[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":4221},["ShallowReactive",2],{"navigation":3,"blog-page":78,"blogs":88},[4],{"title":5,"path":6,"stem":7,"children":8,"page":77},"Blog","/blog","blog",[9,13,17,21,25,29,33,37,41,45,49,53,57,61,65,69,73],{"title":10,"path":11,"stem":12},"100 Years to the 1st Zionist Congress in Basel","/blog/100-years-zionist-congress","blog/100 years zionist congress",{"title":14,"path":15,"stem":16},"Hundred and Twenty Years After the First Zionist Congress in Basel","/blog/120-years-after-the-first-zionist-congress","blog/120 Years after the first Zionist Congress",{"title":18,"path":19,"stem":20},"1897, The First Zionist Congress","/blog/1897-the-first-zionist-congress","blog/1897, The First Zionist Congress",{"title":22,"path":23,"stem":24},"Breaking Down the Boundaries between Art and Life","/blog/breaking_down_the_boundaries_between_art_and_life_chapters","blog/Breaking_Down_the_Boundaries_between_Art_and_Life_chapters",{"title":26,"path":27,"stem":28},"Empathy, Direct Experience, Violence and Will","/blog/empathy-direct-experience-violence-and-will","blog/Empathy, Direct Experience, Violence and Will",{"title":30,"path":31,"stem":32},"Illustrations from the Social History of Reading","/blog/illustrations-from-the-social-history-of-reading","blog/Illustrations from the Social History of Reading",{"title":34,"path":35,"stem":36},"Mach versus Boltzmann","/blog/mach-versus-boltzmann","blog/Mach versus Boltzmann",{"title":38,"path":39,"stem":40},"Notes on the Open Public Library","/blog/notes-on-the-opl-hamburg","blog/Notes on the OPL Hamburg",{"title":42,"path":43,"stem":44},"On the Jewish Metaphysics of Death","/blog/on-the-jewish-metaphysics-of-death","blog/On the Jewish Metaphysics of Death",{"title":46,"path":47,"stem":48},"The Open Library, Graz - Location #1 - Terminal Point","/blog/the-open-public-library-graz-location-no.-1-terminal-point","blog/The Open Public Library Graz, Location No. 1 Terminal Point",{"title":50,"path":51,"stem":52},"The Open Public Library, Graz 1991","/blog/the-open-public-libray-graz-1991","blog/The Open Public Libray, Graz 1991",{"title":54,"path":55,"stem":56},"The Outdoor Exhibition Space Munich - San Francisco","/blog/the-outdoor-exhibition-space-munich-san-francisco","blog/The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco",{"title":58,"path":59,"stem":60},"The Outdoor Exhibition Space\nMunich - San Francisco Questions & Answers\n","/blog/the-outdoor-exhibition-space-munich-san-francisco-qanda","blog/The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco Q&A",{"title":62,"path":63,"stem":64},"The Sick Soul IV - An Auditorium for Film, a Runway for Fashion and a Stage for Music Performance","/blog/the-sick-soul-iv","blog/The Sick Soul IV",{"title":66,"path":67,"stem":68},"The Train Library","/blog/the-train-library","blog/The Train Library",{"title":70,"path":71,"stem":72},"Variants of Aesthetic Collectivism","/blog/variants-of-aesthetic-collectivism-2009","blog/Variants of Aesthetic Collectivism 2009",{"title":74,"path":75,"stem":76},"Zionism as Separatism","/blog/zionism-as-seperatism","blog/zionism as Seperatism",false,{"id":79,"title":80,"body":81,"description":82,"extension":83,"links":81,"meta":84,"navigation":85,"path":6,"seo":86,"stem":7,"toc":85,"__hash__":87},"pages/blog.yml","Latest Articles",null,"Latest texts concerning public projects.","yml",{},true,{"title":80,"description":82},"px__LamPpIP67Tw5p4MU7Oudv-99nI21HrLezf8G79U",[89,488,587,704,779,1444,1530,1570,2076,2432,2491,3189,3233,3395,3520,3749,3869],{"id":90,"title":26,"author":81,"body":91,"caption":81,"date":459,"description":460,"extension":461,"image":462,"meta":463,"minRead":484,"navigation":85,"path":27,"seo":485,"stem":28,"toc":486,"__hash__":487},"blog/blog/Empathy, Direct Experience, Violence and Will.md",{"type":92,"value":93,"toc":427},"minimark",[94,102,107,112,119,123,129,132,136,139,143,146,150,153,160,166,169,172,176,180,183,188,193,199,205,208,212,215,218,225,229,233,236,239,243,246,249,252,256,259,262,266,269,272,275,277,281,285,288,291,295,298,301,305,308,311,315,318,321,327,331,334,337,340,347,351,362,365,368,372,375,380,383,386,389,393,400,403,408,411],[95,96,97],"p",{},[98,99,101],"em",{"style":100},"; font-size: 24px; color: gray; line-height: 8px; ","The Early Phase of Italian Modernism (1880-1920)",[103,104,106],"h2",{"id":105},"part-i-general-remarks-on-the-proposed-exhibition","Part I: General Remarks on the Proposed Exhibition",[108,109,111],"h3",{"id":110},"introduction","Introduction",[95,113,114,115,118],{},"The following text is a preliminary proposal for an exhibition about Italian modernism that Clegg & Guttmann are planning for Lia Rumma Gallery in Milano. The ideas mentioned in the proposal are tentative and subject to change; the main reason for writing the proposal at this early stage is the need to begin a concrete discussion about the planned exhibition. The recent Clegg & Guttmann installation in the Kunstmuseum Basel on the topic ",[98,116,117],{},"120 Years to the First Zionist Congress in Basel"," may be used as a rough guide for understanding the show we propose. The comparison with the Basel show is merely a heuristic, though; the projected exhibition at Lia Rumma Gallery will likely differ from the Basel exhibition in significant ways.",[108,120,122],{"id":121},"a-schematic-description-of-the-planned-exhibition","A schematic description of the planned exhibition",[95,124,125,128],{},[98,126,127],{},"Early Italian Modernism"," (the title will probably change) is planned for the ground floor of the gallery (alternatively, for all the three floors.) The exhibition will consist of six to twelve small environments spread throughout the gallery; each of them will be a constellation of objects, photographic portraits and furniture ensembles that represent a context where one of the aspects of early Italian modernism was developed – an artist studio, a futurist sound studio, a socialist club etc. The environments are supposed to belong to specific individuals or groups who contributed to early Italian modernism; each is dated and localized – the office of Leonardo Magazine in Firenze 1903, for example - indicating that the relevant events took place in a certain time frame in a particular part of Italy. A schematic map of Italy should be drawn with chalk on the gallery floor so the different environments can be placed thereon according to their locations.",[95,130,131],{},"Each of the environments is based on a specific photograph or a painting; the objects in the environments will be partly period pieces and partly 'schematic' representations made of MDF. Some of the environments will include reading materials – newspapers, books etc.",[108,133,135],{"id":134},"italian-modernism-as-an-operatic-artwork","Italian Modernism as an 'operatic' artwork",[95,137,138],{},"The main source of information about the protagonists and their activities are MP3 players attached to each environment that contain recordings of quotations of the protagonists, samples of their writings or music and texts about them. The audio-files will be playing simultaneously in order to create a 'sound environment' with a musical logic. When viewers approach nearby an MP3 player, they will be able to focus on the individual recordings it contains.",[108,140,142],{"id":141},"re-animated-portraits","'Re-animated' portraits",[95,144,145],{},"The exhibition will also include portraits of the different protagonists. These portraits are based on black and white photographs that the artists 're-animate' – the photographs are enlarged and printed in color in order give them the character of Clegg & Guttmann portraits. The artists developed the technique in order to allow the viewers to immerse themselves in the portraits of a highly impressive