MA thesis
Title: A Train of Thought
Subtitle: And, a case study and documentation of Documenta(13) as a – not the – turning point to pose and explore narratives in contemporary art.
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University of Amsterdam
MA Arts and Culture: Art History (Modern & Contemporary Art) First reader: dr. M.I.D. van Rijsingen
Second reader: M. Lerm-Hayes Student: L.M. Schoorl
Student no.: 6052835 Date: December 7, 2016
Periplum VI
To embark too young as yet for foresight
blazing a trail
through pathless tracts I maintain
insubstantial shapes thrown from the surface
Cicadas for instance shed tubular jackets periodic of summer
activity
The same way our doctrine often seems misplaced and you study chemistry
to put some depth in the field Where impact occasions we catch a glimpse
In this context messages wash up from the dead
letter office
Content
Preface 4
Introduction 7
I. How does anything go? 18
Intermezzo 33
II. AND: a logbook. A journey through dOCUMENTA(13) from and to the 39 middle (of, the middle of, the middle of…)
Conclusion 79
Images 86
Bibliography 88
Preface
The object of this study is the condition and (re)presentation of narratives in contemporary art as seen in dOCUMENTA(13) specifically. I would like to stress that I have not been to
dOCUMENTA(13) myself. However, dOCUMENTA(13) seems to extend beyond the common limits of art exhibitions and perhaps partially can only be experienced in one’s mind, so that is what I did. All observations, assumptions and statements I make regarding the exhibition in this thesis are based on literature, lectures videos and stories from people who have visited
dOCUMENTA(13). I hereby would like to state that I have read all the sources mentioned in this paper and that whenever I have taken thoughts and words of people other than myself to support my arguments or clarify my thoughts I have credited them in footnotes. Unless otherwise noted everything written in this thesis are my own thoughts and words.
Furthermore, I also would like to add that the thesis is written over the course of two years, and I have not adjusted any time indications. The long writing period has a personal cause which I will not elaborate upon but which in hindsight ironically fits the conceptual endeavour of this thesis and corresponds to some of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s hypotheses for
dOCUMENTA(13). Every Documenta is shaped of the course of several years (five) before it becomes public and in a way now so has this thesis. The reader who reads this, you, reads this now, perhaps there will be people that read it later, in either case everything that I have written will always be belated when read. And, I like that. How old does something need to be in order to be considered belated? What is belatedness? This belatedness, I think, suits contemporary art well and the question of it reoccurs in this project.
This research thesis is my last project in order to graduate from the University of Amsterdam with a Masters of Art in Art and Cultural Sciences: Art History. This program, in particular the courses “Material Turn,” “Thinking Modern and Contemporary Art” and “Art as
Institution (and its critique),” have introduced me to new ways of thinking about art in (contemporary) society and its development, and have inspired and encouraged me to pursue further study of contemporary Art History and Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as in extracurricular projects I have set up and/or been involved in in the past two years, such as Potluck Salon with Zeenat Nagree, a self taught class with David Hall called “Shadows of Desire” and Institutional Garbage, an on-line exihibtion co-curated with Caroline Picard.
I wish to take a moment to express my gratitude towards those who have supported me during the long and fragmented writing process of this thesis which did not take place under ideal circumstances. Thank you first of all, Miriam van Rijsingen, for your continuous support and patience. Thank you Maria Lerm-Hayes for taking the time to read this paper. I would also like to thank James Elkins who let me write parts of this thesis for his seminars “Experimental Writing on Art” and “North Atlantic Art History.” Unconditional gratitude goes to my parents who are in the end the ones who encouraged me to finish writing at last. And, thank you, of course, to my collaborators and dear friends listed above, Zee, David and Caroline, for continuing deepening questions about the role of art in the contemporary. Lastly, thank you Amsterdam Writers Guild for sharing your writing space with me.
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Introduction
[dOCUMENTA(13) // CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV // 2007-2012]
(figure 1)
Upon entering the Fridericianum, the main exhibition building of documenta, during the summer of 2012 straight ahead one found the Rotunde; a semi-circle closed off by a glass wall. This space was the “Brain” of dOCUMENTA(13), named as such and curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. The “Brain” exemplified a non-concept that was the overall concept of the whole exhibition and kept twenty-eight (groups of) objects – some of them artworks, some of them not; some made by artist, others not (but by inventors, engineers or no one in particular). Their presence, function and relationship to one another were not explained (i.e. an explanatory narrative of them was not forced upon the viewer). dOCUMENTA(13) was an attempt to create an open exhibition –open for multiple interpretations and open to different disciplines– not yet
formulated definitely around a theme. The exhibition was a state of mind, perpetually fluid, and the “Brain” illustrated that thought.1
Among the objects in the “Brain” were ancient Bactrian Princesses dated from the 2nd millennia B.C.; a video work by Tamara Henderson from 2011; an excerpt of a video made by Ahmed Basiony showing the uprisings at Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011 (Basiony was killed by the Egyptian police three days later); melted artefacts from the National Museum in Beirut misshapen by the shill fire of the 1975-1990 civil war; objects taken from Hitler’s apartment by Lee Miller, such as Eva Braun’s perfume bottle and a small neo-classical female nude porcelain sculpture; pictures of Lee Miller taken by both herself and Man Ray, her lover; several editions of Man Ray’s lost readymade Object to be Destroyed / Object of Destruction / Indestructible Object, containing a cutout of Lee Miller’s eye –for example. 2
Some of these objects seem to have a connection to each or multiple others, others anything but. The works of and by Miller and Ray, for example, may relate to each other by means of the artists’ personal relationship (if one knew about that relationship). However, right next to these seemingly relating objects one could encounter pictures of fog catchers in South America taken by cultural anthropologist Horacio Larrain Barros and a model of the first computer-like “mechanical brains”3 and water-color drawings both by the technical engineer, Konrad Zuse. What is the story there? And whose story is it?
