“100 Notes – 100 Thoughts.” Now available: The first 17 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions
Photo: Dirk Schwarze
As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz have initiated a series of publications driven by the logic of the mind-at-work, presenting, writing, and drawing scenarios that point outside the normative bounds of academic text production. In the form of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations between artists and writers, and conversations, they present models of connection-making between the private and the public, between the pre-stage of intuitions, the naming of ideas, and the key-chain of arguments that provide the reader with a singular insight into working methods. The series is formed through interconnections, so that the notebooks could be described as an “interregnum,” a temporary rupture in discursive intelligence; they do not direct us towards reason as such, but towards a different understanding of the role of consciousness.
They appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and they are between 16 to 48 pages long. The contributors come from various fields such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature studies, and poetry. They include Etel Adnan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Péter György, Emily Jacir, Susan Buck-Morss, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 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 Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department 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. Amongst the first “launches,” dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz are pleased to announce:
“Notes towards dOCUMENTA (13) in a state of hope,” a lecture by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Goethe Institute Cairo, April 21 2011, 7 pm
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), will introduce the first 17 Notebooks of the “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts” series published in conjunction with dOCUMENTA (13). This address will include a talk on her plans and work for dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. After this lecture, Sarah Rifky, a curator and Cairo resident, will host a discussion with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
Presentation of the first Notebooks of the series “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts,” Artists Space, New York, May 10, 2011, 7 pm
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), and Chus Martínez, Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department, will present the first 17 Notebooks of the series “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts” at Artists Space in New York. Founded in 1972, Artists Space has contributed to changing the institutional and economic landscape for contemporary art in New York City―lending support to emerging ideas and emerging artists alike. It is a place for discussion and examination, which proposes new modes of production to set new relations in play while shifting focus away from the presentation of artworks alone―ultimately, a center for new ideas in a radically changing world.
You can buy individual notebooks or subscribe to the entire series of 100 notebooks at www.hatjecantz.de/documenta13.
001: Michael Taussig
Fieldwork Notebooks
What is it that makes notebooks so fascinating? Anthropologist Michael Taussig, for whom fieldwork notebooks are an indispensable tool, discusses this very question. A starting point of his investigation is Walter Benjamin, who obsessively filled his own notebooks and was intrigued by their materiality. Roland Barthes, Le Corbusier, and Joan Didion are some of the many other notorious note takers that Taussig visits so as to crystallize his ideas of what a notebook really is. Far more than a mere “thing,” Taussig argues that a notebook develops a life of its own, a life, which is often fed by what hasn’t been written down and other externalities. In the end, this history can even take possession of its possessor by transforming a notebook into a magical object, a fetish. – Anthropologist Michael Taussig (*1940) is a professor at Columbia University, New York.
English/German
24 pp., 1 ill.,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2850-8
E-Book
c. € 6,49 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3030-3
002: Ian Wallace
The First documenta, 1955
In 1955, the first documenta took place in Kassel. Originally planned as a one-time exhibition, it now takes place every five years and has become a primary periodic moment of exhibition and reflection on contemporary art. In this 1987 lecture, held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Ian Wallace sheds light on the first documenta. After World War II, the exhibition followed the aim to represent and rehabilitate those artists who had been vilified as “degenerate” by the National Socialist regime. The first documenta is a mirror and protagonist of the postwar cultural and political climate. Under the guidance of Arnold Bode, and with the help of Werner Haftmann, it has notably contributed to what has been called “the triumphal march of abstraction,” which helped West-Germany to reintegrate itself into European modernity. – Ian Wallace (* 1943) is an artist living in Vancouver. He has taught at the University of British Columbia as well as the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
English/German
36 pp., 1 ill.,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2851-5
E-Book
c. € 6,49 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3031-0
003: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Letter to a Friend
In her “Letter to a Friend,” dOCUMENTA (13)’s Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gives an insight into her working process, outlining some of the key issues around the 2012 exhibition. In shifting voices, such as storytelling, theoretical speculation, travel diary, press release, or critical reflection, she describes dOCUMENTA (13) as something more than an exhibition—for her it is a state of mind. It is a constellation of artistic acts and gestures that are already taking place as well as an exhibition that will open on June 9, 2012, and that will run for 100 days. Given the heterogeneity of the audience it addresses and the historical development of group exhibitions as “a non-commercial place to intensely aggregate,” what can this exhibition be today? Opening the boundaries of disciplines and fields of knowledge and emphasizing the procedural questions, dOCUMENTA (13) is coming together by thinking through a number of composite entangled ontologies instead of following a defined curatorial concept.