group of young Italians that brought the early modernist culture to Italy.",[108,147,149],{"id":148},"italian-modernism-as-art-essay","Italian Modernism as 'art-essay'",[95,151,152],{},"The projected exhibition belongs to a group of Clegg & Guttmann installations the artists refer to as 'art essays'; the artists have been constantly developing new strategies for presenting relatively complex bodies of ideas in that form. The reason behind the persistent interest of the artists in this category, that included some of their most ambitious works to date, is twofold:",[95,154,155,159],{},[156,157,158],"strong",{},"(i)"," The immersive qualities of the visual work of art help sustain the viewer's attention during complex, non-conventional presentations of intricate historical and philosophical material. The texts, audio files and objects are designed to appeal to the different mental faculties – a combination of sensual, intellectual and emotive stimulations that deepens the engagement with the topic.",[95,161,162,165],{},[156,163,164],{},"(ii)"," The intense intellectual engagement the art essay typically requires tends to transform the aesthetic experience; the background information on the objects in view and the role they play in the historical processes bestow on them a distinct type of aura that deepens the viewer's engagement and gives rise to an aesthetic experience of a new kind.",[95,167,168],{},"Clegg & Guttmann are, needless to say, far from being the only artists interested in art-essays. In fact, some of the legendary shows at Lia Rumma gallery featured important practitioners of the art essay genre who developed in those occasions ground-breaking strategies for essaying with art – Kosuth, de Dominicis, Kabakov and Mucha, for example.",[170,171],"hr",{},[103,173,175],{"id":174},"part-ii-on-early-modernism","Part II: On Early Modernism",[108,177,179],{"id":178},"the-need-for-a-better-understanding-of-early-modernism","The need for a better understanding of early modernism",[95,181,182],{},"The starting point of the present proposal is that there is an urgent need for a better understanding of early modernism. Despite the attention given to topic, we believe that the contemporary discourse about modernism suffers from systematic misunderstandings that stem from uncritical acceptance of various dogmas; as a result, the meaning of the crucially important concept is consistently misconstrued.",[95,184,185,187],{},[156,186,158],{}," The most pervasive misunderstanding is that modernism was a rationalist, scientific world-view. In fact, the modernist movement began as a revolt against reason; all of the important and influential early modernist philosophers - Schopenhauer, Mach, Bergson, William James, Nietzsche and Charles Pierce - were highly critical of the exaggerated role assigned to the intellect and argued for the centrality of the will, direct intuition and the capacity for empathy. That does not mean that modernism was anti-scientific - it was a critique of science in the name of science.",[95,189,190,192],{},[156,191,164],{}," The idea that modernism expressed an uncritical infatuation with technology, metropolitan life, industrialization and science is widely assumed to be a truism. In fact, most of the early modernists had an ambiguous relation to the modern lifestyle and sought to reform it.",[95,194,195,198],{},[156,196,197],{},"(iii)"," Another common mistake is that the modernists had a disdainful attitude towards the past and a delirious belief in the future. As a matter of historical fact, many of the early modernists were involved in an array of revivalist movements that studied 'primitive' culture, the Middle Ages or even the Baroque as a way of transcending the cognitive limitations of their day and age.",[95,200,201,204],{},[156,202,203],{},"(iv)"," The contemporary tendency to associate modernism with abstraction misses an important point: To the extent that they wanted to rid their art of representational content, the early modernists were motivated by the desire to come closer to the immediate, concrete reality of colors, lines, shapes and materials.",[95,206,207],{},"The dogmatic belief in rationality and scientific reasoning was typical of the second, post-war phase of modernism; after WWI, many associated the violent nationalist mentality that led to the war with the irrational exuberance of the early modernists who enthusiastically supported it. The wide spread tendency to blame the revolt against reason for the horrors of the Great War swung the pendulum in the opposite direction - it created an aversion towards anything mystical, spiritual or irrational; the result –a dogmatic, categorical belief in scientific rationality - was at the core of the new version of modernism that developed in the inter war years.",[108,209,211],{"id":210},"the-politics-of-the-early-modernist-avant-garde","The politics of the early modernist Avant-garde",[95,213,214],{},"The pervasive view that the modernist Avant-garde was an integral part of the culture of the Left is yet another example of the stubborn unsupported dogmas that blind us to the true intellectual history of early twentieth century. In fact, the division between Left and Right as we know it today did not yet exist until the Russian revolution and the end of WWI; early modernism developed relative to an earlier world view and thus cannot be easily classified as belonging to either camp. If anything, many of the early modernists were decadent aesthetes who were staunchly a-political; after WWI some of them became right-wingers – Marinetti and Kirchner for example – while others supported the Bolshevik Left.",[95,216,217],{},"In Italy, the dogmatic argument that fascists cannot be modernists was particularly harmful; it obscured the central contributions of right wing Italian philosophers, writers, political theorists and visual artists to early modernism. Marinetti, for example, was, indeed, a fascist whose political and aesthetic ideas were tightly interconnected; does that fact call into question the veracity or authenticity of his modernism? Is there any doubt that his futurist manifesto provided one of the most influential and internationally celebrated formulations of early modernist ideology? In fact, the Italian Avant-garde poet participated in the events that led to the emergence of early modernism in Paris; he took part in the discussions of the cubist group that met in Pateau; he corresponded with Tristan Tzara and other Parisian Dadaists; due to his influence, futurist groups were founded around the world that brought early modernist culture to places like Czechoslovakia Georgia, and Nigeria. The reservation about Marinetti's modernist credentials is not supported by historical facts.",[95,219,220],{},[221,222],"img",{"alt":223,"src":224},"Florence, offices of Leonardo Magazine","/blog/Leonardo-HFQ-Florence.jpg",[103,226,228],{"id":227},"part-iii-direct-experience-empathy-violence-and-will-four-early-modernist-themes","Part III: Direct Experience, Empathy, Violence and Will: Four Early Modernist Themes",[108,230,232],{"id":231},"direct-experience","Direct Experience",[95,234,235],{},"One of the complaints of the early modernists was that bourgeois culture functioned as a filter that led to a dull, distorted perception of the world. The revolt against reason sought to reverse or counteract this process by teaching people how to neutralize their reason and bring forth other cognitive relations to reality that will make it more resonant and engaging. The point was not to project one's subjective point of view on reality; quite to the contrary, the idea was that when one sets the concepts aside and engages directly in 'sense data' – with what one actually sees and hears – one might obtain access to a layer of