It was up to each viewer to create their own narrative(s), relating or unrelating the objects as they noticed, perceived and understood them based on their co-presence with the objects in the
1 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. “The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted and lasted
for a long time,” in Book of Books edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Published in conjunction with dOCUMENTA(13): 31
2 The Guidebook. Catalog 3/3. Edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Published in
conjunction with dOCUMENTA(13): 24-33
3 Buhmann, Stephanie, “Allowing Loose Ends to Linger: dOCUMENTA(13),” artcritical.com June 24, 2012, June
“Brain,” and based on the context(s)4 each viewer brought and became part of upon entering
dOCUMENTA(13). “[The objects we]re held provisionally together in this ‘Brain’ of dOCUMENTA(13) to indicate not a history, not an archive, but a set of elements that mark contradictory conditions and committed positions of being in and with the world.”5 Through the “Brain” Christov-Bakargiev showed the function of what she understood as a non-concept. The non-concept was not an avoidance of the concept; it was the concept. It went, and still goes, against pre-established narratives that make up disciplines and it lays bare the malleable nature of pre-expressed thoughts and the mutual influence of humans, objects and place on each other. Everything influences and is influenced by everything else. In our own brains we think; many fragments, shards, beginnings and open-ended thoughts pass through before they are fully formed and (com)modified to be shared and communicated outside the brain. In the brain thoughts are not translated, formulated and fixed. There are no boundaries, time can be played with and rocks might have feelings.6 This is the state of mind Christov-Bakargiev aimed to emulate7 with dOCUMENTA(13).8
The purposeful lack of a fixed narrative or perspective by Christov-Bakargiev, is a reaction to the commodification of ideas, which through the internet as well as modern
4 I understand context here as something that is also a text and is being influenced as well as that it influences, and
take that understanding from Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson in their essay “Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders.” They define this semiotic context as “on the one hand, the unarrestable mobility of the signifier, and on the other, the construction of the work of art within always specific contexts of viewing.” Source: Bal, Mieke and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders” in Donald Preziosi, ed. The Art of Art History. A Critical Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009: 252
5 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “The dance was very frenetic,” 2012: 35
6 Christov-Bakargiev wanted and tried to bring El Chaco, a meteorite situated in Argentina, to Kassel. Considering
the fact that this rock’s journey was stopped by hitting the earth she raised questions regarding the sentient of the rock and whether it might to travel further, or see a different place on earth. Source: Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “The dance was very frenetic,” 2012: 30-31
7 By “emulate” I mean that Christov-Bakargiev is attempting to show (rather than tell) possible connection making
processes similar to how that happens in an actual brain.
infrastructures can travel across the world quickly. Christov-Bakargiev sees intellectual labor as the drive of the economy in the twenty-first century but she also sees the threat of exploitation and manipulation of that labor. When knowledge becomes valuable it will be commodified, to have knowledge then is to have power, which inevitably will influence intentions and production process. In several sources I have read Christov-Bakargiev state that “the historical,
technological and social system is being built around products of the brain the same way that it was built around the products of machines in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and around products of the land prior to that.”9 These products have built our world. Art is also a kind of intellectual labor just like, for example, philosophy, biology and quantum physics. Bringing thinkers from different fields together Christov-Bakargiev “aims to explore how different forms of knowledge lie at the heart of the active exercise of reimagining the world.”10
dOCUMENTA(13) is not only about art –it is about different strata11 of the world which at heart may be what art is about– but contemporary art provides the context that allows a freedom to move away from existing structures (although within a structure of the art world), as contemporary art does not teleologically aim to achieve resemblance or purity or autonomy, anymore. An art context, today, allows for experimenting for the sake of experimenting and for failing and trying again. dOCUMENTA(13) is also not an attempt to explain interdisciplinarity
9 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev quoted by Karen Wright, “Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: In the Here and
Now,” Under the Influence, New York: Philips de Pury, 2011: 35; and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev quoted by Wes Hill, “Traumatised Art Objects. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13,” Contemporary Visual Art + Culture
Broadsheet, Vol. 2 (2012): 135
10 Citation: Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “The dance was very frenetic,” 2012: 31; and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
quoted by Karen Wright, “Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: In the Here and Now,” 2011: 35-38
11 I take this term “strata” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and will elaborate more on their thought in the
Intermezzo. Deleuze and Guattari use the word strata to indicate and/or define what a “book” is; both as a word as
well as the physical object. They compare “book” with “world” and in the context of dOCUMENTA(13) I consider “exhibition” to be a concept akin to “book” or “world” to think about micro and macro structures. Source: Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 3-4
directly or to make it a field or object of study. Interdisciplinarity is already here, according to Christov-Bakargiev, our world is interdisciplinary, it is what constructs our world today. Rather, the exhibition is interested in exploring how this process of thinking and producing knowledge, as done in the brain12, can be shown and done in an art exhibition, and how such an exhibition then opens up to other fields because multiple fields produce the intellectual knowledge that forms our society. Furthermore, it shows also how knowledge may be produced outside of any field and the possibility of non-human factors contributing to that. In addition to the act of producing, location is also very important to Christov-Bakargiev, as surroundings influence the process. What does it mean to create an exhibition in Kassel at documenta in the twenty-first century about creating structures that form our world? Aware of documenta being a micro cosmos13 –and in a way taking advantage of that, using it as a testing ground–
Christov-Bakargiev chose “four possible conditions in which people, in particular artists and thinkers, find themselves acting in the present.”14 The four conditions –although a fraction of an inexhaustible list of possible conditions– are: under siege, on retreat, in a state of hope and on stage. They are tied to four physical locations: Kassel, Cairo/Alexandria, Kabul and Banff. Thoughts might not have a physical location but our bodies have and those influence our thoughts.15
dOCUMENTA(13) shows spaces of unfixedness similar to the spaces (social, institutional, geographical, etc.) that our world consists of (when seen from a certain
12 I imagine a brain to produce knowledge, thoughts and ideas but also internal bodily messages, and that it sends
those off to different body parts or to completely different bodies –for example, other to people or into texts. The brain remains in place yet reaches out and is able to reach far in the modern world due to its infrastructures.
13 Documenta represents the contemporary art world every five years, but of course it does not and cannot show all
parts of the artworld. dOCUMENTA(13) specifically, due to its political and locational bearings in a way also represents other fields, or worlds if you may, of the world. Yet, again only segments of it and so documenta and dOCUMENTA(13) are micro cosmoses.
