beneath Chaillot, Paris. Aboveground, in that city as in most of the world, everything was contaminated with radioactivity after the series of nuclear explosions that wiped out much of life during a lightning Third World War. He was promptly operated on. The prognosis of the doctor who examined him following the operation was that he had only weeks, or at best months, to live. As a result, he was selected to participate in a time-travel experiment. He soon learned that another man, a photographer, was also approved ... -
Life in all its variety and diversity is rapidly becoming the “property” of corporations through patents and “intellectual property rights.” A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention. Life, however, is not an invention. We can modify life-forms, we can manipulate living organisms. But we do not create life. The first patent on life was granted to General Electric for a genetically engineered bacterium. In 1971, General Electric and one of its employees, Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, applied for a U.S. patent on a genetically engineered Pseudomonas bacterium. Taking plasmids from three kinds of bacteria, Chakrabarty transplanted them into a fourth. ... -
There are five kinds of ruins. 1. There are romantic ruins, old castles and fortresses, temples and churches. They were destroyed by the passage of time, by becoming useless and irrelevant. These vast edifices whence the gods have fled are witness to the vacuity of aristocratic warrior virtue, royal glory, ecclesiastical authority, chivalry and gallantry as well as chastity, (self-imposed) poverty and obedience. The ancient junk now devoid of aura, halo and charisma is collected in museums, its context smashed: altarpieces mounted on walls, watched by schoolboys admiring the rump of Mary Magdalen. Romantic ruins are the first instances of non-beautiful beauty. ... -
Dune was to be his most ambitious film production: a personal adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel of the same title, published in 1965. The science-fiction saga was ideally suited to the choreography of transgressive visual and narrative genres of the sort in which the method of Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929 in Chile) partakes, and as it had been manifested in his films El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). Such an important project merited its own blank book. Hence, the word “DUNE” written in Art Deco-style typography is on the cover of a thick yellow notebook from 1974. Inside, however, ... -
In March 2010 we started recording an interview with Paul at his apartment on West End Avenue in New York, attempting to work together several ideas connected to Paul’s work, among which Threeing is central. Upon transcribing, and in the process of editing, we realized that there was a potential for Threeing as a mode of re-working our interview. In firstness, we were all present in the room and in conversation. In secondness, we each responded to what we had done — disappointments and affirmations. In thirdness, which is this version, a severe edit was made, basing itself on our ... -
For the first documenta in Kassel in 1955, Arnold Bode decided to exhibit European modernism and works by contemporary West German artists in the same galleries to demonstrate the unity of contemporary Western culture, which is the universal character of modernist culture. Kassel is a city with today almost 200,000 inhabitants that found itself “relocated” from the center of Germany to the inter-German borderland after 1945, and documenta came about as a part of the program of Cold War cultural policy. The exhibition was a clear indication that the country, which strongly opposed Communism, was and would remain thoroughly committed ... -
Saturday, November 6, 2010 New York City Dear Bettina, It’s been more than a month since we had coffee and the whole time, I’ve been thinking about how to best enact your suggestion: claiming UbuWeb as an artwork, perhaps the most significant artwork I will ever make. Or else to try to weave the various strands into my practice as a Gesamtkunstwerk. For the past fifteen years, I’ve been working daily on UbuWeb, a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. And although the site gives the smokescreen of being a large organization, the truth is ... -
Mario Bellatin is a writer who wants his books always on hand, not only the texts but the books themselves. What he wants then is a section of his studio where at all times there will be thousands of physical copies, one hundred thousand, to be exact, of the books written during his lifetime. From now on he will count the years of his life in books and not in years as most do. He will turn books and not years, so to speak. He will compose one hundred titles, with a first edition of one thousand books each. The books will go on sale only if someone is interested in owning them; these books ... -
For the past six years, I have been retracing some of Paul Gauguin’s steps. He led a famously peripatetic life, and I did not attempt to follow him systematically or in the order of his moves. More simply, I took advantage of lectures and conferences and organized vacations so as to see not only his works, as closely as possible, but also the places and things he had seen and sometimes represented. Since this exploration had to be performed over an extended period and in a sequence contingent on extraneous circumstances, it was important that I record it in ways that ... -
If there is a poem Sitting here In my chest May it irrigate Populate Intention If there is a story Let it wander Through this being Emerge into the land Seeing Let the water flow Rush like blood A great flood eternal … -
Cornelius Castoriadis never had a notebook. He wrote on the paper that was at hand. Whether it was the back of Red Cross ration tickets, the blank section of a conference schedule, or the reverse side of old documents from his workplaces such as the OECD and the Hôpital Henri-Rousselle, like a keen-eyed magpie he worked on the paper that was nearby. He sketched out his thoughts in a manner that combined an acerbic and polemical wit with an unflagging commitment to the ideals of freedom. It reveals a style that includes an alarming sense of political urgency, a fastidious ... -
The globalized art world has been overtaken in recent decades by a true compulsion to archive—a compulsion that includes anything from academic research into preexisting archives or those still to be constructed, through exhibitions fully or in part based on them, to frantic competition among private collectors and museums in the acquisition of these new objects of desire. Without a doubt, this phenomenon is not the result of chance. In view of this, it is urgent that we problematize the politics of archiving, since there are many different ways of approaching those artistic practices that are being archived. Such politics should ... -
This paper begins and ends with reflection on India, and on the place of Gandhian ideas about non-violence as a form of political action. The literature on Gandhi and on his place in the study of non-violence is voluminous. One among the many questions that remain open about Gandhian thought and action is the way in which violence and non-violence are connected in his politics. The argument developed in this paper is that Gandhian ideas about and practices of non-violence have a double genealogy. One genealogy is connected to Indic ideas about asceticism, avoidance, and abstinence; in common with other ... -
