100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. New publications: notebooks nos. 18 to 33

018: Mario Bellatin
The Hundred Thousand Books of Bellatin

Mario Bellatin’s oeuvre is characterized by an experimental and fragmented mode of narration that artfully links reality and fiction. In his text, the author, claiming he wishes to be surrounded by his books at all times, devises the project The Hundred Thousand Books of Bellatin: one hundred books written by himself, each of which is to be printed in an edition of one thousand. The hundred themes of this enterprise include such diverse topics as the importance of a certain dog without a hind leg in the life of Mario Bellatin, the donation of a Hewlett-Packard camera to one hundred artists around the world, and the abandonment of a Doberman puppy called Jesús. What appears at first to be an unstructured list gradually takes shape as a peculiar narration of its own.

Mario Bellatin (*1960) is an author living in Mexico City and a member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of dOCUMENTA (13). 

English/German
28 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2867-6

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3047-1

019: Dario Gamboni
The Listening Eye: Taking Notes after Gauguin

In this notebook, Dario Gamboni embarks on the trail of the notoriously restless European 19th-century artist Paul Gauguin. During the “period of incubation” that the artist customarily underwent after arriving in a new environment, such as Brittany, New Zealand, or Tahiti, he drew in order to familiarize himself with the place. Gamboni followed Gauguin’s traces, capturing his own observations in photographs, drawings, and notes. The resulting comparisons, elaborated in extensive captions, bear witness to the intensive approach made by the author toward Gauguin’s way of working and thinking. In his introduction, Gamboni delves into processes of perception and cognition, employing various techniques—among them the note-taking after Gauguin’s notes—that he applies in his own practice, techniques that lead him to a form of imitative agency, witnessing witness.

Dario Gamboni (*1954) is Professor of Art History at the University of Geneva.

English/German
36 pp., 23 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2868-3

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3048-8

020: Romaine Moreton
Poems from a Homeland

Romaine Moreton is an Australian writer, filmmaker, and performance poet, and is of the Goernpil and the Bundjalung  people. She lives in Katoomba, New South Wales, and is one of the most experimental contemporary poets writing today in the English language. As an Indigenous writer today, her political and poetic writing expresses linguistic focus and outrage, and her readers are both confronted and challenged by her poems. Commenting her new poems in this notebook, Moreton states, “The things I have to say and how I say them are a direct response to the environment in which I have grown up and continue to live in. To create works that do not deal with the morbid and mortal affects of racism for one, and the beauty of Indigenous culture for another, would be for me personally, to produce works that are farcical.”

English/German
44 pp., 1 ill.,
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2869-0

E-Book
c. € 3,99 [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3049-5

021: Cornelius Castoriadis
Introduction: Nikos Papastergiadis

Three important, closely linked concepts stand at the center of the thought of philosopher, economist, social critic, political thinker, and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997): the imaginary, creation, and autonomy. They refer to the wide spectrum of meanings through which a society develops symbolic forms and institutional structures in order to express its identity. The radical left-wing group Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded by Castoriadis in 1948 together with Claude Lefort, influenced numerous labor movements throughout Europe. For his notes on topics in philosophy, economic science, politics, mathematics, and psychoanalysis, selected by cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis, excerpts of which are reproduced here, Castoriadis never used a notebook, but rather any material within his reach, whether the backs of ration cards or the empty lines in a conference program.

With an introduction by Nikos Papastergiadis (*1962), Professor of Cultural Studies and Media & Communications at the University of Melbourne.

English/German
48 pp., 36 ill.,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2870-6

E-Book
c. € 7,99 [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3050-1

022: Suely Rolnik
Archive Mania

In recent decades, the art world’s interest in archives has increased steadily, developing into a true “compulsion to archive.” In her text, Suely Rolnik describes the root of this tendency in Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, and focusing on the countries of Latin America that were under military dictatorships. She sees one explanation for this in “unconscious colonial repression,” which, like the dictatorial regimes in these countries, left behind a far-reaching trauma and led to a split between the poetic and the political, widened through the misunderstandings of “official” art history, which interprets the artistic practices that are found there in terms of a “political” or “ideological” Conceptual art. Against this background erupts the will to turn toward the archives anew and reactivate the fusion of poetic and political forces.

Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, curator, and cultural theorist based in Brazil.             

English/German
36 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2871-3

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3051-8

023: Nalini Malani & Arjun Appadurai
The Morality of Refusal

In his essay, Arjun Appadurai reflects on the significance of Gandhi’s ideas on non-violence as a form of political action in India, pursuing the thesis that Gandhi’s thought and practices exhibit a double genealogy. While one genealogy is related to Indian notions of asceticism, avoidance, and abstinence, the second is influenced by kingship, sacrifice, and martial prowess and has no regard for the injury of living beings. According to Indian traditions of warrior asceticism, both genealogies intermingle, which constitutes a vital resource for a politics of militant religiousness in India today. Nalini Malani responds to this essay with drawings that sometimes overlay the text, sometimes accompany it, sensually reflecting Appadurai’s elaborations.