important information that is usually suppressed and hidden from view.",[95,237,238],{},"Bergson argued that one of the victims of out over-intellectualized worldview was the perception of time. The French philosopher contrasted the 'mechanical' notion of time made of points that we are taught in school with 'duration' or the direct experience of time that was indivisible and forward looking. In the same years William James introduced the stream of consciousness as the basic object of psychology and proposed to investigate it 'in its own terms'. The two philosophers exerted important influence on Proust, Joyce, Woolf and other early modernist writers.",[108,240,242],{"id":241},"empathy","Empathy",[95,244,245],{},"In the social domain, the urban bourgeoisie were willing and able to 'filter out' the extraordinary poverty and misery surrounding them. In that period cities like Torino and Milano quintupled their population in less than fifty years, a process that resulted in a large segment of the population living in horrifying conditions. And yet there seemed to be a distinct lack of empathy for the victims of modernity. The rebels against reason blamed the same over-intellectualized world-view of the bourgeoisie for keeping urban misery from their view.",[95,247,248],{},"The idea created a shared ground between socialists who tried to 'open people's eyes' to the problems of the proletariat and decadent bohemians who wanted a more exciting world: Both were anti-bourgeois who tried to force people to take off their sunglasses and see their environment as it actually was.",[95,250,251],{},"Apart from its obvious social implications, the notion of empathy was useful also in the cognitive domain: In that context it signified the type of intense engagement generated by the neutralization of reason. Rodin's contemporary experiments with continuous drawings – when the eyes do not leave the subject and the hand draws automatically, as it were – were seen as proofs of the theory: when you keep concepts from view and focus only on the direct experience the results are often surprisingly life-like. In that context, too, neutralizing reason may lead to heightened empathy and the later, to an access to a new layer of facts.",[108,253,255],{"id":254},"the-will-as-a-central-concept-of-modern-philosophy","The will as a central concept of modern philosophy",[95,257,258],{},"Schopenhauer defined the core of modern philosophy as the insight that \"all our ideas are nothing but brain functions.\" According to his definition the philosophy of modern times calls into question any attempt to identify our internal representations with real, independently existing objects. The first philosopher to focus on these modern doubts was Descartes; in fact, the ability to doubt was central to his proof of the existence of the 'I'. Kant doubted the reality of the objects we perceive even further; he stipulated that we cannot have access to objects as they exist in and of themselves. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant but introduced the thesis that even though we have no way of knowing what lies beyond appearances we may identify a will behind them; even a wave that swells to its maximal size and then recedes displays such a will. Mach applied the modernist doubt to physics; he argued that even basic concepts like matter and energy have no independent reality. Science, in Mach's view, merely expresses the 'will to explain'; the concepts we use make the world intelligible to us. The will had a central role in Nietzsche's philosophy as well - he spoke about the will to power as the basis of his godless ethics; Bergson who was fascinated by the fact that sunflowers always turn their heads towards the sun concluded that they displayed a universal will to live; William James placed the will to believe despite insufficient evidence as the cornerstone of his pragmatist philosophy. The early modernists were overwhelmingly followers of Nietzsche, Bergson and William James; they believed that human beings were able to act autonomously despite their lack of access to the world beyond appearances due to their will.",[95,260,261],{},"Georges Sorel's political conception drew on the philosophy of Bergson and James; in this context too, the political theorist reasoned, the crucial notion is the will to believe. In so far as ideologies entice us to act, they should not be formulated as scientific theories as Marx required but in terms of evocative 'revolutionary myths' that make us throw caution to the wind. That was the basis of Sorel's syndicalism that profoundly influenced the revolutionary Left and the extreme Right. Indeed, both Lenin and Mussolini were deeply indebted to Sorel's idea of voluntarist politics. The rejection of science-based ideology and the assignment of a central role to the 'political will' made Sorel the godfather of modernist revolutionary politics.",[108,263,265],{"id":264},"the-legitimation-of-violence","The legitimation of violence",[95,267,268],{},"The most direct opposition to a life of reason was, of course, one ruled by brut force. Even if the early modernists did not initially intend to, their revolt against reason invariably turned into a joy of humiliating it and finally to a conception of life where violence played a constant part. For millions of young people in Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Austria and Russia, WWI turned that 'contrarian' attachment to violence into completely real challenge that they mostly enthusiastically accepted. The Futurists declared: \"We will glorify war —the world's only hygiene —militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.\" Many of them died in the war.",[95,270,271],{},"The war brutalized Italy. As Gramsci put it: \"Four years of war have rapidly changed the economic and intellectual climate. Vast workforces have come into being, and a deeply rooted violence in the relations between wage earners and entrepreneurs has now appeared in such an overt form that it is obvious to even the dullest onlooker. No less spectacular is the open manner in which the bourgeois state…shows itself to be the instrument of this violence.\"",[95,273,274],{},"The end of the war brought, in quick succession, a semi-revolutionary situation when hundred of factories were occupied and operated by syndicalist and socialist workers councils and a wave of vicious fascist counter-violence that culminated in the March of Rome of 1922.",[170,276],{},[103,278,280],{"id":279},"part-iv-italian-modernists","Part IV: Italian Modernists",[108,282,284],{"id":283},"early-modernism-in-italy","Early modernism in Italy",[95,286,287],{},"Italian modernism developed in the background of the intense industrialization, urbanization and political unrest of the period between the Risorgimento and the First World War. After the bourgeoisie completed their domination of every aspect of economic, social and political life, modernism emerged as an anti-bourgeois movement with philosophical, cultural and political wings. In the philosophical realm modernism was associated with the revolt against reason, which was associated with bourgeois ideology, and the celebration of intuition, empathy and the will. The period was also the first golden age of psychology that was researched both as a science of mental life – rational and irrational - and the means to control it. These ideas influenced the symbolist movement that aimed to produce on the viewer certain mental effects rather than represent nature. The same influences were evident in the political domain. The syndicalist politics of the same years sought to propagate revolutionary myths rather than rationally influence the masses. The rejection of 'bourgeois' dogmas – determinism, materialism etc. – had important consequences also in