There once was a trader, a white man at the store back on the Rez, who was so good at tricking Indians they were a little bit proud of him. One day an Indian came up to the counter and said to the trader, “Now you are the cheatin’ wonder of the whole civilized world, but that one over there, he’s even better than you are.” “Why him? He’s only a scrawny critter!” “Yep, that’s the one. So why don’t you let him prove it?” So the white man ambled over to Coyote and said, “Let’s you and me have us a tricking ... -
“As I see it, creativity includes things like opening a hotel in Kabul,” Boetti said in an interview in the 1970s, adding, “an undertaking that would be crazy even in Italy! But there you realize it’s a true challenge: even presenting yourself as something other than an artist, when you have no anchorage and must completely reinvent yourself, physically and as a character. For instance, over there I always wear a jacket and tie with dark glasses, and I’m very dry and stand-offish with people…” The One Hotel opened in Kabul in the autumn of 1971, during Alighiero’s second trip to ... -
A Few Questions Regarding the Hesitance at Choosing between Bringing a Bottle of Wine or a Bouquet of Flowers dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsSometime in 1971, Harald Szeemann visited Turin in preparation for the documenta exhibition he was curating for the following year. Among the people he tried to meet in the city was Alighiero Boetti, but when Szeemann visited Boetti’s studio, the Italian artist wasn’t there. All indications are that somebody took the curator through the studio and showed him around, and that, mistakenly, Szeemann forgot a small piece of paper with a list of artists’ names. Several weeks might have passed before Boetti returned to Turin (that year he took two long trips to Afghanistan) and found the piece of paper ... -
Tiresias the diviner was turned into a woman by the supreme goddess Hera, having committed the sacrilegious act of killing two copulating snakes. After serving seven years as a priestess and a prostitute, and giving birth to a daughter named Manto (a diviner herself), Tiresias was permitted by the goddess to become male again. One day, Hera and her husband, Zeus, asked Tiresias who had more pleasure in sex, men or women, since he had experienced both womanhood and manhood. He replied that feminine pleasure was infinite, whereas male pleasure was finite, the opposite of what Hera had argued. Hera ... -
Allo-Thanatography or Allo-Auto-Biography: A Few Thoughts on One Painting in Charlotte Salomon’s "Leben? oder Theater?", 1941–42 dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsOn the edge of the Catholic cemetery at Portbou, Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan (b. 1930) was commissioned to create a memorial to Walter Benjamin on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in the town on September 26, 1940. Inaugurated on May 15, 1994, the monument is entitled Passages. A rusted steel pathway leads to a hooded entrance, which opens onto a precipitous staircase cut directly into the cliff. The staircase appears to open directly onto the sea crashing on the rocks below. The viewer is, however, protected from falling into the sea by a massive wall of glass placed at ... -
Afghanistan: A Lexicon uses the form of a lexicon to present a nonlinear narrative of twentieth-century Afghan history as a recursive loop of modernization attempts, revolts, collapses, and recoveries.The lexicon covers seventy-one terms, most illustrated by archival and original images, including: vocabulary unique to Afghan politics, like bi-tarafi, jirga, and nizamnamah; terms that have specific meanings or resonances in the Afghan context, like “infidel,” “martyr,” and spetsnaz; key players and places, from Bacha-i-Saqqao to Hizb-i-Islami and from the Bala Hissar to the Microrayan; and special entries on recurrent events and themes that form the weft and warp of the century, ... -
Where the rituals of academic life are concerned, there are few exercises as rudimentary, at once essential and banal, as taking notes. A student goes to class and reflexively pulls out a spiral-bound notebook, scribbling furiously to keep pace with the lecture. A scholar produces copious marginalia in an essay or book: in this sense, his or her library is not so much a collection of volumes on a shelf as an archive of palimpsests. Field notes are the preferred literary genre of anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists venturing beyond the walls of the ivory tower; art historians visit museums and ... -
I’ve just returned from comforting my best friend, Gesine. In the meantime I’m sure that she won’t kill herself. The storm has not been weathered. I saw how he trashed her, then slammed the apartment door behind him. He has the delicacy to continue living with her to avoid hotel costs. He leaves her apartment and goes about his business, visiting his new mistress, a married woman for whom Gesine has been demoted. I have to take care that my words of comfort (although I usually just gather her silently in my arms and put her to bed) don’t fuel her ... -
Group Material’s work was primarily topical and temporal, fueled by our personal and collective observations—and by the social urgencies we perceived. Our horizon was the present tense. In 1989, the curator of the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley University Art Museum, Larry Rinder, invited us to address the subject of AIDS after seeing our exhibition at Dia Art Foundation the year before, “AIDS & Democracy: A Case Study.” At the time, Group Material consisted of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Karen Ramspacher. By 1989, we had witnessed several years of the epidemic with severely inadequate public response.The accumulation of ... -
Consider a fictional multiple integral equation that is a flawed trope and a serious joke in an effort to picture what an intersectional—or intra-actional—theory might look like in Terrapolis. Think of this formalism as the mathematics of sf. Sf is that potent material semiotic sign for the riches of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, science fantasy—and, I suggest, string figures. In looping threads and relays of patterning, this sf practice is a model for worlding. Sf must also mean “so far,” opening up what is yet-to-come in protean time’s pasts, presents, and futures… -
Imagine living your life automatically; imagine that everything you do is like putting on your clothes—a combination of routine and basic thought that after many million repetitions now belongs to a realm located between reality and dream. Life is largely constituted of the continuous reperforming of single actions that share one trait in common: none of them is of true indifference to us, yet none really interests us. However, what is interesting is the weaving of these exercises of memory with potential invention— every morning we remember how to dress, how to make coffee, how to drink it from a ... -
For SEARCH, Matias Faldbakken went into the log of his different hard drives and extracted parts of his Google search histories. The search phrases are printed chronologically according to when they were typed into the search box. It is a straightforward concept with a revealing and a semi-absurd end product. The texts are to a large part based on image searches. In many respects they show the verbal foundation for the artist’s image production: they are partly his notes, partly his research. These search-word texts are at the same time almost like automatic writing; unconscious (or accidental) text production. They allow the ... -