Nalini Malani (*1946) is an artist living in Bombay.

Arjun Appadurai (*1949) is an anthropologist and Goddard Professor for Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.   

English/German
48 pp., 23 ill.,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2872-0

E-Book
c. € 7,99 [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3052-5

024: Mariana Castillo Deball & Roy Wagner
Coyote Anthropology: A Conversation in Words and Drawings

According to Roy Wagner’s anthropological approach, the unspoken, the unheard, and the unknown are just as important as what is there. The absences, described by Wagner as “anti-twins,” are essential to the formation of culture and the study thereof. In this notebook, Mariana Castillo Deball creates a two-level communication with the re-printing of a text excerpted from Wagner’s writings. On one level, the conversation unfolds between Wagner and his anti-twin Coyote, who expresses what is absent while also countering Wagner’s statements. On the other, the artist’s filigree drawings—of fantasy figures and objects, closely related to Mexican folklore, and especially produced for this notebook—accompany and comment on Wagner’s text.

Mariana Castillo Deball (*1975) is an artist living in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Roy Wagner (*1938) is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia.

English/German
24 pp., numerous ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2873-7

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3053-2

025: Annemarie Sauzeau
Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel

“As I see it, creativity includes things like opening a hotel in Kabul,” explained Alighiero Boetti, and he went on to realize this plan in 1971 on his second stay in Afghanistan, during which he opened the One Hotel with his friend Gholam Dastaghir. The hotel remained open for six years. Annemarie Sauzeau was married to the Italian artist for more than twenty years, and in her personal reminiscence, she recounts Boetti’s time in Kabul, where she occasionally accompanied him. How was it possible to open a hotel in Afghanistan? Who were the hotel guests? What happened on a typical day in the hotel? She also describes the close relationship Boetti had with this country, where he spent at least four weeks twice a year, and which assumed a significant role in his oeuvre.

Annemarie Sauzeau is an art critic and writer and currently Director of the Archivio Alighiero Boetti in Rome. 

English/German
24 pp., 9 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2874-4

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3054-9

026: Mario Garcia Torres
A Few Questions Regarding the Hesitance at Choosing between Bringing a Bottle of Wine or a Bouquet of Flowers

In his notebook, Mario Garcia Torres invites the reader to share in his thoughts on the relation between being a guest and being a host. What kind of reactions are provoked when one gets an invitation? How does one act within a given context, and how can this context be escaped? How can the functions of guest and host be interchanged? Garcia Torres centers his essay on these questions, employing examples provided by other artists who have explicitly put themselves in one of these two roles: as hosts, Alighieri Boetti with his One Hotel in Kabul and Allen Ruppersberg with Al’s Grand Hotel in Los Angeles; as guests, Daniel Buren in the Virgin Islands, where he installed in situ works, residing on Saint Croix in a resort that was destroyed in 1989 by a hurricane, and Martin Kippenberger, who lived in the Hotel Chelsea in Cologne. We are Garcia Torres’s guests and must decide what to bring along: a bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers.

Mario Garcia Torres (*1975) is an artist living in Mexico City.  

English/German
28 pp., 7 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2875-1

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3055-6

027: Bifo – Franco Berardi
Ironic Ethics

Bifo’s essay is a critical examination of the current political situation that prevails in his homeland, Italy, where both media and politics have been under the influence of Prime Minister and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi for three decades now. The author draws an image of “Berlusconiland,” where the Italian language—its collective imagination and its sensuousness—has been debased, and where the policies of “Mafia media moguls” take effect like a “psychopoison” that slowly destroys everything. Television and advertisement continuously become more pornographic and obscene, which has led to a form of false “pleasure expectations,” self-hatred, and aggressive shame. Bifo describes the aggressive competition between macho men, whose main pleasure lies in the soiling of the female body—an expression of their all-encompassing scorn for women. Finally, it is neither a moral nor a political ethics that the author proposes as “therapy,” but rather an ethics that begins with skepticism and leads to the reactivation of empathy as a way toward pleasure and “Great Compassion,” which is a political condition.

The author, media theorist, and activist Bifo – Franco Berardi (*1949), founder of Radio Alice in the 1970s, teaches Media Aesthetics at the European School of Social Imagination in San Marino of which he is a co-founder.

English/German
44 pp., 1 ill.,
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2876-8

E-Book
c. € 3,99 [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3056-3

028: Griselda Pollock
Allo-Thanatography or Allo-Auto-Biography:
A Few Thoughts on One Painting in Charlotte
Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater?, 1941–42

With her reading of a selection of works by Charlotte Salomon, Griselda Pollock takes a look at the oeuvre of an artist who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 because she was a Jewish woman. Already in 1940, Charlotte Salomon had been interned in the French concentration camp Gurs, where she began to produce expressionistic gouaches and transparent overlays. In only eighteen months she created an enormous narrative cycle which encompasses 1,300 images and texts as well as musical indications for the singing of the texts. Salomon left the cycle, as a complete work, in a box with a doctor in Nice. The individual pages provide intimate insight into the intellectual world of a nameless person whose sole registration of her status as an artist is to be found on the Gestapo’s deportation list, who did not sign her work, and who gained a name—and thereby due recognition as an art maker—only with immense delay.

Griselda Pollock (*1949) is Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, where she is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art.

English/German
32 pp., 5 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2877-5

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3057-0

029: Mariam & Ashraf Ghani
Afghanistan: A Lexicon

In the form of a lexicon, artist Mariam Ghani describes, together with her father, the renowned economist and political scientist Ashraf Ghani, the cycle of repeated collapse and recovery that Afghanistan has undergone over the course of the twentieth century. The lexicon comprises seventy-one mostly illustrated terms that include central figures and places, words that carry a specific (political) meaning in the Afghan context, and entries on recurring events and defining themes. The notebook’s point of departure is a detailed reflection on the reign of King Amanullah Khan (1919–29), whose successes and failures yielded a model for reformers who succeeded him. These thoughts are followed by a series of terms related to, among other things, the now-destroyed Dar ul-Aman Palace, which was part of Amanullah’s design for a “new city,” and which characterized—as a space of exception, a center of conflict, a prototype for future plans, and a symbol of past failures—twentieth-century Afghan planning policy.

Mariam Ghani (*1978) is an artist based in New York and Kabul. Ashraf Ghani (*1949), author of Fixing Failed States (in English) and A Window to a Just Order (in Dari and Pashtu), lives in Kabul.

English
48 pp., 72 ill.,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2878-2

E-Book
c. € 7,99 [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3058-7

030: Pamela M. Lee
Illegibility

Writing notes is an essential component of academic life, a ritual that is performed with as many handwritings as there are individuals. In her essay, Pamela M. Lee addresses the phenomenon of illegibility within notes: of what use are notes if they cannot be deciphered at a later time? Lee develops her “semiotics of illegibility” with reference to the extensive archive of notes written by the prominent American art historian Meyer Schapiro. In Lee’s view, the illegibility of Schapiro’s script stands in especially stark contrast to the clarity of his texts. Incorporating psychoanalysis and literary criticism, Lee’s study draws from Schapiro’s own unique approaches to the theory of signs, and in particular from his canonical paper “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” which can be traced back to notes, excerpts of which are reproduced in this publication.

Art historian and cultural critic Pamela M. Lee (*1967) is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

English/German
24 pp., 7 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2879-9

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3059-4

031: Alexander Kluge
He Has the Heartless Eyes of One Loved above All Else

In his literary texts, regardless of their length, Alexander Kluge says what needs to be said in the most succinct way possible. He notes his texts down on plain A4 pads in order to dictate them afterward. In this notebook, he outlines, in the space of a few lines, the emotional state of a woman named Gesine, who is unhappily in love with a man who has long since lost interest in her, if he was ever interested at all. She can’t get away from him. She suffers and is consoled by her best friend—the first-person narrator. Kluge’s syntactical austerity in the description of emotional entanglements, the objective, distanced style of a more or less documentary character, gives rise to a precise consolidation of complex subject matter. Thus, out of only one portrayed instance, an entire life unfolds.

Alexander Kluge (*1932) is an author and a filmmaker.

English/German
12 pp., 2 ill.,
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2880-5

E-Book
c. € 3,99 [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3060-0

032: Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Group Material
AIDS Timeline

In 1989, the members of Group Material—Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Karen Ramspacher—were invited by the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley University Art Museum to deal with the subject of AIDS. The artists assembled their research into an overview, structured by year, of the circumstances under which the epidemic had turned into a national crisis. Among the objects of investigation were events in the fields of medicine, politics, and statistics, representations of AIDS in the media, and artistic responses. The AIDS Timeline, which is reprinted in this notebook, supplies background information on the widespread stigmatization of people with AIDS, documents the impact that homophobia and racism have had on the formation of public policy, and places these structures in a larger socio-political context.

Doug Ashford (*1958) is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Julie Ault (*1957) works as an artist, curator, editor, and writer.

English/German
24 pp., 18 ill.,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2881-2

E-Book
c. € 7,99 [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3061-7

033: Donna Haraway
SF: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures

“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 her text, Donna Haraway, author of the influential “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), devises the formula for a possible world, Terrapolis, and places it in connection to string figures, which, as pictures of cosmological constellations and creation myths, constitute a popular cultural practice among the Navajo to this day.

Cultural theorist, biologist, and feminist Donna Haraway (*1944) is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of dOCUMENTA (13).

English/German
20 pp., 2 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2882-9

E-Book
c. € 5,99 [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3062-4