100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken / 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, lecture and presentation of dOCUMENTA (13) notebooks at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), September 28, 2011, 7 pm

Notes have a paradoxical character: they are neither significant, nor absurd. We tend to endow the world with meaning (or meaninglessness) in order to find some control over it. Traditionally, theory looks at the world but the world does not look back. Can one imagine a new language that would register our being observed by the whole realm of the non-human, a form of translation or a form of “speaking with” the other animate and inanimate makers of the world?

 

Notes are capable of registering this turn – they are advocates of a form of fiction that is modest and less anthropocentric. Fictional, because nothing is more fantastic than the precision of translation. A note expresses nothing but itself and in doing so occupies the totality of the mind. The necessity of notes has nothing to do with their utility. Notes have nothing to say, but they constitute a way of speaking.

 

Introduced by Marta Kuzma, Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and dOCUMENTA (13) Member of Core Agent Group, and Pablo Lafuente, Associate Curator at OCA, Chus Martínez, Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group for dOCUMENTA (13), will present the series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts on September 28, 2011, at 7 pm. This is the sixth public presentation of dOCUMENTA (13) notebooks, following a premiere in Cairo and launches in New York, Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki, and Paris.

 

On this occasion, Christoph Menke, Professor for Practical Philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and author of Aesthetics of Equality, the 10th notebook in the dOCUMENTA (13) series, will give a lecture entitled “What is Aesthetic Freedom Today?”

 

This lecture is organized in the framework of the OCA Semesterplan, OCA's public program of talks, lectures, seminars and symposia presented by artists, curators and critics participating in OCA's ISP and IVP Programmes.

 

In The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (1999), Menke writes that the aesthetic experience becomes apparent when intensified meaning is defined – as an experience of meaning that gives representation to the truth about non-aesthetic understanding.

 

In this lecture, Menke will specifically approach the transformation of aesthetic taste within the development of late capitalism in an effort to address the possibility for the aesthetic freedom of taste to regain a critical potential. Menke will try to deconstruct the question of how the arts can be thought of as a point of departure for defining and regaining a practice of freedom – a freedom that stands in critical contrast to the freedom of contemporary consumer capitalism.

 

In cooperation with Goethe Institute in Oslo. www.oca.no

The notebooks appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and range from 16 to 48 pages in length. Contributors hail from diverse fields – art, science, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature, and poetry. The second round of notebook authors include Arjun Appadurai and Nalini Malani, Doug Ashford and Julie Ault, Mario Bellatin, Bifo – Franco Berardi, Mariana Castillo Deball and Roy Wagner, Dario Gamboni and Paul Gauguin, Mariam and Ashraf Ghani, Donna Haraway, Alexander Kluge, Pamela M. Lee and Meyer Shapiro, Romaine Moreton, Nikos Papastergiadis and Cornelius Castoriadis, Griselda Pollock and Charlotte Salomon, Suely Rolnik, Annemarie Sauzeau, and Mario Garcia Torres.

 

Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13) Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group, Chus Martínez, this series is edited by Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke. The 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series is being launched at various places and in various moments, each accompanied by a discussion on the nature and the aim of this publishing project. You can acquire individual notebooks or subscribe to the entire series of 100 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions at www.hatjecantz.de/documenta13.