Sometime 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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, ...

“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 ...

On 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...