physics – field theory, quantum mechanics etc. - and mathematics – the 'subjective' foundations of probability theory, for example. In literature, early modernists tended towards the stream of consciousness techniques that were inspired by the writings of William James and Bergson.",[95,289,290],{},"Many of the conceptions of the early Italian modernists were influenced by the French discourse; the Italian versions were often highly original and distinctive, though, reflecting the conditions of the country. The next sections consist of short introductions to a partial list of the environments of the Italian early modernists that we plan to include in the exhibition.",[108,292,294],{"id":293},"the-florentine-offices-of-leonardo-magazine","The Florentine offices of Leonardo magazine",[95,296,297],{},"Giovani Papini led a group of young Florentine intellectuals that was known as the Italian pragmatists. Starting in 1903 the group began to publish a series of sophisticated magazines dedicated to philosophical and cultural issues. The first magazine was named Leonardo; it was followed by Lacerba and La Voce.",[95,299,300],{},"The Florentine pragmatists were influenced by British empiricism, positivism and pragmatism; when William James visited Italy and heard about his Italian disciples he initiated a meeting with Papini, Calderoni and the rest of the group; James' impression was highly positive – he said he wished his students at Harvard were as knowledgeable and sharp. Papini's crew met the futurists that gathered around Marinetti and after an initial tension, the two groups got along famously. In 1914, though, there was a split between the Florentine and Milanese. Both Papini and Marinetti became increasingly enamored with the fascist movement; the rightward turn of the former was reflected in the editorial policy of his magazines.",[108,302,304],{"id":303},"the-torino-school-of-mathematical-logic","The Torino school of mathematical logic",[95,306,307],{},"One of the founders of Leonardo was a talented young mathematician named Vailati who was studying mathematical logic in Torino. Among the eminent teachers who taught him during his studies in the Torino mathematics department were Peano and Volterra. The Torino school of logic was known worldwide for its insistence on rigorous axiomatization and formal proofs. The reasoning behind the axiomatic approach to mathematics was philosophical: The logicians of the Torino school insisted that mathematical theories should be defined in terms of precise axiom systems that filtered out the metaphysical assumptions that often crept in. Mathematicians do not have to assume that their theories were true; the truth of the axioms systems that formulate them should be left open; the mathematician's aim is to prove that if the axioms were true certain consequences followed.",[95,309,310],{},"Vailati wrote: \"It must be demanded of anybody who advances a thesis that he be capable of indicating the facts which according to him should obtain (or have obtained) if his thesis were true, and also their difference from other facts which according to him would obtain (or have obtained) if it were not true.\"",[108,312,314],{"id":313},"an-international-congress-on-probability-theory-in-rome","An international congress on probability theory in Rome",[95,316,317],{},"Bruno de Finetti studied mathematics and later became a professor in the University of Rome. His controversial, highly influential theory of probability is currently considered one of the most important treatments of the subject. De Finetti general philosophical point of view was influenced by the Italian Pragmatists and the Torino school: He followed the latter in his rejection of the idea that mathematical theories were objectively true. Instead, de Finetti recast probability theory in subjective terms, defining the probability of a proposition as the degree of belief an individual assigns to that proposition. Subjective probabilities reflect the betting behavior of the individual who assigns them - the way he or she would bet on various propositions. The sole requirement placed on the choice of subjective probabilities is internal consistency.",[95,319,320],{},"De Finetti's rejection of objective probabilities was motivated by a general anti-metaphysical spirit that stemmed, according to his explanation, from his hatred of 'bourgeois' metaphysics. Indeed, de Finetti saw a strong connection between his subjectivism and the anti-intellectualism of the fascists he admired. His 1931 paper \"Probabilismo\" for example closes with a remarkable pean to fascism that connected it to his philosophy of probability.",[322,323,324],"blockquote",{},[95,325,326],{},"\"But where my spirit rebelled most ferociously and clashed against the concept of 'absolute truth' was in the political field, and I could not say what part, surely very great, this sense of impatient revolt must have had in the development of my ideas. To be confronted by papier-mâché idols and a miserable political class that would have preferred Italy in ruins rather than failing (sacrilege!) to render due homage! Those delicious absolute truths that stuffed the demo-liberal brains! That impeccable rational mechanics of the perfect civilian regime of the peoples, conforming to the rights of man and various other immortal principles! October of '22! It seemed to me I could see them, these Immortal Principles, as filthy corpses in the dust. And with what conscious and ferocious voluptuousness I felt myself trampling them, marching to hymns of triumph, obscure but faithful Blackshirt.\"",[108,328,330],{"id":329},"the-grubicy-gallery-in-milano","The Grubicy gallery in Milano",[95,332,333],{},"The first Italian painting style that merited the designation modernist art was an odd combination of post-impressionism, symbolism and realism from the 1880's and 1890's that is often referred to as divisionism. Gauguin explained the symbolist painting style as a product of the desire of the artist to impact the viewer in a particular way rather than paint the world faithfully. With this aim in mind, Gauguin painted the earth in Sermon in the Afternoon bright red, for example; it did not matter to him whether or not the color corresponded to nature. Symbolism can be explained as a reflection of the modernist belief that the viewer has no access to the object in and of itself but only to its appearances. According to the modernist the idea of a faithful depictions stems from confusion; since the viewer never accesses the object itself what does the faithful depiction thereof mean? The only aspect of the painting process that has any relevance is the way the painted surface impacts the mind of the viewer.",[95,335,336],{},"In Italy the Scapigliatura movement developed an interesting confluence of symbolist and divisionist (re: post impressionist) ideas. The movement consisted of a group of bohemian artists and writers who were active in Milano from the 1880's. Grubicy, an art dealer and critic who opened a gallery in Milano, exhibited and supported some of the artists in the group. The art dealer spent a period of time in Paris where he became acquainted with the ideas of the symbolist movement and upon his return to Italy introduced them to Segantini and other talented local painters.",[95,338,339],{},"Segantini, like Van Gough, combined the symbolist use of color with intricate post-impressionist brushwork. Even though Segantini's paintings were not wild as Van Gough's, he shared the latter fascination with 'kinetic' surfaces that seemingly swirled and other 'psychoactive' effects that existed only in the mind of the beholder, emphasizing the symbolist ideology. The methods of the Scapigliatura to introduce motion into paintings influenced the futurists - Severini and