100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken / 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, presentation of dOCUMENTA (13) notebooks at Artists Space, New York, May 10, 2011, 7 pm
100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. Now available: The first 17 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions. www.documenta.de
A notebook is a venture.
It is pure speculation: can one effectively transform thinking while thinking at the same time? The notebooks show us the hand trying to trace other logics, trying to travel a bit further away from the already known in order to cover a distance between the now and the near future.
The first 17 notebooks will be discussed at Artists Space, 38 Greene St in New York, on May 10, 2011, from 7 to 9 pm, with some of the New York-based authors, including Susan Buck-Morss, Kenneth Goldsmith, Paul Ryan, and Michael Taussig. This is the second public presentation of dOCUMENTA (13)'s 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series, following a premiere in Cairo, Egypt, on April 21, 2011. The evening will be moderated by Bettina Funcke, Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13) and Chus Martínez, Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group. Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev will take part in the discussion. www.artistsspace.org
In Cairo we said: “A notebook is a rehearsal space. It allows the words, the lines, the drawings to be there before being actually there for anybody else than one’s self. Thinking is not yet there, writing is not yet there, method is not yet there and, slowly, all of them fall into place. The notebook is a receiver, since it is used quickly to capture our thoughts as well as the thoughts of others, and images, too.”
And now in New York we add: “The whole series is an exercise in choreography, it creates a movement between sense and understanding. To be visible a movement requires a dramatization, and that is why these image-texts do not explain, presenting us instead with affect, reality, time, matter, text, thought, space, and doubt: we apprehend a “situation”. It is a new situation that involves the current status of text and art, but also that of readership; of thought, but also that of the limits of critical thinking; of life, but also the precarious condition of the personal and the political; of image, but also of its potential for retreat; and of singularities who decide to share their life-in-the-form-of-notes.
The presentation at Artists Space will take its cue from all these questions: the status of the text, the interplay between raw material and finished work, between spontaneous gesture and the production of culture, between the unregulated world and regulated, normative systems. The notebooks address the existence of a third space that appears between the polarity of the creative and the constrained, a space that defies the commonsensical logic of the double versus the idealistic – possibly even the natural laws of markets versus a practice that can remain in a permanent state of surplus.”
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 studies, and poetry –and include Etel Adnan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Péter György, Emily Jacir, Susan Buck-Morss, Alejandro Jodorowsky, William Kentridge, Peter L. Galison, Erkki Kurenniemi, Lars Bang Larsen, György Lukács, Christoph Menke, Paul Ryan, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Vandana Shiva, G. M. Tamás, Michael Taussig, Jalal Toufic, Ian Wallace, and Lawrence Weiner.
Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13)’s 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 will be 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 buy individual notebooks or subscribe to the entire series of 100 notebooks at www.hatjecantz.de/documenta13. For further information about dOCUMENTA (13), including the publications, visit www.documenta.de.
