Documenta X, the Book: Politics Poetics (1997)

“For the first time in the history of documenta, the companion publication attempts to go beyond a survey and interpretation of the exhibited works of art to document and analyze the cultural development of the western world from 1945 to 1997 in a rich selection of paintings, photos, plans, sketches, maps, essays, quotations, discussions, poems, philosophical essays and manifestos. The book unites the diverse forms of expression in an impressive collage. The artists of documenta X are introduced in a number of artist’s inserts. A provocative, enlivening and thoroughly current reader and reference work for anyone interested in the art and culture of our times.

Since 1955, the documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, has served as the world’s most important forum for contemporary art. This year’s series of interlocking exhibitions, conferences, performances, lectures, and – notably – publications will be the tenth documenta and the last of this century. Organized by the respected French curator Catherine David, documenta X is conceived as a manifestation culturelle including a program entitled “100 Days – 100 Guests” that will host an exceptional group of international figures. Acknowledging both the significance of its position at the end of the century and the dramatic aesthetic, technological, and political challenges facing culture in the future, Catherine David has carefully structured the programming for documenta X around two themes: first, a critical reflection on the development of culture since 1945, and, second, an interdisciplinary dialogue about the need for new categories of critical and political discourse. The question where culture stands today in the world serves as the focal intersection of these two organizing themes. Each previous documenta has had a profound impact on the art world: documenta X promises to serve as a genuinely international forum for artists, writers, and thinkers from all disciplines.

Conversations with: Benjamin Buchloh, New York; Andreas Branzi, Milan; Etienne Balibar, Paris; Jacques Rancière, Paris; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, New York Original contributions by: Peter Bürger, Bremen; Daniel Defert, Paris; Fabrizio Gallanti, Genoa; Serge Gruzinski, Paris; David Harvey, Baltimore; Masao Miyoshi, San Diego; Peter Noller and Klaus Ronneburger, Frankfurt; Hans-Joachim Ruckhaeberle, Berlin; Saskia Sassen, New York; Paul Sztulman, Paris, and others.”

Edited by documenta and Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs
Idea and conception by Catherine David and Jean-François Chevrier
Publisher Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997
ISBN 3893229116, 9783893229116
830 pages
via Arch

Exh. reviews: Monica Amor (Third Text, 1997), Nancy Princenthal (Art/Text, 1997), Masao Miyoshi (New Left Review, 1998), Sabine Fabo (Leonardo, 1998), Kathryn Hixson (New Art Examiner, 1997), more.
Commentary: Universes in Universe (n.d.)

Exhibition website (archived by Vuk Cosic)
Exhibition archive
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (74 MB)

TkH, 23: The Commons / Undercommons in Art, Education, Work … (2016)

“The fifteen pieces in this issue are the result of a somewhat peculiar endeavor. Between May 29 and June 1, 2014, we held a conference at Frankfurt Lab under the title of The Public Commons and the Undercommons of Art, Education, and Labour. Its title reflected our concerns about diagnosing the current predicament of higher education in the arts and humanities, artistic production, and cultural work. To summarize briefly, two turns have lately merged that characterize the transformation of work, knowledge, and subjectivation processes across the arts field and the Academy: the educational and the curatorial turn. While the educational turn has yielded a new academic (professional) valorization of artistic praxis (in the so-called creative or practice-based PhDs), coupled with a proliferation of degrees and a prolongation of financialized, debt-stricken study (also as a temporary deferral or relief from the market and its projective temporality), the curatorial turn has corresponded to a neoliberal style of managing both art and education, reducing time and attention, critical and transformative (poetic) engagements with one’s own art and study.” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Harutyun Alpetyan, Gigi Argiropoulou, Stefano Harney, Gal Kirn, Boyan Manchev, Randy Martin, Fred Moten, Isabel de Naverán, Norbert Pape, Nina Power, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Jason Read, Jan Ritsema, Ana Vujanović, and Josefine Wikström.

Edited by Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Kunst, and Stefan Hölscher
Publisher TkH (Walking Theory), Belgrade, and Institute for Applied Theatre Science, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, April 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Serbia License
ISSN 1451-0707
72 pages

Publisher

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A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN (2018)

“‘Everyone contains a history of contamination; purity is not an option.’

In the event of disaster, we, the people who have always been surviving, will simply continue to survive. We have learned skills you wouldn’t believe, enduring under police states. We refine trauma into gold and use exile as jet propellant.

Yet we lack a vision of our lives past survival. What will we do when we head “back to the land” that was never ours? We do not see ourselves in the paranoiac manuals of preppers, in minimalist lifestyle retreats, in the nativist isolationism of militiamen.

We do not want to repeat these dreams of being the center, forever tyrants over little kingdoms. In this beyond, we will contaminate one another. We first learn from the past, building lookouts to keep our homes from burning.

We then seek an unruly communion. New languages, icons, guides, rituals, spun and fired beneath a twilight canopy of fungi. We claim a gorgeous, baroque maximalism, a future that sounds, looks, and feels like our innermost thoughts.”

Made by American Artist, Caitlin Cherry, Nora N. Khan and Sondra Perry
Published in New York, October 2018
[24] pages

Exh. reviews: Alex A. Jones (The Brooklyn Rail, 2018), Che Gosseett (The Brooklyn Rail, 2018).

Exhibition
Author
Author

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