Boccioni in particular.",[95,341,342,343,346],{},"Volpedo, another member of the Scapigliatura and one of Segantini closest friends introduced into his art the type of political subject matter used by 'realist' painters. The combination of realist subject matter, symbolist use of 'unnatural' colors and 'psychoactive' post-impressionist brushwork made paintings like ",[98,344,345],{},"The Forth Estate"," truly haunting.",[108,348,350],{"id":349},"an-austrian-café-in-trieste","An 'Austrian' café in Trieste",[95,352,353,354,357,358,361],{},"The writer Italo Svevo was born in Trieste to a Jewish father and an Italian mother. He completed ",[98,355,356],{},"Confessions of Zeno",", his masterpiece, when he was over sixty. The novel tells the story of Zeno, its narrator, who was instructed by his psychoanalyst to write his memoires as an aid to his therapy. Consequently, we learn about him only how he appeared to himself and his analyst rather than how he actually was; he emerges from the words that describe him like a portrait in a pointillist painting – an 'I' that construct itself in the manner described by Mach in his ",[98,359,360],{},"Analysis of Sensations",".",[95,363,364],{},"The book revolves around the narrator's tobacco addiction and his constant attempts to stop smoking: Whenever he manages to do so for a while he initially experiences such elation that he starts smoking again so he will be able to stop again and experience once more the state of mind he longs for.",[95,366,367],{},"Zeno was a close friend and early supporter of James Joyce when he lived in Trieste. Joyce, in turn, was instrumental in bringing Svevo's writings to the attention of publishers, editors and critics.",[108,369,371],{"id":370},"a-room-of-an-individual-anarchist","A room of an 'individual' anarchist",[95,373,374],{},"Novatore was an individual anarchist who embodied the irrational hyper-individualism of early modernism in its most violent, political form. A son of peasants from Liguria, he self-educated while toiling the fields, reading Nietzsche, Stirner and Baudelaire. If god was dead - as the first said - the only one you owed anything to was yourself – as the second did – and that meant living life to the fullest – like the third. Politically, Novatore was influenced by the revolutionary anarchism of Malatesta and Kropotkin.",[322,376,377],{},[95,378,379],{},"\"Revolution, he wrote, is the fire of our will and a need of our solitary minds; it is an obligation of the libertarian aristocracy. To create new ethical values. To create new aesthetic values. To communalize material wealth. To individualize spiritual wealth. Because we - violent cerebralists and at the same time passionate sentimentalists - understand and know that revolution is a necessity of the silent sorrow that suffers at the bottom and a need of the free spirits who suffer in the heights.\"",[95,381,382],{},"Novatore believed he had the right to expropriate from the rich what he needed for daily survival and justified the use of force.",[95,384,385],{},"From 1908 on Novatore embraced individualist anarchism. In 1910, he was charged with burning a local church and spent three months in prison but his guilt was never proven. A year later, the police accused him for theft and robbery. Renzo Novatore was involved in an anarchist-futurist-collective in La Spezia that he led (with Auro d'Arcola) and molded into an active militant anti-fascist Arditi del Popolo. In May 1919, the city of La Spezia fell under the control of a Revolutionary Committee and Novatore fought alongside the revolutionaries.",[95,387,388],{},"When Italy was about to be taken over by the fascists, Novatore went underground. In 1922, he joined the gang of the famous robber and anarchist Sante Pollastro. He was killed in an ambush near Genoa on November 29, 1922.",[108,390,392],{"id":391},"a-futurist-sound-studio","A Futurist sound studio",[95,394,395,396,399],{},"Russolo was an Italian futurist painter, composer a builder of experimental musical instruments and the author of the manifesto ",[98,397,398],{},"The Art of Noise",". He is often regarded as one of the first experimental composers. Russolo performed noise-music concerts in 1913–14 and continued them after World War I - notably in Paris in 1921. He designed and constructed noise-generating devices he named Intonarumori.",[95,401,402],{},"Explaining his musical approach, Russolo wrote:",[322,404,405],{},[95,406,407],{},"\"At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.\"",[95,409,410],{},"Russolo and Marinetti gave the first concert of Futurist music, complete with intonarumori, in 1914, causing a riot. The program comprised four \"networks of noises\" with the following titles:",[412,413,414,418,421,424],"ul",{},[415,416,417],"li",{},"Awakening of a City",[415,419,420],{},"Meeting of cars and airplanes",[415,422,423],{},"Dining on the terrace of the Casino",[415,425,426],{},"Skirmish in the oasis",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":430},"",2,[431,439,443,449],{"id":105,"depth":429,"text":106,"children":432},[433,435,436,437,438],{"id":110,"depth":434,"text":111},3,{"id":121,"depth":434,"text":122},{"id":134,"depth":434,"text":135},{"id":141,"depth":434,"text":142},{"id":148,"depth":434,"text":149},{"id":174,"depth":429,"text":175,"children":440},[441,442],{"id":178,"depth":434,"text":179},{"id":210,"depth":434,"text":211},{"id":227,"depth":429,"text":228,"children":444},[445,446,447,448],{"id":231,"depth":434,"text":232},{"id":241,"depth":434,"text":242},{"id":254,"depth":434,"text":255},{"id":264,"depth":434,"text":265},{"id":279,"depth":429,"text":280,"children":450},[451,452,453,454,455,456,457,458],{"id":283,"depth":434,"text":284},{"id":293,"depth":434,"text":294},{"id":303,"depth":434,"text":304},{"id":313,"depth":434,"text":314},{"id":329,"depth":434,"text":330},{"id":349,"depth":434,"text":350},{"id":370,"depth":434,"text":371},{"id":391,"depth":434,"text":392},"2018-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","Text for show \"Modernismo Italiano\" at Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan 2018","md","/blog/Luigi-Russolo-Cacophonous-Italian-Modernismo.jpg",{"head":464},{"meta":465},[466,469,472,475,478,481],{"name":467,"content":468},"keywords","Public Project, 2006, Italy, Modernism, Avant-garde, Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":471},"robots","index, follow",{"name":473,"content":474},"author","Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann",{"name":476,"content":477},"copyright","© 2018 Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":479,"content":480},"description","The text first appeared in the accompanying project documentation of the show \"Modernismo Italiano\" at Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan 2018",{"name":482,"content":483},"og:title","This is an OpenGraph title",25,{"title":26,"description":460},"true","O-jbdUNXIBHfrry_Fa8sbEhSlu_n973_m4BeCW37M4k",{"id":489,"title":14,"author":81,"body":490,"caption":81,"date":574,"description":575,"extension":461,"image":576,"meta":577,"minRead":584,"navigation":85,"path":15,"seo":585,"stem":16,"toc":486,"__hash__":586},"blog/blog/120 Years after the first Zionist Congress.md",{"type":92,"value":491,"toc":564},[492,494,498,501,504,508,511,514,517,521,524,527,530,534,537,541,544,547,551,554,557,561],[170,493],{},[103,495,497],{"id":496},"_1-the-installation-as-art-essay","1. The Installation as Art-Essay",[95,499,500],{},"The present installation of Clegg & Guttmann in the Kunstmuseum Basel is dedicated to a commemoration of the first Zionist Congress in Basel that took place 120 years ago in the year of 1897. The artists consider the project an art-essay on a historical topic where the aesthetic and the intellectual experience go hand in hand -- the