A cute little weasel made of pale-blue snow is living in our fridge. It studied art history in the nineties and was a critic for a while. It feeds on veal and tender duck meat with sesame sauce and lemon marinade. It also appreciates sweet chestnuts, sashimi, and noodles and is blessed with a good appetite. We make it work for every meal so that it doesn’t wallow in ingratitude. At noon, the fridge door is opened, for, among other things, ventilation. Then the weasel must utter a new thought that it has concocted in the darkness. If the thought is round ... -
Has the human capacity for thinking and feeling been captured by the machine? This is an issue that Franco Berardi Bifo identifies when he says that we have been learning words from the machine, not the mother, leading to a situation where language and affectivity have been separated. Extending this to intellectual and social behavior, he calls this state of affairs a catastrophe of modern humanism, where we no longer have sufficient attention spans for love, tenderness, and compassion. His concern is that we are becoming more and more distanced from affect through the ways in which it is rendered, ... -
Édouard Glissant, who was born on Martinique in 1928 and died in Paris on February 3 of this year, was one of the most important writers and philosophers of our time. He called attention to means of global exchange that do not homogenize culture but produce a difference from which new things can emerge. He bears the intellectual significance for our time that Foucault and Deleuze bore for theirs. His poems, novels, plays, and theoretical essays are a “toolbox” I use every day in my praxis as an exhibition curator… -
The nineteenth-century fascination with scientific advances—especially those of science’s friendliest side, medicine, pursuant to the discovery of the miracle drug penicillin—intensified during the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the interest of the masses in literature and the humanities sunk like a grand ocean liner that had run into an iceberg of disappointment. More than by any novel, I myself—a person who does nothing but read and write—have been impressed by the research of Aubrey de Gray, a gerontologist at Cambridge with a picturesque beard, and of other sages who, like de Gray, predict that we will soon be able to put death ... -
On the Destruction of Art: or Conflict and Art, or Trauma and the Art of Healing dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsMy dear friend, Quite some time has passed since my last letter, and there are a few urgent matters that I would like to tell you about. One day, when I was writing the place-name “Kassel” on my smartphone, I made a mistake and the word was automatically corrected by the intelligent digital device to “Kabul.” This made me think of the conflicted relationship between the technologies of communication on the one hand, and intentionality and language on the other. In turn, that made me think about conflicts in general (that is, not just war), and then about the destruction of art ... -
Notes for the Breitenau Room of The Workhouse—a Project by Ines Schaber and Avery Gordon dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsThe visitors from the big cities remark on how beautiful it is. And it’s true that the Benedictines had a knack for choosing the finest locations for their monasteries, and this one too, sitting alongside the long River Fulda amid verdant meadow, its large stone buildings nestled in among the smaller village houses, farms, and woods, makes a good impression. Slowly Ines shakes her head. No, no, no. It’s not beautiful, she says, it’s claustrophobic. I understand. I’m prepared for a haunted ruin of an old prison… -
Artist Ida Applebroog uses a wide variety of media to express themes of struggles within gender and political roles, as well as sexual-identity issues. The publication Scripts is a facsimile of excerpts from one of her personal notebooks containing a compilation of handwritten notes, storyboards, mise-en-scène drawings, and musical notations. Underlining, as well as annotations in different colors, shows that the artist has intensively worked through her notes several times. Some of the fragments on these pages read: “Silences are the undercurrent of all dramatic events.” “Each performance should be more of silence than words.” “Any silence must be punctuated by sound ... -
Ana Prvacki: What does it mean to be “prepared” to greet? I am reminded of my grandmother and family in Romania preparing for guests in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It was an exhaustive effort. The house was cleaned, everything put in its rightful place, shiny and aired, the buffet elaborate and ornate (radishes were cut into little flowers, and parsley was laid out in patterns). And this was during the Ceaus‚escu era. There was barely enough food for the daily meals, but all the “good stuff” was brought out for guests, from meat and cocoa for cooking to ... -
In its seventeenth-century origins, the coffeehouse was quickly identified as an alternative to the court (and the tavern). It hosted polite speech, disputation, and the brokering of commerce, and its patrons belonged to the rising fractions of civil society: political dissenters, mercantile traders, and assorted writers; publishers, illustrators, and wits. Jürgen Habermas famously judged these establishments to be the cradle of what he called the “public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit), pushing its overcaffeinated snout into the affairs of state. Several incarnations later, the coffee shop has become the default work – place for a new generation of urban strivers, piloting their careers ... -
In form and content alike, Paris Arcades was to be Walter Benjamin’s most demanding project for a new method of gaining insight into history: a history in images reflecting the multilayered character of the past. Benjamin’s historical-philosophical approach was directed against the authority of dogmatic systems, taking the marginal, the peculiar, and the fault lines as its orientation. Benjamin outlines the importance of things, images, architectures, and experiences for historical insight using the figure of the ragpicker. The shadowy labyrinths and crowded merchandise backdrops of the Parisian arcades constituted for Benjamin the historically charged districts in which the metropolis was ... -
Human life can be described as a prolonged dialogue with the world. Man interrogates the world and is interrogated by the world. This dialogue is regulated by the way in which we define the legitimate questions that we may ad dress to the world or the world may address to us—and the way in which we can identify the relevant answers to these questions. If we believe that the world was created by God, we ask questions and wait for answers that are different from those that we ask if we believe that the world is an uncreated “empirical ... -