English/German
32 pp., 6 ill.,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2852-2
E-Book
c. € 6,49 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3032-7
004: Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss
This notebook combines photographs by artist Emily Jacir with a text by political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, who teaches at the City University of New York, written in response to the images and to conversations with the artist. Jacir’s photographs depict the former Benedictine monastery of Breitenau, near Kassel. A prison camp in the Nazi era, it became a girl’s reformatory after World War II. These images as well as other photographs taken in Kassel are accompanied by selections from the artist’s diary entries, which investigate questions around the histories of the represented sites. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Buck-Morss’ textual response unravels how truth and collective memory are established and how the inextricable relation between knowledge and power leads to the selection of what is archived and remembered.
English
48 pp., 28 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2853-9
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3033-4
005: György Lukács
Notes on Georg Simmel’s Lessons, 1906/07, and a “Sociology of Art,” c. 1909; Introduction: Lívia Páldi
In 1973, an employee of the Deutsche Bank in Heidelberg identified the influential sociologist of literature and Marxist György Lukács (1885–1971) as the owner of a mass of material that had been deposited there in 1917. Among the sixteen hundred letters and text fragments of the collection, known as the “Heidelberg Suitcase” among researchers, was the notebook that has been partially reproduced in this publication. The content of the notebook is in two parts: In the front are notes Lukács took in German during lectures by Georg Simmel on “Logic and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy,” held at the Berlin University in 1906. A few years later, Lukács used the notebook again and, starting from its end, wrote in Hungarian a draft with the title “Sociology of Art.” – With an introduction by Lívia Páldi, Chief Curator at the Mucsarnok/Kunsthalle Budapest and Agent for dOCUMENTA (13).
English/German
48 pp., facsimile,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2854-6
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3034-1
006: Etel Adnan
The Cost for Love We Are not Willing to Pay
In her poetic reflection, artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan (*1925) describes various forms of love: the love for ideas, for God, for things, and for nature. However, today we have distanced ourselves from a higher form of love that drove Nietzsche into madness and the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj into martyrdom. The love for nature, which Adnan describes through her own experience, even seems to have given way to contempt—how else could the ecological catastrophe toward which we are steering be explained? The price to stop it would be too high, as it would involve a radical change in our way of life—similar to the experience of conventional love between two people, which involves such intensity only a few are ready to endure it.
English/German
20 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2855-3
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3035-8
007: Erkki Kurenniemi
Introduction: Lars Bang Larsen
A reprint of diary pages from October 1980 by Erkki Kuriennemi (* 1941), nuclear physicist turned artist and protagonist of electronic music in Finland whose work refutes, with a radical imagination, the common place that bases technology in frigid thought and loss of sensuality. Over decades, Kurenniemi incessantly built up an archive comprised of photographs, floppy discs and harddrives, hundreds of video and audiotapes as well as dozens of notebooks, like the one presented here.
English/German
48 pp., facsimile
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2856-0
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3036-5
008: Lawrence Weiner
IF IN FACT THERE IS A CONTEXT
For this series, artist Lawrence Weiner (* 1942) has made an artist’s book in exactly the same format (A6) and with the same number of pages (24) as his first contribution to documenta 5 in 1972, curated by Harald Szeemann. The partly handwritten instructions, statements, definitions, poems, and pictograms give an insight into his artistic practice and—as eloquently as poetically—transfer his ideas around dOCUMENTA (13) into language. A central figure in Conceptual art from its beginnings, Weiner works in a wide variety of media including video, books, performance, and installation.