spatial, sculptural and material qualities of the objects are meant to augment and enrich the historical material. On the other hand, the placement in the exhibition space of audio sources to present the relevant historical material induces a musical logic on the show, transforming it into an operatic environment.",[95,502,503],{},"The artists - Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann - are Israeli citizens who grew up in Jerusalem and are native speakers of Hebrew; the exhibition thus inevitably assumes also the character of a personal reflection. Both artists descend from Zionist families who immigrated to Palestine hoping to avoid being affected by anti-Semitism -- a threat they knew about only too well. Clegg's family left Corfu in the 1920's after a cruel, demoralizing pogrom made them realize they will never be safe there. Moshe Guttmann was on the Schindler's list; when the factory closed he was transferred to Mauthausen. Zipora Guttmann worked with a partisan unit until she was caught; after jumping from a moving train she spent the rest of the war pretending to be a Ukrainian peasant girl. The two met after the war; they were in their early twenties; they boarded a rickety boat that sailed from Genoa to Palestine; the British Navy intercepted the boat - at that time Britain was actively preventing the last remnants of the European Jewry from reaching a safe haven in Palestine - and my parents were imprisoned with the rest of the war weary passengers in a British concentration camp in Cyprus; they were able to arrive to Palestine only when the British left the Middle East abruptly in 1947. These autobiographic facts, needless to say, inform the artists' relation to the subject at hand.",[103,505,507],{"id":506},"_2-evolution-from-the-1997-exhibition","2. Evolution from the 1997 Exhibition",[95,509,510],{},"The present installation is based on an earlier exhibition that the artists created in the Kunsthalle Basel in 1997 -- the centennial year of the First Zionist Congress in Basel. In that context too the exhibition space was divided into several sub-environments that represented various aspects of Jewish existence during the period when Herzl formed the idea of Zionism: The bourgeois salon; the Heder -- the traditional, religious Jewish school; the synagogue; the Zionist Congress in Basel; the Viennese café; the kibbutz dining-room. In the earlier version the supplementary material was presented in vitrines as well; as it is the case with the present installation, the artists had also presented books, newspapers and publications that the viewers were meant to read. The earlier version included the large portraits presented in the present show -- photographic prints from black and white negatives that the artists 'reanimated' by coloring.",[95,512,513],{},"Despite these similarities, the present exhibition is a significantly different artwork. The inclusion of material presented through multi audio sources that operate simultaneously creates, as we mentioned, a musical environment that alters the experience of the viewers. The present exhibition also includes a new selection of primary sources -- the speeches in the Congress; religious texts like the bible and the Talmud; fin de siecle essays by Weininger and Krauss; later essays by Scholem and Hanah Arendt; texts of the Baal Shem Tov, Schnitzler and Zweig. This body of texts that the viewers may listen to as they move around in the exhibition space forms the 'intellectual skeleton' of the present installation.",[95,515,516],{},"It should be mentioned that each environment has two different audio files. The first one represents the dominant or official point of view and the second, a perspective of the opposition. Herzl's dominant point of view, for example, is contrasted with the criticism of Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am); orthodox, rationalist Judaism is supplemented with a text about Jewish mysticism; the standard legal text of the Talmud is set next to a supernatural story by the father of the Hassidic movement. Any attempt to understand the discourse surrounding Zionism must emphasize the multiple viewpoints, competing interests and the general culture of argumentation and debate that the protagonists all shared.",[103,518,520],{"id":519},"_3-historical-context-and-contemporary-reflections","3. Historical Context and Contemporary Reflections",[95,522,523],{},"In 2017 a number of other significant events related to Zionist and Israeli history were commemorated or acknowledged as well: The centennial of the Balfour declaration of 1917; seventy years since the UN voted in 1947 to partition Palestine and create two separate states for the Palestinians and the Jews; fifty years have passed since the Six Day War of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank of the Jordan river with its millions of Palestinian residents; 30 years since the Palestinian civil disobedience campaign of 1987 known as the first intifada. Each of these events sheds a different color on the entire history of Zionism; consequently, it is genuinely hard for the contemporary observer to avoid 'contaminating' the perception of earlier events with the hindsight knowledge of later ones. Difficult as it may be, we urge the viewer to focus on the original background of the Zionist conference; we hope that the present installation will be helpful in that regard; we would like to use the present occasion -- 120 years to the First Zionist Congress -- to emphasize the actual factors that created Zionism. We believe that regardless of one's views on various debates related to the movement -- the Palestinian problem, in particular -- one should understand the social origins of the movement and the spiritual strife of the Jewish individuals involved. These were after all the real reasons for the emergence of Zionism; later events, however important, should not be allowed to obscure this fact.",[95,525,526],{},"The fact that the congress took place before WWI makes it difficult to view it in the same terms as the protagonists from that period; the Great War changed the world so deeply that in its immediately aftermath everything that took place earlier seemed ancient, irrelevant and hopelessly old fashioned. Herzl and Nordau were liberal thinkers; after the war liberalism was under attack. The two believed that science and technology could solve the problems of mankind whereas the post-war protagonists had deep suspicion about the ethos of science and technology. The two Zionists believed in international diplomacy; in their view the world was determined by the intrigues of the Great Powers who were busy carving the world among themselves. Indeed, the political Zionism of Herzl and Nordau was a direct result of their general conception; if you wanted to make a difference in a world defined by imperialism, you had better lobby the Great Powers -- the Sultan, the Kaiser, the Czar, the King; the post war youths abhorred that point of view.",[95,528,529],{},"The Great War destroyed the world of Herzl and Nordau to smithereens. The Czar was toppled; the Bolsheviks took over. The Kaiser abdicated; the Social Democrats who replaced him proved weak and indecisive and soon enough Germany was divided between Nazis and communists. Austro-Hungary was split into a multitude of unstable nationalist regimes; the Turkish Empire collapsed and its spoils were divided between Britain and France. It was thus supremely ironic that the Balfour declaration, the greatest achievement of political Zionism, happened precisely at this point!",[103,531,533],{"id":532},"_4-the-post-war-generation-and-the-balfour-declaration","4. The Post-War Generation and the Balfour Declaration",[95,535,536],{},"The post-war Zionist youth was not particularly enthusiastic about