14 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “The dance was very frenetic,” 2012: 35
15 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “The dance was very frenetic,” 2012: 30-35; “Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: In the
perspective). Throughout modern history (powerful) people have tried to confine those spaces and stories into fixed and distinguishable structures –often their fixedness is based solely on agreements or it is imposed, but either way validated through language. As Christov-Bakargiev writes in her closing paragraphs: “[dOCUMENTA(13) is] the space of relations between people and things, a place for transition and transit between places and in places, a political place where the polis is not limited by human agency only, a holding space, a committed space, a vulnerable space, a precarious yet cared-for space.”16 It is this space in between, that blurs borders and allows for fluidity of bodies and places, in which we can reconsider the condition that our world is in if only to raise awareness in different places with the hope that messages are sent and spread like neurons that will then take action, however small. It is this fluid perception of the world being considered as a valid perception, how that should be considered (as this perception exists), but not commodified.17
In Letter to a friend, Christov-Bakargiev writes:
“Your intuition is right, my friend […]. I am in favor of opening the boundaries of disciplines and fields of knowledge, especially now, when collecting and storing data, archiving and comparing data digitally, or even imagining, is changing science, art and consciousness. I believe that
procedural questions are as meaningful, if not more, that so-called
“thematic content” or “subject matter” of an art project–how one exercises agency and relates to others, how one proceeds as an artist, or how one acts as a member of the audience, for example. Although the process through which ones reaches a result might be “creative,” it is important to not turn that process itself into a new kind of product, and as a consequence, I am not fully in favor of the emerging, uncritical, dominant ideology of creativity.”18
16 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “The dance was very frenetic,” 2012: 44
17 Ibid.; and “Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: In the Here and Now,” Interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev by
Karen Wright, 2011: 35-38
18 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. Nº.003: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Letter to a Friend/Brief an einen Freund.
Characteristics and aims (or lack of aims), such as the acceptance and embrace of
incommensurability and multiplicity of perspectives and micro cosmoses, the production of knowledge and the undefinable open state as a valid perspective to see the world, that
continuously have come up in this initial description of dOCUMENTA(13) are reminiscent of postmodernism, but also move beyond the incapability of postmodernism to deal with the chaos it acknowledges.19 In the second half of the twentieth century a critique of linear progression and
developments in the production and translation of knowledge (both in sciences and arts) and the narratives that told them started to take hold. In the history of modern art –specifically the writing about and presentation of it– this was expressed by questioning of the succession of (stylistic) movements and their ability to govern the standards and values of (good) art, and was met by art that attempted to break through the structure of master narratives –“it was an attitude of rebellion not against previous art movements, but against the categorical authority of art history.”20 Fueled throughout the era by psychoanalysis, formalism, feminism, multiculturalism, Marxism, globalism the dissent against the canon accumulated in the 1990s with an abundance
19 Incapable in the sense that such as Eleanor Heartney asks it in her book survey book Art and Today “How is it
possible to write a survey of contemporary art in an era of apparently anarchic pluralism?” as a possible response she writes her book around sixteen themes. In a way this goes against Christov-Bakargiev’s non-concept as themes become commodities. (Source: Heartney, Eleanor, Art and Today, Phaidon Press, 2008: 10-11) Perhaps Christov-Bakargiev aligns more with Terry Smith in that, he too, in his book What is Contemporary Art, seems to
acknowledge the contemporaneity and the multiplicity of art and of being and does not aim to order that. Smith writes: “against its grain, we must write its[, the contemporary’s,] history, as it is happening, or otherwise it will elude us––even, perhaps, destroy us.” (Source: Smith, Terry, What is Contemporary Art?, 2012: 255)
If contemporary art is art that does no represent anymore, but is ontologically present, then perhaps that is a mode that exhibitions and art historical writing could adopt as well. Smith has no answers, he mostly analyzes what art and artists are doing. He acknowledges the need for stories as well as that one story will not suffice; and that art should be / or is contemporaneous and multiple. He writes about the problems, but does not write in an innovative way himself that might suggest an alternative contemporary way of making narratives such as Christov-Bakargiev does with dOCUMENTA(13).
of materials, media, and expression of the above named movements and accompanying theories into a “condition”21 called postmodernism.22
“Postmodern condition” comes from the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s book of the same name The Postmodern Condition. A report on knowledge,23 which is the book that is usually understood as the key text on how postmodernism came about. Lyotard argues “that [in the most developed societies] in the postmodern era, comprehensive theories of history, social systems, or science are no longer tenable. Hence, Lyotard asserted, we must abandon universal principles in favor of micro-narratives.”24 The Postmodern Condition was written in 1979, and in ways it predicted the future, mostly in regards how (the production and dissemination of)
knowledge was going to influence power relationships in the world (as also has become clear in some of Christov-Bakargiev’s statements). However, ever since the late 70s the writing or creating of micro-narratives has not succeeded in the art world. There are there in the world, things are multiple and happen simultaneous, yet to find a way to write that way, to share or show the multiplicity and contemporaneity of art, has been a problem for the art world. I do not believe that Christov-Bakargiev with dOCUMENTA(13) has necessarily resolved that problem, neither do I think she attempted to (or that it is even possible). She took a step back or forward, or perhaps rather away from the narrative crisis and just let things be and form in a “before-resolved” state.25
21 Lyotard, F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986: xxiii
22 Heartney, Eleanor, 2008: 7-11; Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: xxiii-xxv 23 Hereafter referred to as The Postmodern Condition.
24 Heartney, Eleanor, 2008: 10
25 Smith, Terry, What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago: Universtity of Chicago Press, 2009: 1-10; Elkins, James,
“Introduction,” What is Insteresting Writing on Art?, (blog) September, 2013
<http://305737.blogspot.com/2013/07/chapter-1-some-terms.html>; and Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern
This thesis is a pondering on the making and/or showing of narratives in art in the twenty-first century through a case study of dOCUMENTA(13). I do not aim to propose dOCUMENTA(13) as an example of a contemporary narrative par excellence or a solution on how to write about art outside of the canon or how to write multiplicituous. Although, I do intend to push art historical writing outside of its traditional discourse using the non-concept in dOCUMENTA(13), which shares and is the in-process, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s agency on myself to do so; in two (and a half) chapters I want to provide an overview of the crisis of comprehensive unifying narratives in art as well as follow the dOCUMENTA(13) state of mind beyond the crisis of narratives by writing about the exhibition in a logbook format. In the first chapter, “How does anything go?,” I will examine the postmodern dissent against the canonical narrative in modern art established by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and repeated in the writing of other authors such as Mieke Bal, Eleanor Heartney, James Elkins, Terry Smith who (among many others) also question, critique or reconsider the linear narrative writing of (art) history/ies. I will use Niels Brüggen’s close reading of The Postmodern Condition and Fredric Jameson’s
introduction to the Lyotard’s book to explain and contextualize Lyotard’s project. The second chapter, “A Logbook. Documentation dOCUMENTA(13)” will be a case study and
documentation of dOCUMENTA(13) informed by the three volume exhibition catalogue (Books of Books, the Guidebook and the Logbook), reviews, interviews and online videos about
dOCUMENTA(13).
