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