the declaration; most of them were, to begin with, revolutionary leftists who despised the imperialist powers and believed their days were numbered; they could not accept the type of Zionism that was predicated on negotiations with the Great Powers. These young Zionists also understood the murky motives lying behind the declaration -- an odd evangelical philo-Semitism combined with a high dosage of anti-Semitic beliefs about the financial prowess of the international Jewry that would be diverted elsewhere if Britain did not show its support; (there was even a rumor that the US government will not join the war against Germany otherwise!) Others pointed to the large number of influential Jews in the higher echelons of the Bolshevik regime and being completely clueless -- Lenin explicitly rejected Zionism - hoped that supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine will elicit their sympathy. Ten years later, when the British realized their mistakes, they switched to an equally cynical strategy based on racist beliefs about the mythical power of the Arab nation that proved as erroneous -- despite the anti-Zionist policies of the British mandate the Arabs had no intention of supporting them in the war against Nazi Germany. Be that as it may, Britain altered its course, favored he Arabs and prevented Jewish immigration to Palestine.",[108,538,540],{"id":539},"gershom-scholem-and-cultural-zionism","Gershom Scholem and Cultural Zionism",[95,542,543],{},"Gershom Scholem who lived around the corner from us in Jerusalem was one of the Zionist youths who became highly critical of political Zionism after the war; in a letter to the Zionist leadership he warned against relying on Britain's declaration and thought it was unworthy of the movement to depend on such immoral, discredited allies. In fact, Scholem was mostly uninterested in the political dimension of Zionism in its entirety; he came to Palestine expecting a renaissance of Jewish culture -- the hope that the Jews who come to Palestine create a secular culture with Jewish characteristic that will rejuvenate the Jews and become \"a light to the nations\". Scholem supported a bi-national secular democratic state for both Palestinians and Jews; after the Arab nationalist pogrom of 1929, though, this point of view vanished almost completely from the public discourse. Even though Scholem did not join a kibbutz he was sympathetic to Hashomer Hatzair which members began to establish kibbutzim when he arrived at Palestine in 1923. Like many leaders of the kibbutz movement, the young scholar was an anarchist sympathizer who was adamant about avoiding exploitation in any shape and form.",[95,545,546],{},"Scholem wrote that he immigrated to Palestine because for Jewish youths like him the atmosphere in Germany was asphyxiating. He described at length how his parents and their Jewish relatives and acquaintances constantly deceived themselves they were fully accepted in German society despite all the evidence to the contrary; the young man was increasingly disgusted by the failure of that generation to come to terms with the truth. In fact, Scholem's situation was not dramatically different from Herzl's; when the father of Zionism was a young man he faced a very similar situation in fin de siècle Vienna. The difference between the two was that young Scholem could choose Zionism while Herzl had to invent it. That was in a nutshell what Zionism meant circa 1920 -- at least to some. 23 years after the first Zionist congress a younger generation of European Jews that included Scholem, Benjamin, Arendt and countless others were no longer doomed to live demoralized, paralyzed lives. Not all of them chose Zionism, of course; some chose communism, others anarchism and many vacillated between the different points of view. The very fact that Zionism existed, though, made a fundamental difference in the lives of them all.",[103,548,550],{"id":549},"_5-the-russian-jewish-experience","5. The Russian Jewish Experience",[95,552,553],{},"The largest group in the first Zionist Congress was Russian. Arguably, the Jews in that part of the world went through a number of extraordinary processes that prepared them for modern Zionism: In the 1870's they were finally allowed to attend Russian high schools and they took full advantage of that possibility. Thousands of young Jews learnt Russian, read Pushkin, Tolstoy and Turgeniev, finished their exams and joined society at large. Hundreds of them joined the Narodniks almost immediately -- a group of idealist youths who tried to agitate the peasants to revolt against the Czar; many remained in the movement even when it turned into a terrorist organization. From that point on a revolutionary ethos involving moral outrage, self-sacrifice and contempt for bourgeois morals became deeply engrained among the Russian Jewish youth. That mentality proved to be a fertile ground for Zionism as well. Needless to say, the increasing ferocity and frequency of the anti-Semitic pogroms helped too.",[95,555,556],{},"Many of the post war Zionist pioneers from Russia took part in the failed revolution of 1905. That was when a significant group began to gravitate towards the Bolsheviks; others decided to mix socialism and Zionism. That was the main group that began to settle the land of Palestine in record speed by founding a network of kibbutzim. That generation retained the idealism and moral courage of the Narodniky as well as their penchant for self-sacrifice. They were adamantly against exploitation, insisting on working their fields on their own rather than using hired hands. Many were pacifists who eventually learned they had to defend themselves from sporadic attacks by Arab nationalist forces and bands of local bandits.",[103,558,560],{"id":559},"_6-the-exhibition-as-mosaic","6. The Exhibition as Mosaic",[95,562,563],{},"The present exhibition is a mosaic of all these points of view. You hear the standard Jewish learning and the supernatural stories of a young religious students; A bible reading and the voice of Messianic mysticism; a story of a bourgeois salon and the perverse theories of the café set; the call of the Old-New Land and the response of the diaspora. These ghostly voices tell the story of the First Zionist Congress that took place in this city hundred and twenty years ago.",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":565},[566,567,568,569,572,573],{"id":496,"depth":429,"text":497},{"id":506,"depth":429,"text":507},{"id":519,"depth":429,"text":520},{"id":532,"depth":429,"text":533,"children":570},[571],{"id":539,"depth":434,"text":540},{"id":549,"depth":429,"text":550},{"id":559,"depth":429,"text":560},"2017-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","An art-essay commemorating the 120th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress","/blog/berlin_salon.jpg",{"original_event_date":578,"venue":579,"artists":580,"exhibition_type":581,"readingTime":582,"wordCount":583,"head":81},"1897-08-29","Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland","Clegg & Guttmann","Installation","15 min read",3000,15,{"title":14,"description":575},"Txi3va4zec5wxRAMQa1pVvDJp4noOpVIMcqkYBlPef8",{"id":588,"title":70,"author":81,"body":589,"caption":81,"date":694,"description":695,"extension":461,"image":696,"meta":697,"minRead":81,"navigation":85,"path":71,"seo":702,"stem":72,"toc":486,"__hash__":703},"blog/blog/Variants of Aesthetic Collectivism 2009.md",{"type":92,"value":590,"toc":682},[591,593,598,608,613,617,621,624,628,631,635,638,642,645,649,652,656,659,663,666,668,673],[103,592,111],{"id":110},[95,594,595,597],{},[156,596,158],{}," In the aesthetic domain, individualism and collectivism stand for competing theories of artistic reception. The former view emphasizes the primacy of the experience of the