Like dOCUMENTA(13) I consider this thesis (and perhaps any contemporary writing on art) rooted in the crisis of narratives –specifically the (re)presentation of narratives. But like dOCUMENTA(13) also I will attempt (in chapter II) to move beyond, before or away from this crisis by way of mirroring dOCUMENTA(13) conditional and provisional state –the state of
documenta and perhaps of any research-based project which can continued to be worked on, infinitely. Although I have physically never been to any of the geographic dOCUMENTA(13) locations my mind has. A logbook, originally used to document a ship’s journey, provides a format to express my unexperienced26 experience, a journey of my mind while my body was located elsewhere, as well as that it pushes the boundaries of academic writing. In the middle the “Intermezzo” functions as a preface to the logbook as well as that it forms a transition from theoretical writing in chapter I to more experimental writing in chapter II. In it I will elaborate on the format of the logbook and how I see it as an appropriate format in response to questions about narratives in a (post) postmodern time. This is not to say that the logbook format is the correct or perfect way to write about art, more so it is a way of writing, for me, that allowed me to understand in the first place dOCUMENTA(13) and secondly the problem of the crisis of narratives.
26 I say unexperienced by way of a wordplay, because I have not visited dOCUMENTA(13) and thus not
experienced dOCUMENTA(13) in a conventional way. I will elaborate more on this unexperienced experience in the intermezzo and in chapter II.
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I. How does anything go?
“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives[,]”27 Lyotard writes halfway through his introduction to The Postmodern Condition. This book, The Postmodern Condition, is seen as the key-text for the introduction to and explanation of the era after modernism. Although there is not one definition of the postmodern nor is there an explicit starting point, this simplified definition from 1979 is often rehearsed as a general description of what postmodernism is: a disbelief and end of grand narratives28. Lyotard illustrates this rupture in the belief in grand confirming narratives by looking at the production and dissemination of knowledge and the role that language plays in constituting and questioning truths. To illustrate his criticism against grand narratives Lyotard explains how modern exact sciences, such as mathematics, use meta-discourses to become part of grand narratives in order to legitimate themselves: i.e. to communicate scientific truths in a universal language understandable to the layman, to those outside their field, to everyone, yet in a language that is incommensurable with the original. According to Lyotard this is characteristic of the modern era. Therefor Lyotard applies the term modern “to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a meta-discourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative.”29
The Postmodern Condition does not give a theory of narrative per se, but points out multiple legitimizing narrative models based on language that are used to legitimize exact science as well as to justify societies. According to Lyotard grand narratives are what built modernity, but are obsolete in the postmodern era, as there are many small narratives happening
27 Lyotard, Jean-Fraçois, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: xxiv
28 Grand narratives is another term for metanarratives that Lyotard (and others) use. 29 Lyotard, Jean-Fraçois, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: xxiii
at the same time and different language games30 take place that involve a sender, an addressee
and a statement constituting and breaking those small narratives, continually.I want to use this chapter to discuss Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and consider narrativity (also studied by scholars) because some of the problematics of narratives that Lyotard and his contemporaries points out are similar to the problematics of (re)presentation that Christov-Bakargiev reacts to in dOCUMENTA(13) as well as that both inform my difficulty with writing (academic) texts – translating reading into thought and back into text yet a text that seems to require a particular kind of (Art Historical) discourse.31
In an appendix to The Postmodern Condition, titled “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” and originally written later in 1982, Lyotard writes: “the postmodern would be that which in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of the philosopher.”32 If the postmodern constitutes the
unpresentable and the indefinable, and narratives are used to create meaning by ordering chaos, narrative and the postmodern both seem like a good fit as well as a paradox. Postmodernism then
30 In his book Philosophical Investigations (1953) Ludwig Wittgenstein introduces his theory of and on language
games. Language games are for Wittgenstein a way to understand both how language functions and thus life. The rules (grammar, word choices, sentence structures) that determine our use of language corollary determine how we live. “What enables language to function and therefore must be accepted as “given” are precisely forms of life. In Wittgenstein's terms, “It is not only agreement in definitions but also (odd as it may sound) in judgments that is required” (PI 242), and this is “agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life” (PI 241). Wittgenstein’s theory of language games has been very influential on philosophers, thinkers and writers of the late 20th century, among which also Jean-François Lyotard. I use these words here, because they will play a role throughout this thesis. Source: Biletzki, Anat. March 3, 2014. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. May 23, 2014.
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#Lan>
31 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: xxiii-xxv
32 Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?,” translated by Régis Durand. In The
also seems not to do so much something new, but rather indicates a shift in perceiving the world which was always already (t)here. This ties in with Lyotard (and repeated by others such as Heartney as I mentioned on p. 12) not proclaiming postmodernism “as a discontent with a disintegration of this or that high modernist style […] not that which follows modernism and its particular legitimation crisis, but rather as a cyclical moment that returns before the emergence of the ever new modernisms in the stricter sense.”33 With this in mind and continuing to
(re)consider narratives, I like to invoke Mieke Bal who suggests to think of narratives as modes and not as genres or formats. She writes “[a narrative] is alive and active as cultural force, not just a kind of literature. It constitutes a major reservoir of the cultural baggage that enables us to make meaning out of a chaotic world and the incomprehensible events taking place in it. […] it is a cultural force to be reckoned with.”34 Both Lyotard and Ball in these citations above criticize
the linearity of authorized narratives and suggest their true nature and forming to be more fluid. Narratives have been used as a way of story telling for centuries, but it is the grand narrative, a “story or representation used to give an explanatory or justificatory account of a society, period, etc.”35 that is singled out as an institution and critiqued by Lyotard and other thinkers of the twentieth century such as also Jameson, Roland Barthes and Hayden White.36 Ten
years prior to The Postmodern Condition Barthes wrote in “The Death of the Author”: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the
‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
33 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: xvi
34 Bal, Mieke. “Working with Concepts.” European Journal of English Studies. Vol.13, No. 1 (2009): 16 35 "narrative, n.". OED Online. June 2016. Oxford University Press.
