project proposal: documents>documenta 12: magazines

documents>documenta 12: a research project

The research project will investigate the discursive orientation of contemporary avant-garde art via a comparative study of the contents and forms of the early surrealist ‘review’ Documents (1929-1939), edited by the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille and the Documenta 12: Magazine project (2005-2007), an on-line editorial database-cum-magazine (‘magazine of magazines’) developed by the curators of Documenta 12 (2007) as an extension of and supplement to the sited exhibition. A caveat: although both projects function as delivery systems for information and discourse about art and culture, and so share a number of intellectual and formal features, for all practical purposes Documents and the Documenta 12: Magazine are very different beasts and so are fundamentally incomparable. Each is a product of a specific social, political and thus cultural context; each has a different set of critical objectives and different forms and modalities of expression. Yet, the variances between these publication projects are also telling: they reveal significant transformations in the frameworks within which a critical art practice is carried out, via media-based practice or otherwise. Hence, the study will be attentive not only to changing conceptualizations of avant-garde art itself, especially as it makes use of mass media tools, but also to the nature and kinds of political practice available to citizens of the 20th and 21st centuries. In sum: the research project will consider changes in media platforms, shifts in the creative and critical use of information/media technologies (as these changes mark or instantiate shifts in discourse about political reality), transformations in aesthetic dispositions, and new modes of political expression and participation.

Preliminary bibliography:
Baker, Simon “Doctrines [The Appearance of Things],” in Dawn Ades + S.Baker (eds.) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, London + Cambridge,Mass.: Hayward Gallery + MIT Press, 2006.

Bourraiud, Nocolas Postproduction ~ Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Lucas + Sternberg, 2002.

Bürger, Peter Theory of the Avant-Garde, tranl. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Documenta 12: Magazine Project http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/index.php

Foster, Hal, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

Micheal Hardt + Anthony Negri Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000

Hayles, N. Katherine “Speech, Writing, Code: Three World Views,” My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago + London, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

“Narrating Bits: Encounters Between Humans and Intelligent Machines,” Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7&projectId=6 (2005)

Manovich, Lev The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Webber, Andrew J. “Manifestations: The Public Sphere,” The European Avant-garde 1900-1940, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004.



Cheryl Simon, February 2008

baker entry

Simon Baker “Doctrines [The Appearance of Things],” in Dawn Ades + S.Baker (eds.) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, London + Cambridge,Mass.: Hayward Gallery + MIT Press, 2006.

Simon Baker discusses the distinctive editorial rationale and design principles at work in George Batailles’ review, Documents’. Conceived as “a war machine against received ideas,” the journal adopted a radically disjunctive format to suit its deconstructive aims. Documents was full of ‘documents’: of rare coins and of sculptural and ethnographic objects, of pictures taken from the newspaper, from films and museum archives, pictorial documents of contemporary art works art photography, poetry and philosophy, discussions of music and a wide range of scholarship concerned with the appearance of a wide variety of things. The contents were diverse and the relationship between image and text informal—‘formless’ to borrow the term Bataille himself used to describe his critical organizational attitude. Images and texts were illogical in their positioning; categories of things and genres of representation were set against each other to disrupt the logic of the sequence, rather than in combination for illustrative purposes. Disciplinary boundaries were transgressed, cultural hierarchies demolished. More akin to the logic of a medieval curiosity cabinet than the modern museum display, these odd juxtapositions meant to destabilize the positive associations between meanings and categories that modern representational practices of all kinds made a habit of promoting. Bataille’s methods were deliberate and purposeful in their rejection of the predominating tendency in representational practice of the time—in popular and avant-garde circles alike—to find visual correspondences and poetic equivalents between ideas and things.