single viewers, confronted with a work of art, whereas the latter, the manner in which they are constituted by it as parts of an aesthetic collective. For the aesthetic collectivist, you always experience art together with others; for the individualist, the art viewer is essentially alone.",[95,599,600,601,604,605,607],{},"Individualism is, of course, the more common sense view; all experience resides, after all, in the heads of single human beings. Collectivism points to the fact that an important aspect of the issue is ignored - that the sense of togetherness generated by common aesthetic experience is not an incidental phenomenon but part and parcel of the aims of all art, whether one experiences it in a concert hall, a cinema or a museum. Genuine art, as Kant reminded us, is not concerned with mere subjective gratification; art must always appeal to the viewer's ",[98,602,603],{},"sensus communis"," and the development of ",[98,606,603],{}," requires the experience of art.",[95,609,610,612],{},[156,611,164],{}," The present exhibition of Clegg & Guttmann is conceived of as an essay on various concrete forms of aesthetic collectivism found in their recent works of art.",[103,614,616],{"id":615},"works-in-the-exhibition","Works in the Exhibition",[108,618,620],{"id":619},"i-what-can-be-expressed-and-what-is-always-left-out-from-the-description","i. What can be expressed and what is always left out from the description",[95,622,623],{},"In \"What can be expressed and what is always left out from the description\" the issue of aesthetic collectivism appears in a most transparent way. When the individual viewers contribute intellectual labor, drawing the different parts of the tree as it appears to them at various points of time, they are thereby engaged in a communal aesthetic project.",[108,625,627],{"id":626},"ii-constraint-drawing","ii. Constraint drawing",[95,629,630],{},"\"Constraint drawing\" is also clearly centered on the topic of multi participant action albeit in a somewhat different way. One could even say that the artwork is, essentially, a devise for collective creativity. Because the movements of the \"model\" and the three \"draftsmen\" who are included in the piece are mutually constrained and the drawings that result represent the sum total of the actions of a genuine aesthetic collective.",[108,632,634],{"id":633},"iii-our-productionthe-production-of-others","iii. Our production/the production of others",[95,636,637],{},"\"Our production/the production of others\" is relevant to the present concerns because it is the terminal point of a sequence of events involving the photographers (Clegg & Guttmann) and their subjects (Melos Quartet). Clegg & Guttmann were asked to photograph the musicians. The photograph was used for a record cover of the late Beethoven string quartets. Finally Clegg & Guttmann \"re-appropriated\" the record cover image, re-photographing it and presenting it as their own work.",[108,639,641],{"id":640},"iv-cardinal-red","iv. Cardinal Red",[95,643,644],{},"\"Cardinal Red\" was made as a collaboration of Clegg & Guttmann and Franz Erhardt Walther – a work of art authored by, both, the photographers and their subjects. In so far as we see Franz Erhardt Walther demonstrating how to use the different parts of one of his works for a performance of sorts, the photograph is inherently concerned with his ideas. On the other hand, the work is also a portrait that employs various art historical conventions; in that regard, it is thoroughly consistent with the concerns of Clegg & Guttmann's works.",[108,646,648],{"id":647},"v-rus-in-urbis","v. Rus in Urbis",[95,650,651],{},"\"Rus in Urbis\" is an installation, which explicitly requires a collective aesthetic reception; the viewers are requested to syncopate with their dance movements to the beat generated by a mechanical bull.",[108,653,655],{"id":654},"vi-the-open-tool-shelter-of-toronto","vi. The open Tool-Shelter of Toronto",[95,657,658],{},"Finally, \"The open Tool-Shelter of Toronto\" shows how the work of art can expands its influence beyond aesthetic concerns. Being a mechanism for recycling and sharing various work tools, the work aims to generate in its social surrounding an enhanced sense of a community.",[103,660,662],{"id":661},"conclusion","Conclusion",[95,664,665],{},"To sum up, none of the works included in the show realizes an idea, which appeared, first, in the mind of a single creator. Most required a collaboration of a number of distinct individuals. All are open works, which must be completed by the viewers. Each in its own manner articulates a way in which the work of art casts the single viewer as a part of an aesthetically-generated collective which it helps create and sustain.",[170,667],{},[95,669,670],{},[156,671,672],{},"Exhibition Information",[95,674,675,678,681],{},[156,676,677],{},"Georg Kargl Fine Arts",[679,680],"br",{},"\nSchleifmühlgasse 5, 1040 Vienna",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":683},[684,685,693],{"id":110,"depth":429,"text":111},{"id":615,"depth":429,"text":616,"children":686},[687,688,689,690,691,692],{"id":619,"depth":434,"text":620},{"id":626,"depth":434,"text":627},{"id":633,"depth":434,"text":634},{"id":640,"depth":434,"text":641},{"id":647,"depth":434,"text":648},{"id":654,"depth":434,"text":655},{"id":661,"depth":429,"text":662},"2009-11-13T00:00:00.000Z","An exhibition exploring collective aesthetic experience through collaborative artworks","/blog/Kargl_Variants_2009_1200px.jpg",{"endDate":698,"venue":677,"location":699,"artists":580,"Exhibition dates":700,"readingTime":701},"2010-01-09","Vienna, Austria","November 13, 2009 - January 9, 2010","3 min read",{"title":70,"description":695},"HYstQ33PxDQaHLintg2U2vaalodPTBylhnYrGRAyAI4",{"id":705,"title":30,"author":81,"body":706,"caption":81,"date":760,"description":761,"extension":461,"image":762,"meta":763,"minRead":775,"navigation":85,"path":31,"seo":776,"stem":32,"toc":777,"__hash__":778},"blog/blog/Illustrations from the Social History of Reading.md",{"type":92,"value":707,"toc":757},[708,710,713,716,719,725,728,731,734,737,743,749],[103,709,111],{"id":110},[95,711,712],{},"Libraries are commonly defined as repositories of books and magazines that are made available for the public. The definition emphasizes the nature of objects amassed by these types of institutions. Upon reflection, though, it should be clear that libraries cannot be thought of merely as places of storage but must be characterized in terms of the activities that presumably take place therein. Let us, then, rethink the matter and redefine the library as a public space dedicated to browsing and reading.",[95,714,715],{},"At first blush the above distinction might seem rather pedantic; books, after all, are meant to be used in a particular way - they are artifacts produced primarily in order to be read. We believe, nevertheless, that it is important to emphasize that the library is intended to satisfy a particularly human craving and that the books one finds there constitute one form among many others that make it possible for people to retrieve information and content. An awareness of the nature of the activities that are supposed to take place in the institutions we call libraries might help, then, to plan and design them better and expand them in the appropriate direction when the need to do so arises.",[95,717,718],{},"For similar reasons, we decided to propose for the new University Library in Innsbruck an artwork that revolves around the act of reading. Our reasoning was quite straight-forward: We believe that art, in general, should provide the viewers means for self-reflection. Public works satisfy the requirement of self-reflectiveness when they shed light on their context and help reflect on their institutional setting. