SEPTEMBER 18 /
INTRODUCTORY NOTES WITH REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL READING AND LISTENING
Tom Holert: The Short Century
In 1959, standing before the assembled participants of the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome, Frantz Fanon urged those in attendance to reach out to “the people” where it is hardest to do so: “We must join them in the fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape … It is to the zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come.” The question raised by “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,” which opened in February at Munich’s Museum Villa Stuck, is exactly how to comprehend and represent this “zone of occult instability.” The goal demands a new cartography for a knotty complex of intellectual, political, and popular discourses, to demonstrate, for example, how cultural and political concerns converged to effectively rupture colonial hegemony. A rupture, furthermore, that could mean a (provisional) rejection of the democratic principles of European modernity, even if these principles provided the background legitimation for colonization itself.
Georges Adéagbo (* 1942, Cotonou, Benin)
“I walk, I think, I see, I pass, I come back, I pick up the objects that attract me, I go home, I read things, I make notes, I learn.” Thus Georges Adéagbo has described his working process. Each of his installations is made up of elements brought back from walks first begun in African and completed with fragments gleaned from walks in the cities where he exhibits. >> Art as Encounter
Brushing History against the Grain: Samson Kambalu and Vincent Meessen
SK: When I first met Okwui Enwezor in New York, I was doing a fellowship at Yale looking at psychogeography in the work of William Blake. It was at Yale that I stumbled on the archive of the Italian Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, which had been sold to the university under controversial circumstances. When Okwui invited me to Venice, I included a proposal to take Sanguinetti’s archive, which I had photographed in full, back to Italy. There I shared it with the public in the Situationist spirit of the potlatch. Sanguinetti sued us, but he lost the case as his archive encouraged free copyright. I came across the work of Vincent Meessen at the Belgian Pavilion then and realized we crossed paths through Situationism—him toward Africa and me toward the West. History Without A Past is an inevitable pairing.
Let there be Lumbung, tv space: Charles Esche, Lecture from 1:47:00
Charles Esche: The First Exhibition of the Twenty-First Century—Lumbung 1 (documenta fifteen), What Happened, and What It Might Mean Two Years On
It is obviously a little dramatic to claim Lumbung 1 (documenta fifteen) as the first exhibition of the twenty-first century. This milestone is drawn from the Western Christian calendar and as such it is completely arbitrary and culturally specific. Still, art history and other fields have a track record of using the turn of a century to signify a break with the past and the start of a new lineage.1 As a provocation then, I wish to suggest that Lumbung 1 in Kassel challenged a paradigm of contem- porary art that was built on modernism. It pointed instead towards a different horizon, not only for the forms of art it presented but also for its institutional frameworks. In doing so, it sought to shift the conceptual and experiential basis of relations between artworks and the diversity of visitors that might see an exhibition.
ruangrupa is the Artistic Direction of the fifteenth edition of documenta. The Jakarta-based artists’ collective has built the foundation of their documenta fifteen on the core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). lumbung as an artistic and economic model is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation, and is embodied in all parts of the collaboration and the exhibition.
Ronald Kolb -- documenta fifteen’s Lumbung: The Bumpy Road on the Third Way: Fragmentary Thoughts on the Threats and Troubles of Commons and Commoning in Contemporary Art and Knowledge Production
Women on Aeroplanes // Inflight Magazines
Based on a framework that is necessarily constantly evolving and multiplying, Women on Aeroplanes aims to gain a broader understanding of what independence and interdependence means, enabling us to see and understand the presence of a shattered, yet powerful, women-informed network. Looking closely at the long history of transatlantic networks and the struggles for liberation, predating the process of independence on the African continent (and elsewhere), the project explores how women were always central to such networks and struggles, in which they played multiple roles. Their stories are however hardly told and their faces remain widely invisible. Women on Aeroplanes aims to not only frame their various and heterogeneous contributions, politically and artistically, but also create new parameters and premises of narratives. To recall the notion of independence today necessarily means to address the gap between formal independence and a process of decolonisation that was simultaneously national and intranational, transnational and international and which remains, in many ways, incomplete.
The project's title is borrowed loosely from Kojo Laing's critically acclaimed second novel Woman of the Aeroplanes, written in 1988. With its deconstructive syntax, the novel sets the tone for a historical narrative, in which subordinate subject-object relations are negated. Laing’s method of speculative fiction writing can be seen as a making-of-theory using other means. As a reference point, it opens a pathway to a new grammar, a kind of guideline for re-visiting and re-writing history and to remember how things can be changed.
Some basics, classics, names, reading list:
1. Pre-Contemporary Foundations (Modernism to 1960s)
John Berger – Ways of Seeing
A classic, short, and critical introduction to visual culture and ideology. >>> here as a pdf
Clement Greenberg – “Modernist Painting” (1960)
For understanding formalist modernism and its limits.
Linda Nochlin – “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971)
A key feminist critique of art historical structures.
2. The Break: Postmodernism & Conceptual Art (1960s–1980s)
Lucy Lippard – Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object
A primary source collection on conceptual art.
Rosalind Krauss – “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979)
A foundational text for postmodern spatial practices.
Amelia Jones – Body Art/Performing the Subject
For performance, identity, and feminist theory.
3. Global Contemporary (1990s–Today)
Okwui Enwezor (ed.) – The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994
A landmark in global contemporary curating.
T.J. Demos – The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis
On migration, representation, and ethics.
Claire Bishop – Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
A critical take on social practice and participation.
4. Contemporary Art and Theory
Hal Foster – The Return of the Real
On the shift from postmodernism to contemporary practices.
Ariella Azoulay – Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
A radical rethinking of archives, photography, and historical narration.
Tina Campt – Listening to Images
On black visuality, fugitivity, and quiet forms of resistance.
5. Contemporary Art in Practice
Hans Ulrich Obrist – Ways of Curating
A conversational and accessible entry into curatorial thinking.
Michela Alessandrini — Curatorial Archives in Curatorial Practices
Grant Kester – Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
On dialogical aesthetics and socially engaged art.
Tania Bruguera – Arte Útil (online archive)
For activist and useful art practices.
6. How to Narrate History (Meta-Historiography)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot – Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
A brilliant, concise book on how history is constructed and erased.
Hayden White – The Content of the Form
On narrative structures in historical writing.
Saidiya Hartman – Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
A poetic, archival, and radical method of historical narration.
Jennifer Bloomer – Architecture and the Text
On textuality, gender, and layered meaning.
More on feminist approaches (oria.no > available online)
Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock — Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, 2020
Pollock, Griselda — Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting, 2022
Methodologies
André Malraux — Museum without Walls, 1974