centres of culture.”37 Barthes here indicates a belief in multiplicity and circularity of narratives38
as well. White in his article “The Historical Event” criticizes the exclusive and limited narratives that have been written down, are taught and considered most accurate as the history of our world. He writes: “The historical past is created by professionals or in some way socially authorized investigators[; it] is a construction made by selecting from the wide range of all the events of the human past a specific congeries of those events that can be established as having happened at specific times and places and can be fitted into diachronically organized accounts of a group’s self-constitution over time.”39 (I will bring up Jameson again later on in this chapter.) It is thus not narrativity that is deemed illegible, but the creation and keeping of grand totalizing and ossified narratives that constitute a universal truth based on knowledge once considered verified by certain (self-) authorized figures.
Like Lyotard, I too suspect the beginning of modern narrative legitimization, which is also the beginning of grand narratives, to be the beginning of the crisis of grand narratives as well. Throughout modernity people and different parts of the world became more connected, through initially travelling, trade, colonization and printed press, for example. Narratives were established to bridge those geographical and cultural spaces, to translate new things in existing languages and document and so cohere these changes.40 As those networks and connections grew more actors (people) participated in their translation, new narratives were formed. This growing
37 Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” Image-Music-Text. Translation by Stephen Heath. Edited by Stephen
Heath. Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1977: 146
38 In this case I consider Barthes’s texts as narratives as the texts he writes about in that citation are also an ordering
of things, other texts, around him. It it reminiscent also of the assemblages that Deleuze and Guattari understand books to be constructed with.
39 White, Hayden. “The Historical Event.” d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Vol. 19, No. 3
(2003): 9-34
40 Perhaps this could be considered a kind of colonizing translation. New knowledges are always incorporated into
the existing ruling Western narratives of History. For example, the history of the discovery of America and the founding of the United States.
continues and has to the point that we live in an era that has never been more connected as before through infrastructures, internet and virtual reality of the online world, which results in a surplus of available information and thus a surplus of their translation into narratives. In her introduction to the catalogs Christov-Bakargiev wrote: “Over the past ten to fifteen years, a number of
devices (desktop computers, laptops, iPads, cell phones, BlackBerrys, and iPhones) have indeed linked people in ways that were previously impossible, building “molecular” networks and archives where people are both more and more connected and more and more separated.”41
Translation –whether from one medium into another, form one language to another, or from thought into words– always fails.42 It take this notion of failure from Benjamin as explained in footnote forty-two. Responding to Benjamin’s essay Paul de Man wrote: “One of the reasons why [Benjamin] takes the translator rather than the poet is that the translator, per definition, fails. The translator can never do what the original text did. Any translation is always second in
relation to the original, and the translator as such is lost from the very beginning.”43
To me narrative is a method of translation, it translates a train of thoughts in reaction to an event or a series of events into language (or another form of representation, it can be imagery
41 Citation: Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “The dance was very frenetic,” 2012: 34-35; and Jameson, Frederic.
“Foreword” in Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986: xi-xii
42 Here I follow Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Task of the Translator” in which he writes: “If the kinship of
languages manifests itself in translations, this is not accomplished through a vague alikeness between adaptation and original. It stands to reason that kinship does not necessarily involve likeliness. While all individual elements of foreign languages – words, sentences, structure – are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. […] The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. It is owing to these modes that the word Brot means something different to a German than the word pain to a Frenchman, that these words are not interchangeable for them, that, in fact, they strive to exclude each other. As to the intended object, however, the two words mean the very same thing. While the modes of intention in these two words are in conflict, intention and object of intention complement each of the two languages from which they are derived; there the object is complementary to the intention.” Source: Benjamin, Walter, “The Task of the
Translator,” The Translation Studies Reader, translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2000: 77-78
43 De Man, Paul, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” The Resistance to Theory,
or an installation as well, an exhibition can be a text44); thus a grand narrative seems impossible
as one could not hope to put together idiosyncratic thoughts collectively in one narrative that does justice to all. I do not think that the failure of translation (and thus the impossibility of overarching narratives) is a bad thing, but I think it is important to realize that in translation things go missing and that nothing presented can be perceived whole. “Translation,” Willis Barnstone writes, “is a much broader venture than the ordinary transference of meaning form one language to another. To write is to translate thought into coded graphic marks on a page. To read is to translate those marks back into a mental text. To translate (in the ordinary senses) is to transform them into lexical equivalents in the same or another language. So every transformation of thought into writing, of writing into reading, and of one written text into another written text is an act of translation.”45
Like narratives, I see translation (which according to Barnstone is also reading) as a form of ordering. A function of narratives attributed to them by several scholars, Bal, but also echoing Ball, by Ian Cheng’s explanation of narrative:
Narrative is itself an intuitive technology for normalizing change, for cohering the experience of reality into a sequence of measured consequential developments – a kind of user experience (UX) design for organizing the look and feel of reality. But sometimes random, unscripted, unforgiving, unmotivated, inexplicable shit happens. Contingency is change happening faster than a human being can immediately narrate, when the UX can’t keep up in real time. The degree to which human beings can deploy narrative
44 Here I consider the concept of text following Mieke Bal: “I have often had occasion to regret the loss of analytical
skills that accompanied the disenchantment with the illusion that ‘the text speaks for itself’. True enough, a text does not speak for itself. We surround it, or frame it, before we let it speak at all. […] the advantage of speaking of ‘visual texts’ is that it reminds the analyst that lines, motifs, colours and surfaces, like words, contribute to the production of meaning; hence, that form and meaning cannot be disentangled. Neither texts nor images yield their meanings immediately. They are not transparent, so that images, like texts, require the labour of reading.” Source: Bal, Mieke, “Working with Concepts,” European Journal of English Studies, 13, 1 (2009): 15 and 21
45 Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Translation. History, Theory, Practice. New Haven:
as a format for cohering the cameos of reality’s contingencies is related to the frequency with which we have to deal with those contingencies. An isolated cinema fire in 1993 can be Uxed in its retelling. [N]ow it’s 2013, and there’s the feeling that the straight story can no longer normalize the complex, unpredictable forces of reality that intrude with greater and greater frequency, let alone the incessant stream of big data reporting on these complexities. What is the intuitive story of climate change? Shifts in the market? Mutations in your brain? Your browsing history?46
Lyotard distinguishes two ruling modern grand narratives: the narrative of emancipation, which comes forth out of the French Revolution and which promotes the autonomy of the individual who should fight against oppression; and the speculative narrative, which was established in the early nineteenth century with the founding of the university in Berlin, and which vouched that science should develop yet “be useful to society”47 as well. In the speculative narrative one meta-discourse merges science with the social, while the narrative of emancipation considers the co-existence of multiple discourses, yet considers them each as a true representation. Brügger draws the following analysis from this: “Thus, the untrustworthiness of two grand narratives in the postmodern already exists from the outset, inasmuch as the speculative narrative does not respect the heteromorphy of the language games, while the narrative of emancipation does not respect their untranslatability.”48 This is the paradox of grand narratives that raises questions regarding narrative’s potential to legitimize validity. “If a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history,” Lyotard writes, “is used to legitimate knowledge questions are raised concerning the validity of
46 Cheng, Ian. “Future Fictions,” Frieze. Is. 156, June 13, 2013, frieze.com, March 15, 2014:
<https://frieze.com/article/future-fictions>
47 Brüggen, Niels, “What about the Postmodern? The Concept of Postmodernism in the Work of Lyotard,” Yale
French Studies, no. 99 (2001): 80
the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.”49
As a result of rapid technological and economic change after World War II the amount and the speed with which the amount of knowledge and information has become available to us increased the heteromorphy and proves the untranslatability of stories in the postmodern era. This led to the untrustworthyness of overarching narratives and thus an emergence of new legitimizing standards to “re-legitimiz[e] contemporary science”50 towards the end of the twentieth century and after. In his close reading of The Postmodern Condition Brügger lists the following “three other possible legitimizing criteria [that] appear within [contemporary] science: performativity, which governs de facto […]; consensus, which is achieved by open discussion, a criterion for which Habermas is made the spokesperson; and paralogy (disagreement,
incommensurability, innovativeness), which Lyotard himself wishes to promote.”51 Paralogy functions through dissensus and multiple small narratives fueling that dissent. In the foreword to The Postmodern Condition Jameson writes of paralogism that “the point is not to reach
agreement but to undermine from within the very framework, in which the previous ‘normal science’ had been conducted.”52
I would like to continue referring to Jameson and go back to what he wrote earlier in his foreword as to concur with his belief that despite postmodernism rejection of grand narratives they remain existent below ground. “I believe,” Jameson writes, “by taking a further step that Lyotard seems unwilling to do in the present text, namely to posit, not the disappearance of the great master-narratives, but their passage underground as it were, their continuing but now
49 Citation: Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: xxiv; and Brügger, Niels, (2001): 80-81 50 Jameson, Fredric, 1986: ix
51 Brüggen, Niels, (2001): 79 52 Jameson, Fredric, 1986: xix
unconscious effectivity as a way of “thinking about” and acting in our current situation.”53 He
continues to point out how Lyotard differentiates “between ‘story telling’ and ‘scientific’ abstraction,”54 how the first consumes or forgets the past (in a Nietschean manner) while the latter capitalizes science. This capitalization is “a mode of understanding that, like the first surplus on the economic level, will little by little determine a whole range of ever more complex and extensive institutional objectifications –first in writing; then in libraries, universities,
museums; with the breakthrough in our own period to microstorage, computerized data, and data banks of hitherto unimaginable proportions, whose control or even ownership is, as Herbert Schiller and others have warned us (and as Lyotard is very well aware), one of the crucial political issues of our own time”55 This capitalization is both a result of narrativation of science as well as that a “return to narrative arguments being fully as revealing an example of the legitimation crisis of the older cognitive and epistemological scientific world-view”56
An example of such an underground narrative being revealed and then critiqued in our current situation (2016) is neoliberalism, which neither Lyotard or Jameson seem to explicitly mention in the book. The fact that Donald Trump won the recent American presidential elections is the result of the forgotten or not seen underground narrative of neoliberalism. Although
neoliberalism officially became a political movement in the 1930s it lost its name publicly in the ‘50s, yet its ideology remained and cohered in the years after. Coincidentally (or not) the fall of Keynesian politics in the 1970s is named also as what caused for neoliberalism to set foot in the maintstream.57 Although “neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket […] it rapidly
53 Jameson, Frederic, 1986: xii 54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.: xii-xiii
56 Citation: Ibid.: xi; and Ibid.: xi-xiii
57 Lyotard wrote: “The decline of narrative can […] also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal
became one.”58 In the same Guardian article as cited before George Monbiot writes: “Freedom
from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.”59 The competition and individualism of neoliberalism shows similarities with Lyotard’s postmodernism, his paralogy and the multiple small narratives respectively which might be an effect of the “political unconscious” that
Jameson has coined and points out, and so indeed Jameson might be right when writing that The Postmodern Condition “becomes itself a symptom of the state it seeks to diagnose.”60
eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services.” Source: Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condtion, 1986: 37-38