During the 1970s and ’80s, as a result of Anwar el-Sadat’s open-door policy‚ Egypt began to deteriorate on different levels. There was a complete reversal of previous president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s promotion of independence‚ social justice, and general development of the country. Under Sadat, the population was forced to adapt to a new reality. The norms and rules were stipulated by a small minority, itself on a path to disintegration. Everybody conspicuously consumed or dreamed of doing so. Productive labor and social solidarity were both rendered meaningless. Education and culture were devalued. Individuals resorted to immigration or crime, and the most ... -
Cairo, August 3, 2011 I lie in bed, my eyes wide-open in the darkness. The air is hot and heavy with humidity and dust. I try in the dimness to remember where I am. Sad memories emerging from the deep recesses of my mind inexplicably surface along with flashes of childish, mysterious joys. I fumble numbly for the lamp, but the electricity is cut off. Satellite communications were also shut down at one point, on the orders of his Excellency the Supreme President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak. This sacred military decision had been issued in secret. Fate was on his side; it helped ... -
This study was begun in Venice, the birthplace of tourism, and the souvenir made for the tourist trade. But we will not consider objects; that is another discussion. Only stuff—material. If I am treated badly by some airline staff I may want to write a letter of complaint. If I write this letter with a pen or pencil and my own hand, in script, a secretary will throw it away without anyone having read it. She will know that it was written by a crazy guy. If I use a typewriter the result will be the same because by now the ... -
It is a story known only too well by readers of Doctor Faustus, but not, perhaps, by other mortals. A gentlemen’s duel with the always-thorny issue of artistic plagiarism as its backdrop, played out by two giants in the history of literature and music, swords drawn: Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg. Their pride wounded, the pair argued, barely managing to contain their indignation and rage. It was as if they had emerged out of Joseph Conrad’s outstanding novel The Duel, in which two Hussar lieutenants in Napoleonic times struck up a protracted private contest, one that was to last their ... -
In the current social, environmental, and economic crisis, a search for alternative systems for every domain of life seems urgent. Many scientists and experts have formulated such alternatives, which now work as lighthouses for other projects that emulate them, joining in the collective effort for a more sustainable and equitable model of society. Among these systems are agroecological approaches such as permaculture—systems modeled on the structures found in nature and involving input from fields such as architecture, agriculture, and energy and waste management, in a holistic approach based on ecosystem dynamics and aiming for practical solutions for sustainable development. Professor George ... -
Among the lesser works of the ninth-century Iraqi writer Jāḥiẓ is an essay titled “The Guarding of the Secret and the Holding of the Tongue.” It teaches two skills seldom named in the enumeration of the arts of language: how not to speak at the wrong time and how not to lose a secret by divulging it.1 Al-Jāḥiẓ wastes no time recalling that all secrets can be disclosed, and that it is a good in itself, for those who hold them, that they remain concealed. He begins, instead, by commenting on the causes that may lead to unwanted revelations. It ... -
“Anthropocene”—the name for a geologic age of our own making—is a term that might yet prove decisive in crystallizing the stakes of climate change. What began as a theory (humans are a predominant force shaping nature) is now the defining feature of an era of the earth’s history. Popularized over the past decade by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, the term is gaining traction in mainstream media. Its identification is, after all, a news event: we’re living in a timeframe that is not the one we had previously thought. Technically, the geologic timescale remains to be formally ... -
He used to wake at about three in the morning and sing. Sing the lines over and over, until he remembered them, I guess. Paddy had put us two fellas together in the same camp out at Coconut Wells, in those early days, and Butcher Joe would get me to smuggle in a couple of cans of VB. We would smoke rollies and sip our warm beers in the tropical night, having a laugh. Then, well before dawn, that singing would half wake me. This was what was called his nurlu, coming through from his Aunty’s spirit. The pictures in this ... -
In his letter to Ada Augusta Lovelace of July 2, 1843, Charles Babbage writes: “I like much the improved form of the Bernoulli Note but can judge of it better when I have the Diagram and Notation.” He is referring to the last in a set of notes written by Lovelace that interpreted the Analytical Engine, the first fully automatic and universal computer, invented by Babbage in 1834, although never actually completed during his lifetime. She appended these notes to her translation of an article written by Luigi Federico Menabrea after he had heard Babbage present a paper on the ... -
Radical Dualism: A Meta-Fantasy on the Square Root of Dual Organizations dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsThe name of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died exactly two years ago to the day on which I write these notes (October 30, 2011), has become emblematically associated with what some call, disdainfully, “binary thought.” Structural anthropology would evidence a reactionary partiality for dual, symmetrical, static, and reversible oppositions, and for the analogies of proportionality that one can build with them, such as totemic systems. The French anthropologist would thus be a kind of champion of the binary system (or of the binary machine, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have said), conceiving it at the same time as the ... -
For his notebook, Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas has compiled excerpts and notations from his personal sketchbook, as well as associative photographs. Cruzvillegas playfully picks up notions of sense, sensibility, reason, and fantasy—the four basic terms of the “human mind and soul” on which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe built his chromatic circle of 1809—and combines them with handwritten thoughts about the structural and creative aspects of artistic production. This notebook is a colorful collage of ideas opposing the appropriation of art by capitalism, against which Cruzvillegas reacts with collective, living, and “definitely unfinished” social sculptures—involving people, animals, and things—that come to ... -
An organic notebook is as good a way as any to commit events and objects to memory. Fallen leaves, bark, twigs, and decaying branches are records of the past. Glistening water moves through grass-lined channels, emerging in bubbling rivulets that slow and subside over terraces, briefly creating a mirror of the sky that soon tarnishes as the earth drinks. The flow, measured by the shadows, is directed by the gardeners’ long-handled shovels. Imagine it as ink, while fallen leaves and twigs form words, and the earth provides pages around which enclosing mud walls form a robust binding. Like the worn cover ... -