English
24 pp., 15 ill.
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2857-7
E-Book
c. € 2,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3037-2
009: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison
The Refusal of Time
Our grasp of time continues to change, in wrenching ways. This is an exploration of these shifts and struggles, across drawing and text, music and movement, film and concepts. In the late nineteenth century, time was coordinated: towns, cities, whole countries lost their “own” time as signals synchronized clocks. When Albert Einstein introduced his radical idea undermining the notion of a “universally audible tick-tock” in favor of times not time, he found resistance furious; and in our own era, time is again in tumult—time crossed with information, challenged at the horizon of black holes, even, among many string theorists, rendered a mere illusion. In a congenial long-term collaboration, Peter L. Galison, historian, author, filmmaker, and Professor of the History of Science and Physics at Harvard University and South African artist William Kentridge are researching such notions in The Refusal of Time, a project for dOCUMENTA (13) into which this notebook offers first insights.
English/German
48 pp., facsimile
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2858-4
E-Book
c. € 6,49 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3038-9
010: Christoph Menke
Aesthetics of Equality
In his essay, Christoph Menke (*1958), Professor of Philosophy at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt/Main, focuses on the question of how and where there is equality between human being s. The author examines different notions throughout the history of philosophy, as well as varying political concepts, such as the contrarian interpretations of fascism and communism, and the differing reflections on the connection between equality and reason by Aristotle and Descartes. Responding to our current debate about the question of equality, Menke proposes a continuation through an “aesthetics of equality,” which radicalizes enlightenment’s assumption according to which all people have the same ability to reason. Here, equality consists of a force, an agency to imagine, given to all people—the equality of the possibility for an exercised and exercising formation of reason, which is not a given but a socially acquired capacity.
English/German
32 pp., 1 ill.,
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2859-1
E-Book
c. € 2,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3039-6
011: Jalal Toufic
Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically
In the second edition of his book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (2003), Jalal Toufic notes: “I was for years concerned with schizophrenia and with schizophrenics, who appeared in my Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995; and I am now interested in ‘the little girl,’ whom I expect to appear in my coming vampire film. . . . At one level, the Thirteenth Series in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, 1969, ‘The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl,’ can thus be retrospectively viewed as a program for the work of a decade on my part.” In this new essay, he writes on the portrait of the pubescent girl, including in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” “The successful portrait of a pubescent girl is not a rite of passage but a rite of non-passage; what needs a rite is not passage, which is the natural state (at least for historical societies), but non-passage, the radical differentiation between the before, in this case a pubescent girl, and the after, a woman.” From the portrait of the pubescent girl, Toufic moves to the portrait in general and its paradigmatic relation to the angel; thus the title of this notebook: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically. — Most of Jalal Toufic’s books are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com.
English/German
24 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2860-7
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3040-2
012: Vandana Shiva
The Corporate Control of Life
Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva (*1952) demonstrates in a matter-of-fact way how corporations gain control over our lives. The patenting of life—from bacteria and plants to cloned animals with certain genetic characteristics—implies the reification and commercialization of life. An agreement of the World Trade Organization allows corporations to patent nearly everything we can imagine. One of the repercussions is biopiracy, the reclaiming of ancient traditional use and breeding of plants as the corporations’ own “invention,” as Shiva shows through the examples of the neem tree and basmati rice. The monopolization of seeds has forced farmers in large parts of India into dependence on corporations, which undermines the farmers’ basis of living.
English/German
44 pp., 1 ill.,
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2861-4
E-Book
c. € 2,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3041-9
013: G. M. Tamás
Innocent Power
In his essay, G. M. Tamás (*1948), Hungarian philosopher as well as former and actual dissident, examines the character of “innocent power.” Power is per se destructive, and its effects are visible in different kinds of ruins, such as romantic ruins, war ruins, and ruins created by contemporary art. Innocent power, like capital, is impersonal and conceptual; it is a collection of concepts that has the “legitimizing” character of “knowledge.” Its recognition as the prevalent order is linked to the way we know. Thus, resistance against innocent power is illegal and unintelligent. But if there are still possible forms of resistance and rebellion against the consequences it may have, such as servitude and humiliation or deliberate imposition of misery, they are made ipso facto unreasonable.