58 Monbiot, George, “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problem,” theguardian.com April 16, 2016,
October 12, 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot>
59 Ibid.
(figure 2)
“One is the Serpent which has its poison according two compositions, and One is All and through it is All, and by it is All, and if you have not All, All is Nothing.”61
Perhaps the symbol of Ouroboros can be attributed to postmodernism, moving in vicious circularity unable to shed its skin but seeing everything anew as the worlds around him spin similarly yet in their own way. The circle is unbreakable but it can be made visible (instead of denied) so that an active challenging of it can be persuaded, not from a beginning or an anticipating end but from within, the middle of the middle. Which is what I believe Christov-Bakargiev attempts with her documenta, making the spinning of the world visible.62
61 Cleopatra the Alchemist quoted in Alic, Margaret, Hypatia’s Heritage: A History of Women in Science from
Antiquity to Through the Nineteenth Centur, Beacon Press, 1986: 39
62 Britannica Academic, s.v. "Ouroboros," accessed December 5, 2016,
Lyotard finds language games the basis for “the minimum relation required for society to exist: even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him.”63 Language becomes more important in a society whose networks are largely based on communication, it becomes more than just the transmission and dialogue of messages; it also redefines messages through all the different perspectives that pass them on. “A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island […] one is always located at a post through which various kids of messages pass.”64 Thus language is more than a communicative tool. Lyotard considers language also an agonistic game, in which atoms, individuals, question (existing) statements and transfer between the different positions in the communication network creating new statements. An “atomization of the social into flexible networks of language games”65 is what takes place in
postmodern society. Like the matter we consist out of our bodies as a whole are perpetually in flux as well and adapt and respond to each new position we find ourselves in.66
Arguments against the use of language as the foundation of society are the limits that institutions exercise on language games, which “restricts the inventiveness of the players in making their moves.”67 Institutions exist out of invisible borders within which, as agreed upon by a certain majority, you have to behave accordingly. Do not speak loud in a church, do not speak when someone else is speaking, do not speak if
63 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: 15 64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.: 17 66 Ibid.: 14-17 67 Ibid.
you are a woman (as agreed upon by some majority) are examples of (social) institutions. However, Lyotard does away with this argument, because these
institutional limits are subject to change themselves, even the established ones. “[T]he limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without.”68 The institution of institutions and their continuation to exist seems to be a dance of specialists of said institutions through a score of language.69
I would like to go back here to the citation of Lyotard I inserted on page 18 in which he describes the postmodern artist or writer as a philosopher, as someone who denies consensus that would make possible the sharing of the unattainable. It reminds me of the opening paragraphs of Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama: “It is the characteristic of
philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of representation. [And] if philosophy is to remain true to the law of its own form, as the representation of truth and not as a guide to the acquisition of knowledge, the the exercise of this form –rather than its anticipation in the system– must be accorded due importance.”70 The crisis of narratives in postmodernity seems to be something that (art) historians cannot move beyond, they point it out but have no answer or solution as how to write and show (art) history differently. The core of this problem is perhaps best stated by Jameson in the foreword to The Postmodern Condition: “how to do without narratives by means of narrative itself?”71 Well we do not or cannot. That is the paradox of the postmodern condition. But perhaps rather than considering narratives in terms of truth or false or of trustworthy or not, we can further Lyotard’s paralogism consider narratives as form of
68 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, 1986: 17
69 I draw the understanding of institution based on agreement in this paragraph from what Searle calls a social
institution. Source: Miller, Seumas, "Social Institutions", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/social-institutions/>.
70 Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009: 27-28 71 Jameson, Fredric, 1986: xix
representation being constructed by shifting positions occupied by the language games
participants. Considering narratives as translation, as representation, as a method to re-arrange chaos, to move through society through language spread like philosophy across all disciplines, “Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.”72
In anticipation of the Intermezzo I would like to end this chapter by thinking of narratives as assemblages as well. Following Deleuze and Guattari in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus I understand narratives also as assemblages, as multiplicities, in the way they
understand books and consider them “unattributable”. “Writing,” they write, “has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.” And thus when perceiving something whole, like an exhibition one should be aware that it is a whole only you (can) see. The holes –the parts that go missing– created through translation, the flaws one sees in grand narratives, I think, do become interesting spaces that when challenged show its fallibility and perhaps when ruptured become entryways for other perspectives.
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Intermezzo
By consequence or Trayne of Thoughts, I understand that succession of one Thought to another, which is called (to distinguish it from Discourse in words) Mental Discourse. –Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, 1651
“This is a period of slacking – I refer to the color of times. From every direction we are being urged to put an end to experimentation, in the arts and elsewhere.”73 With these words Lyotard starts answering the (and his) question ‘what is postmodernism?’ in his essay “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” written three years after he wrote The Postmodern Condition. After these opening words Lyotard begins a list of reactions to the chaotic or unstructured nature of postmodern art and society. One of the reactions he recalls is the following: “I have read in a French weekly that some are displeased with Mille Plateaux [by Deleuze and Guattari] because they expect, especially when reading a work of philosophy, to be gratified with a little sense..”74
Deleuze and Henri Bergson inform a large part of how I look at and understand the world. Or, at times, when I think about the world, I will later read a resonating paragraph in a text by one of those writers. This is to say, that I align with them in some of my thoughts, but also that I am not yet educated enough in their thought that I recognize it every time I think alike or differently. While studying dOCUMENTA(13), the “Brain” and Christov-Bakargiev’s non-concept and repeatedly reading about the discourse of interconnectedness and global structures I had to think, at times, of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia –specifically their idea of the rhizome, a concept through which they introduce the
73 Lyotard, Jean-François, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?,” 1986: 71 74 Ibid.
book. I do not understand exactly what the rhizome is (still). In the book Deleuze and Guattari use it as “a model (a new map) for apprehending the constitution and reception of a book,”75 and I think it also provides a way of looking at the world. In their introduction they write “contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorializaiton of the book, which in turn
deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can).”76
As I understand Deleuze and Guattari, books, and the world, in themselves are words, platforms, cases or shells perhaps, and their contents are assemblages constituted by multiple subjects through heterogeneous connections. By looking at the world as an assemblage, by looking at the world as an unrepresentable thing, it is something we all know and that we all contribute to whether that is actively and consciously or just by being or thinking, from time to time, that we are on this planet.