It has often been noted that the collapse of the socialist system did not result in research activities that could be compared to postcolonial studies. As Ewa Thompson has observed, “Unlike Western colonies, which have increasingly talked back to their former masters, Russia’s colonies have by and large remained mute.” Instead, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, opinions have been expressed from within different research fields regarding the appropriateness of thinking of post-Soviet societies in terms of postcolonial studies. Nevertheless, asserting that postsocialism continues to remain a useful category for researchers, Caroline Humphrey notes the existence of a growing ... -
In recent decades, an increasing number of transnational art centers have brought to the surface significant art from areas of the world once considered remote. Such unprecedented access to artists, coupled with the sheer diversity of practices worldwide, has prompted art-historical reevaluations that are examining contemporary art from a much broader perspective, seeing it as an art that is of and for the world. Such reconsiderations are likely to inspire fresh methodologies for deciphering art history that would mark a shift away from the categorical summation of countries, regions, and movements to the study of individual artists, active in different parts ... -
I was asked about the seed but find myself dreaming of soil. Seeds are many things marvelous. Most of the seeds that yield food and flavors, medicine, and flowers have been cultivated for generations by millions of people. As a material form of collective knowledge, seeds constitute one of the longest-running open-source systems in history. Agricultural diversity is not simply spontaneous but is the product of centuries of attentive cultivation and unregulated exchange. Designed to travel, the seed is a powerfully compact and mobile medium and for this reason is easily fetishized for exchange on the market. The privatization of the ... -
The pyramids of Gaza, so a Forensic Architect once told me, proliferate throughout the Strip, but are most commonly seen in the camps and neighborhoods that ring Gaza City and along the short border to Egypt. They are the result, he said, of an encounter between two familiar elements in the area—a three-story residential building, of the kind that provides a home for refugees, and an armored Caterpillar D9 bull – dozer. While the bulldozer circles the building, its short shovel can reach and topple only the peripheral columns. The internal columns are left intact, forming the peak of the ... -
Even in my dotage, I have never failed to mark the day that I felt compelled to distance myself from my first mentor, Francis Galton. In his day, he was a hero to his public, an intellectual giant amongst his peers, and the person I then credited with whatever learnedness I had achieved. During my youth, I was completely enamored of the conviction that Europe was unrelentingly progressing toward ever-greater prosperity and perpetual peace. This irresistible amelioration was fueled by science, engineering, and enterprise. The entirety of the earth, from the soil, to the animals, to humanity itself, could be ... -
Profanity and the Financial Markets: A User’s Guide to Closing the Casino dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsI want to begin, not with a curse, but with a very beautiful convergence—one widely held to be real, but shrouded in mystery for millions of people. I am talking about the “movement of the squares” unfolding on both sides of the North/South divide. What is the hidden link be – tween the middle-class and precarious movements against the dictates of finance capital—Occupy Wall Street and the European Indignados— and the far more perilous struggles to end dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East? What relationship could possibly be sustained be – tween the regions that concentrate global wealth ... -
“Poetry puts language into a dream state, thereby reassuring itself of the impinging realities,” Durs Grünbein wrote in his seminal 2009 Frankfurt Poetry Lecture. When I first stumbled upon this somewhat cryptic statement, I took it to be more of a metaphor than something to be understood literally. Why the dream state was presumably key to reassuring ourselves of the “impinging realities” of our world, and why and in what sense poetry presumably translated language into an oneiric state, I didn’t even try fully to fathom (let alone grasp and articulate to myself), happily suffused with the line’s wafting aroma ... -
There are not many manifest reasons to think about Hegel and love together. First of all, Hegel is hardly lovable to most people; many readers do not want to take the time to sort out those sentences. Second, the language of love is usually understood to be a direct proclamation or a lyrical expression of some kind. Third, love has a relation to images and motions, to what we imagine time and again or, rather, to a form of imagining and moving that seems to take us up into its repetitions and elaborations. So the topic of love seems an ... -
1928: Monetary tightening in U.S. produces deflationary shock in European markets. 1929: Collapse of FAVAG, Germany’s second-largest insurance company, followed by a stock-market crash. 1931: Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest deposit bank, fails. Austria, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and all of Scandinavia leave the gold standard. 1933: Vast European unemployment. Europe divides into currency and trade blocs. Hitler installed as chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. First concentration camp installed and opened in Dachau. 1935: The share of military spending in German national income increases from 1 to 10 percent. 1936: The European economy shows signs of full recovery. “Modernity—it is hell,” wrote ... -
Here’s a puzzle about love. Love is an event that arrives from the outside and breaks time in two. It shatters the structures of the world you knew and creates a new world. In love, you lose yourself and gain a new being, a new body, remade. And yet if love were really an event in this sense, outside time, it would be unlivable. It is almost impossible even to breathe during such a tumultuous transformation. But love also has another, seemingly opposite, face. Love is a bond, the strongest bond that you can experience, which holds you in relation to ... -
The text we are presenting here, “The Suspension of Historical Time,” is drawn from the book Spartakus: Simbologia della rivolta, which Furio Jesi wrote between 1968 and 1969. Jesi was born into a partly Jewish family in Turin in 1941 and died in Genoa in 1980; despite this early demise, he was one of twentieth-century Italy’s most important and original thinkers and essayists. A true enfant prodige, he got his start as an Egyptologist when he was barely fifteen. In the early 1960s, he turned to the study of mythology and the science of myth, or rather, of how ancient ... -
I actually went to work in the mines in Carbonia to run away from a girl I had got back from prison camp on August 29 I had got back home from Germany I had a bit of a holiday at home I was really emaciated I was really down I stayed at home all the time I didn’t do anything I read some newspapers some books some stuff I found lying around I passed the time like that but then I needed money and I couldn’t find any work and so I went to sea I traveled around just ... -
In October 1999, I saw a drawing by Mark Lombardi in an exhibition called “Monumental Drawings” at Exit Art, New York. I was arrested by the clarity of his “hand-drawn,” and slightly academic, form of corporate chart. It also recalled a map illustrating the flight paths of a global airline. I had recently moved from Rome to join P.S.1 as senior curator, and I was having a difficult time with maps and physical orientation in and through the five boroughs of New York. P.S.1 had just merged with MoMA, and Alanna Heiss, Klaus Biesenbach, and I decided late one night to ... -
In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsIn the year 1974, the United States of America was in crisis. We had lost an ill-conceived and disastrously mismanaged war in Vietnam and were about to withdraw in defeat. Following the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil-producing states initiated an embargo on oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan, in retaliation for their support of Israel, and this triggered an energy crisis in most of the industrialized world. Economic growth in the U.S. slowed to near zero. In August of 1974, Richard Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign in disgrace, and his successor Gerald ... -
Huynh Phuong Dong, Nguyen Thu, Quang Tho, Le Lam, Vu Giang Huong, Duong Anh, Truong Hieu dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsCarolyn Christov-Bakargiev Why did you begin collecting these watercolors, gouaches, and ink-on-paper drawings by Vietcong artists? Dinh Q. Lê I had seen some in the museum here in Ho Chi Minh City [Saigon]. I always admired the draftsmanship and skill that they demonstrate. But I also find it fascinating that they represent these idyllic landscapes. Even when portraying people, there is no violence in them. In late 2005, Catherine de Zegher organized an exhibition on the Vietnam War at the Drawing Center [“Persistent Vestiges”] that I was invited to participate in. She decided to include a group of these drawings. So ... -
The text that follows was a lecture given by Alanna Heiss during a conference that took place April 26–29, 1978, at LAICA, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, housed on 2020 South Robertson Boulevard. Heiss’ text was published in a book titled The New Arts Space: A Summary of Alternative Visual Arts Organizations Prepared in Conjunction with a Conference. It focused on “curatorial” practice (this may be one of the first texts to use that adjectivized noun so common today), at a time when curating was not constituted as a parallel and at times even competitive practice to artistic ... -
Art cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that we know in advance. Art is thinking but is not theory. The world’s reality resides in art, and it is inseparable from art’s investigative procedure, which seeks to expose how the forces, the different compounds of elements—material and conceptual—interact in order to produce a certain effect. I. The Realm of the Public The nineteenth-century invention of the constitutional State was an attempt to link the public sphere to an idea of law. It guarantees its citizens certain basic rights—something that amounts to establishing the public sphere by way of identifying the ... -
It was a joyful moment when I rediscovered my old notebooks. I would not have searched for them without the dOCUMENTA (13) notebook publishing project. When reading these old notes now, I am surprised how many ideas they already contain and how they developed, building unconsciously one on the other. I had no memory of the level of detail in which some of these ideas had already been analyzed in the early notebooks. The books I found cover a three-year period beginning in late 1992. In my scientific life, this was a crucial time. It was the time when key steps ... -
There were irregularly distributed and mostly small dark patches that stood out, small flat shadows, bits of shadows, that drew together as one approached and then shrank or broke up into discrete black splinters and vanished in the matte gray light that had spread out over the surface of the street. Larger areas sometimes appeared, black, hand size, recessed or angular at the edges, jagged and sharp, troughs and holes that fell away as one looked and that were followed by new, differently shaped patches. Farther ahead they flowed into one another, blurring into one dull black area resembling a ... -
One former student told the other former student to go away, out there, in the snow, at night. Go away, he said to the other. If she sees us both, she will label us both former students, forgetting that I am I and you are you. He was the older former student. He had fought in a war. He had not re-enlisted because he wanted to do something else with his life. He was deaf in one ear. The other former student was young, but he had been to Europe. It was true that as she looked out the window at them walking back ... -
As in one of those sentences that starts with a new subject and is followed by composing two parts that are familiar (“Kiwi: strawberry meets gooseberry,” for example), we may be in search of some new character here. Not necessarily entirely composed of existing parts, though. Roosevelt calls. “President Roosevelt?!?” Carolyn jumps up. “Of course, President Roosevelt if you’re Sally Rand!” Dixie pipes up. The phone is blue. The same one that Dixie fell on a floor with in 1962 when Marilyn died. “I fell with a blue phone. When I woke up, people were applauding me.” This is a scene ... -
From the “Hypnotic Shows” organized by Raimundas Malašauskas to Matt Mullican’s performances, from Joris Lacoste’s Vrai spectacle (True Spectacle) to the acoustic odysseys of Loris Gréaud, hypnotic induction is now being unabashedly used in a wide variety of works with diverse ambitions (performance, creativity and the unconscious, authority and subjugation, hallucination and delegation, role-playing games and simulation, etc.). Far from unprecedented, this hypnotic paradigm of art is actually heir to a long tradition that accompanies the entire history of modernity, a history not just of forms but of manipulations of the mind and systems of influence (empathy, attraction, stupefaction, etc.) ... -
The German inventor Christian Kuhtz is convinced that a good conscience is nothing that can be bought, but something that has to be achieved through intellectual and bodily labor and a fond reflection of the industrial conditions of production. His notebook is a plea for the “do-it-yourself adventure” and for an ecological awareness beyond the capitalist logic of consumption, waste, and so-called eco-technique. The featured illustrations and explanations are taken from his innovative series of booklets “Einfälle statt Abfälle” and provide ideas for a self-sufficient existence. From compost toilets, wind turbines, pottery workshops, and sun collectors to handmade shoes, over ... -
Art would be like a dream, one of those “harmless psychoses” that Freud talks about in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: The harmless dream-psychosis is the result of a withdrawal from the external world which is consciously willed and only temporary, and it disappears when relations to the external world are resumed. During the isolation of the sleeping individual an alteration in the distribution of his psychical energy also sets in; a part of the expenditure on repression, which is normally required in order to hold the unconscious down, can be saved, for if the unconscious makes use of its ... -
This is a preliminary report on a seminar that I taught with my colleague Françoise Meltzer in the winter term of 2011. We explored a series of films that comprise a kind of short history of a strange genre that occupies the uncanny realm between horror and film noir, between the spectacle of violent, raging lunacy and the quieter scenes of detective work into the etiology of madness, or its confinement and isolation in clinical and disciplinary settings. We wanted to ask a double question about movies and madness. First, what does cinema reveal about insanity that was not available prior ... -
For this artist book, the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong had an untranslatable sentence about the act of doing nothing translated into English by various people, companies, a translation office, and Google Translate. The Chinese characters are identical on each paper, but each translation varies a great deal. The sentence and its interpretations circle around notions of doing something, doing nothing, wasting and not wasting, each containing an individual perspective on the value of human activity. With each letterhead, color, and signature, the connotation of the line shifts, and Song Dong’s own handwritten decryption oscillates between doing nothing and common ... -
In recent years I have been linked with a philosophical movement called speculative realism. But my own variant of speculative realism, known as object-oriented philosophy, actually dates to the late 1990s. The principles of object-oriented philosophy can be summarized in a few sentences. First, philosophy must deal with every type of object rather than reducing all objects to one privileged type: zebras, leprechauns, and armies are just as worthy of philosophical discussion as atoms and brains. Second, objects are deeper than their appearance to the human mind but also deeper than their relations to one another, so that all contact ... -
—What should I do? We anticipated atrocities, mayhem, chaos. All there was, was a strange stillness lingering over violence from the night before. It doesn’t matter where or when this was. There were, there are, many nights. The calmness was sincere, not eerie as one might imagine. Blood shed in peace, startles. It felt welcoming, enough to want to be there, amid anyone. We walked among people, tents, clusters of conversations, we gave out newspapers, shared news and oranges we had bought. Nine floors up, in a balcony, overlooking freedom, journalists propped their cameras for an uninterrupted airing of a live ... -
A recent novel by the English writer A. S. Byatt features a runaway boy who escapes the brutal conditions of an 1890s pottery factory in the English Midlands, to find refuge in the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). At night he sleeps in the storerooms and by day feeds himself from leftovers in the café. The museum gives him shelter and twenty-four-hour access to Asian, Middle Eastern, and European ceramics. By contrast with industrially produced pottery, the exquisite vases and figurines he studies are made by individual craftsmen. They inspire him to create something himself. This idea of the museum ... -
How is it, given the huge popularity enjoyed by museums and exhibitions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, that the Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) (of all people) can speak of the “obsolescence of the exhibition”? Recent decades have seen an unprecedented increase in the building of museums and the founding of biennials—institutions that enjoy high visitor counts and attract no less attention in the media and in art discourse. How can this success be explained? And are there, nonetheless, grounds for viewing it as a sign of the exhibition’s growing obsolescence? Historically speaking, the success story of the ... -
Ecce occupy: Fragments from conversations between free persons and captive persons concerning the crisis of everything everywhere, the need for great fictions without proper names, the premise of the commons, the exploitation of our everyday communism... dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsNotebook 089 is a result of the immense changes that have taken place in the world since 1989. With the end of the Cold War, the utopian neoliberal fantasy of a global capitalist expansion, unfettered by the limits of any borders (psychic, physical, ethical, national, or ecological) and governed through an extension of credit/debt coupled with correlated “structural adjustments,” assumed a new function for nation-states around the world, as a privatizer of gains, and a socializer of costs. In a span of twenty years the insolvency of this paradigm has become evident; not only has an entire world been gripped ... -
In his contribution, philosopher Éric Alliez visually translates his planned book on diagrammatic thought and its implications for the field of contemporary art to the design of the notebook and its text. It is his response to the format of this German-English publication series, for which usually texts of 3000 words were commissioned. His contribution consists of three parts: in the first two originally French parts, only some of the words are legible in their English translation (or in original German), while the rest of the original can be deciphered from underneath the grey bars that cover it, so that ... -
How to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism: Notes on African/Black Marxism dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsWhen approached about the idea of contributing to dOCUMENTA (13)’s notebook series, I proposed to its Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the idea of focusing on African Marxism. I thought it would be interesting as a way of liberating Marx from his Eurocentrism. I also thought it would be relevant to dOCUMENTA (13) because it revisits the exhibition’s founding years, which coincided with decolonization in Africa and other parts of the Third World, and with corollary landmark events that shifted world politics and created a new international order. Among these events was the 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia, where non-aligned and newly ... -
What is printed in this notebook is film material, if not in the physical sense of celluloid, chemicals, video cassettes. For me, film material is everything that accumulates during a film project and accompanies it. That includes rejects or what was merely thought of and remained notes. Many things shape a film, not just the script but also the working environment and production processes, self-censorship and prohibitions. Certain of one’s aims remain unfulfilled, falling victim to constraints, or only in post production is the right tone found. The script is the working template for director, cameraman, and actors during shooting. Why was ... -
There are two short works that date back to the late 1960s that should be reread and approached today. The extreme encounter that I would like to address as an artist is that between Clement Greenberg, the most famous American art critic, and Mario Tronti, the most radical Italian political philosopher. I thus put two works together on my table: “Recentness of Sculpture” by Greenberg, from the 1967 American Sculpture of the Sixties catalog (with its original silver cover), and “Lotta contro il lavoro!” by Mario Tronti, from his famous book Operai e capitale, published in Turin in 1966. I believe ... -
In this text I will try to understand some of the intentions of dOCUMENTA (13) according to my particular point of view, which is based on the belief that the current agony of capitalism will be a deadly trap for human evolution unless we adapt our culture and lifestyle to exhaustion, the dominant trend of our time. I will also try to understand how some of the works presented and assembled by dOCUMENTA (13) express propositions for emancipation and autonomy through withdrawal, exodus, and a proliferation of morphogenetic processes of recombination. I am writing and acting in Europe, where the modern ... -
Issa Samb is a Senegalese sculptor, painter, actor, philosopher, performance artist, writer, and critic. For decades, he has been creating a galaxy of interconnected universes in which the signs of everyday life are transformed into altars to personal obsessions. One of those obsessions is politics and politicians, in particular Senegalese politicians, whom he has frequently described as mindless people. In keeping with his readings of Marxist philosophy and aesthetics, many of his sculptural assemblages take the paradigm of revolutionaries—Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Lech Wałęsa, the Black Panthers—as their subject matter, suggesting the possibility of harnessing the energy of ... -
Witch-Hunting, Past and Present, and the Fear of the Power of Women dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsShe stands alone in the twilight, in an empty space, holding in her hands a skein of blue yarn that weaves around her to embrace a cluster of homes, which, because of this, appear almost as a continuation of her body. Trazando el camino (1990) is among the many paintings that Rodolfo Morales, one of Mexico’s best twentieth-century artists, has dedicated to the theme of the female body as the material and social fabric holding the community together. Morales’ painting is a counterpoint to the image of the witch: with her quiet look and embroidered apron, the woman it represents ... -
Rex Exsomnis: Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsSymptom of the Present. Today, biology and the medical sciences are highly advanced in determining the physiology and neurology of sleep, and the emerging medicalization of sleep disorders has be- come a new site of “biocapital” accumulation. At the same time, our “twenty-four-hour society,” with its incessant production, communication, and consumption activities, makes sleep a problematic, uncertain element of everyday life, even perceived as a waste of time or as inertia in a mobile and pragmatic neoliberal social order obsessed by the idea of full employment of finite human existence.The anxiety around sleep (evidenced in the booming scientific research in ... -
We rarely see Melanie Klein at work, at least not quite like this. It is as if we are looking over her shoulder as the contours of her theorization trace themselves across the page. When we think of Klein, the first image that comes to mind is not that of hesitancy. She had a supreme confidence, famously in her clinical interpretations, even if some of us have always suspected that such confidence was the other side of—her way of managing— the deep mental trouble and energies that she saw it as her task to excavate. More perhaps than any other ... -
What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsNothingness. The void. An absence of matter. The blank page. Utter silence. No thing, no thought, no awareness. Complete ontological insensibility. Shall we utter some words about nothingness? What is there to say? How to begin? How can anything be said about nothing without violating its very nature, perhaps even its conditions of possibility? Isn’t any utterance about nothingness always already a performative breach of that which one means to address? Have we not already said too much simply in pronouncing its name? Perhaps we should let the emptiness speak for itself. At the very least, listening to nothing would seem to require ... -
Recent writings about art have tended to focus on the intention of artists and the effect their artworks have on viewers, as well as the social consequences of these effects. Often, these writings do not speak about the artworks themselves, but about curatorial positions in art today, constituting a meta-artistic discourse. A question, then, might be how to reconnect with the visual, structural, and phenomenological analyses of the twentieth century without sacrificing the political and social dimensions of recent art theory. After more than a decade of these discourses, mainly dedicated to curatorial practices or to broader cultural studies and postcolonial ... -
dOCUMENTA (13): An Art Exhibition in Kassel ... and in Kabul 20/06 –19/07/2012 dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 ThoughtsThis publication introduces the exhibition documenta (13) in Kabul as well as documents the preliminary seminars that were held between 2010 and 2012. The four main positions around which dOCUMENTA (13) is articulated—Siege, Hope, Retreat, and Stage—correspond to four possible conditions in which artists and thinkers find themselves acting in the present. These positions are not comprehensive and acquire their significance through their mutual interrelation and resonance. Kabul and Bamiyan together constitute a crossroad of these conditions. Here, simultaneously with the state of hope, artists frequently experience the condition of being under siege, as well as that of withdrawal and ... -
There is no such thing as voice in literature. That is, we assign chimerical properties to characters’ voices; fictions based on voices we have heard in relation to the description of the characters’ personalities; identities we want to confer on the characters. Whilst we read and listen to this voice, it is neither true nor false. It is the product of a careful assembly of traces and features we believe represent a person – more physically even than their own body. ‘Chimerization’ is a term Florian Hecker uses to allude to another complex operation: the artificial attribution of the properties of ... -
Dear David I have been re-reading our letters. And what an interesting discussion we had this week, about the writing that one does for a singular reader; the ‘one other’ with whom one is thinking. So there has been much dialogue about representation; about performance, and sentiment and sincerity, each thinking to the self through thinking with a companion. And our question returns, often enough, to this: what limits are placed on thought, in the moment that it aspires to be understood from outside itself? This is not a lover’s discourse; it is though interested, and it is interested in the lover’s discourse. Our ... -
People sometimes get irritated if you ask them the same question again, especially if it happens in the same conversation. Yet sometimes they provide different answers immediately, or let’s say two minutes after the first (think of the Oracle in The Matrix, or Bill Clinton during his trial). However, when there are forty years in between two identical questions, there’s a big chance of getting the same answer. This does not a priori mean that nothing has changed or that things have remained the same. The same answer could mirror a totally different fold of an arrival from the previous ... -
Sahar Muradi and Zohra Saed are two Afghan American poets. This is a lyrical conversation between Sahar who returned to retrace footsteps in Afghanistan and Zohra who remained ensconced in longing for mythic cities of her birth.