English/German
c. 32 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2862-1
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3042-6
014: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Introduction: Chus Martínez
The Chilean director, cartoonist, composer, and visual artist Alejandro Jodorowsky (*1929) dedicated a voluminous notebook to the script for his film Dune, after the 1965 science-fiction novel of the same name by Frank Herbert. He even printed the title on this book. But his ambitious project remained unrealized, and in the end, the 1974 notebook instead brings together his intensive research about the historical Tarot de Marseille. For three years, Jodorowsky followed the paths of the famous tarot deck to explore its origins and its historical development, as well as the various teachings and interpretations embedded within it. The notebook contains the result of his encounters, conversations, and studies in the form of texts, collages, and diagrams, which are reproduced here in a selection. — With an introduction by Chus Martínez, Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department for dOCUMENTA (13).
English/German
48 pp., facsimile,
17,6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8,– [D], CHF 12,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2863-8
E-Book
c. € 6,49 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3043-3
015: Paul Ryan
Two Is not A Number: A Conversation with Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri
In a conversation with dOCUMENTA (13) Agents Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, New York–based video artist Paul Ryan talks about the theoretical and biographical background to his work, about formative experiences while being an assistant to Marshall McLuhan, and about his role within the video group Raindance and their magazine Radical Software—and about how all these influences shaped his desire to connect his artistic practice with revolutionary social action. Ryan’s idea of Threeing lies at the center. Based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenological categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, Threeing is a voluntary practice of relating, in which three people take turns playing three roles. The conversation is complemented by a detailed appendix with illustrated texts on Threeing and on Ryan’s concept of the Relational Circuit.
English/German
48 pp., 9 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2864-5
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3044-0
016: Péter György
The Two Kassels: Same Time, Another Space
In his essay, Péter György reflects on the apparently unconnected “two Kassels” that exist next to each other. On the one hand, the former residential city in the middle of Germany, which was mostly destroyed in World War II and which became a border city through the inner division of Germany into East and West. On the other, the documenta city, which every five years, during the time of the exhibition, becomes the destination of an international audience and pushes the actual Kassel into the background with its “machinery of representation.” Looking toward dOCUMENTA (13), György sees a paradigm shift in the curatorial concept, which will involve as one of its sites Breitenau, a former Benedict cloister near Kassel that has been used for various functions (as a camp in Nazi years and as a girls’ reformatory until the 1970s): a shift to the connection of the contemporary art world with local history. – The art historian and culture critic Péter György (*1954) is Head of the Graduate Program for Film, Media, and Cultural History at the ELTE Budapest.
English/German
36 pp., 1 ill.,
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2865-2
E-Book
c. € 2,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3045-7
017: Kenneth Goldsmith
Letter to Bettina Funcke
In a letter to Bettina Funcke, dOCUMENTA (13)’s Head of Publications, New York–based poet Kenneth Goldsmith (*1961) weaves the strands of his artistic practice into an overall picture of his work. He begins with the online archive UbuWeb, which he founded in 1996: a noncommercial platform where he collects and presents material from all areas of avant-garde artistic production (poetry, film, video, sound, etc. The descriptions of his work on UbuWeb, as a writer (who retypes existing texts), as a host of a weekly radio show (who reads out other DJs’ set lists and texts from blogs), and as a professor of English literature (who teaches “uncreative writing”), together with theoretical and poetic inserts, condense to a complex reflection about poetry under the influence of appropriation.
English/German
36 pp., 1 ill.,
10,5 x 14,8 cm, paperback
€ 4,– [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2866-9
E-Book
c. € 2,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3046-4