Amsterdam is a rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, and so is the brain and memory. “A rhizome is made of plateaus. [And, a] plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end.”77 They take an understanding of the word plateau from Gregory Bateson
as “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.”78 “What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicates with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in
75 Clinton, Dan. “Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. "Rhizome," in A Thousand Plateaus.
annotation by Dan Clinton (Theories of Media, Winter 2003),” University of Chicago, February 14, 2016 <http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/deleuzerhizome.htm>
76 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 1987: 11 77 Ibid.: 21
such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus.”79 A rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari is not a tracing, it is a map, it has multiple entryways, perhaps also as to how one can interpret it. dOCUMENTA(13) is a world, a micro-cosmos, as well as that it is a book, or at least part of dOCUMENTA(13) is in book form: the catalogues. dOCUMENTA(13) had three catalogues, or three books that together comprised the exhibition catalogue(s).80
I do not want to apply the concept of the rhizome to documenta, as I have not come across a reference to the rhizome by Christov-Bakargiev in relation to dOCUMENTA(13), but I am also aware that there is a way in my writing that might suggest a kind of metaphysical perspective on and experiencing of the world, art and dOCUMENTA(13) specifically, in this thesis reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari thought. Initially I left this unexplained because, but after Miriam van Rijsingen suggested I look into Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on the smooth and striated space, also a chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, I found a platform, a case or shell in which I could explain why I chose to write about dOCUMENTA(13) from first-hand experience while being in different locations –none of them one of physical dOCUMENTA(13) locations (other than the books)– in a logbook format. This Intermezzo functions thus a textual
acknowledgement of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and their influence on me. One of the heterogeneous assembles that I am part of, with or without me being aware of Deleuze and Guattari these thoughts about experience within my mind, through my body and how to translate that into language is where this thesis began. I “proce[ded] from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing,”81 like Wiener’s piece in the Fridericianum.
79 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 1987: 22 80 Ibid.: 4-5
Smooth and striated space are two different kinds of spaces, or perhaps rather two different ways of perceiving (moving through) space. Despite their different natures, Deleuze and Guattari, also state that they “exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space.”82 Deleuze and Guattari provide different exemplary models to explain the spaces and their mixtures. I will only discuss one of them, the maritime model, as I considered my journey to dOCUMENTA(13) as if it were a sailing journey. Additionally, the sea “is the smooth space par excellence, and yet [it] was the first to encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation.”83 So, the sea can be both spaces, it is a place where both spaces confront, it becomes a place where one can travel without going anywhere physically.
“In striated space, lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another. In smooth space, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the
trajectory.”84 In smooth space points adapt to the journey, which is susceptible to change through external influences; “the inside space confirms to outside space: tent, igloo, boat.”85 For me a sea space, or navigating dOCUMENTA(13) as though a ship at sea came perhaps from a
personal and cultural relation with water. Having grown up close to the North Sea and spent time on sailboats in the Netherlands, a country that has always lived with the water (being located below sea level), I have experienced the affect of water and found it a useful space, it’s perpetual movement and uncontrollability, to set a space for this journey of the mind.
If I were to choose one type of space through which I travelled, perceived and wrote about dOCUMENTA(13) it is the smooth space. I started the journey by looking at the catalogs
82 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 1987: 475 83 Ibid.: 479
84 Ibid.: 478 85 Ibid.
and browsing the dOCUMENTA(13) website. I found these locations, but I did not look for them. Throughout my journey I did not look for anything, I found places. I would read and study my sources with various intensities, let my eye and mind rest when something caught my
attention or recognition. The surroundings of my real geographical location would also influence my visits to dOCUMENTA(13). If I had to get off the “L”86 I had to close the guidebook; if I was early for class I could “go” to documenta for a bit before class started (with that day’s reading assignments in my mind!); if my father went to a conference lecture I would find a café in Tokyo and go to documenta from there; and, of course, I would make time to go to
documenta. My movement was one of assemblages as well. The artworks by themselves are important, but for me they became important mostly because of the route that led me there. The journey that is different for everyone, that is not possible for everyone and unknown to many, too. I noticed the things I noticed because of the external factors mentioned above as well as the internal contexts I’d brought with me. Names of artists that I already knew stood out to me and I would linger or move on because of that. If something was blue, I would look longer as I have something with blue works of art. If works were not (solely) visual, I would try to imagine their scent, sound, smell or touch, and so forth. What follows is an assemblage of experiences caught in the intellectual as well as emotional currents of processing perceptions in my mind.
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AND: a logbook
A journey through dOCUMENTA(13) from and to the middle (of, the middle of, the middle of…)
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A logbook is a book in which moments and events that have happened over the course of a certain amount of time are documented. The term logbook originates from the chip log, an instrument (made from a piece of wood, sometimes also called a Dutchman’s log) that was used on board of ships in the 15th and 16th century to calculate the ship’s speed. The chip log, attached to the log line (a robe with equally distanced knots in it), was thrown across the railing behind the ship. Then, over the duration of 28 seconds (30 seconds -2 seconds in which the log was thrown and a sand glass turned upside down) the amount of knots that went over board were counted –with these numbers the speed was calculated. The speed and events, such as changing weather conditions, encounters or other un-expectancies that happened during the passing of the day, were documented in a book: the logbook.i
As such the logbook is a body that contains the passing of time and through space.
Log its night nur das englische Wort für ein großes Stück Holz das von einem Baum abgeschlagen word und das in seinen Jahresringen klimatische Veränderungen dokumentiert, ein Log ist auch ein Fahrtmesser, mit dem man früher die Geschwindigkeit von Schiffen bestimmte. Beide Bedeutungen, die aus die Zeit und das Reisen verweisen, kommen in dem Wort >Logbuch< zusammen, das für die tägliche Aufzeichnung der Fortbewegung eines Schiffs [engl. vessel] steht. Ein vessel wiederum ist nicht nur ein Gefährt, das auf dem Wasser schwimmt, indem es dieses verdrängt, sondern auch sind Gefäß, das Wasser -ebenso wie viele andere molekulare Aggregate- in sich aufnehmen kann.ii
A note:
I have never been to dOCUMENTA(13) or any other documenta. I have, in fact, never been to Kassel before, nor have I been to Kabul and Cairo. Banff I have been to when I was 4 years old; I remember seeing black bears in Banff.
dOCUMENTA(13) is also the 1st documenta I have encountered and read about.
I have been thinking and writing about dOCUMENTA(13) for two years in Amsterdam, several places (but mainly on trains) in Japan and in Chicago and sometimes in Los Angeles.
There is and always will remain a certain distance between me and dOCUMENTA(13), time-based, geographically and conceptually, and it is this distance, a hole, that invited me to undertake this journey.
WH: You appear to be preoccupied with the notion of distance, whether in a critical, emotive or geographical sense.
CCB: Yes, exactly. What is distance? What does it mean to be
a witness? What does it mean to be embodied in something? What does it mean to be in one place and not in another – in Kassel but not in Kabul?iii
(Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in an interview with Wes Hill in Art & Australia. Vol. 49, no. 4, 2012)
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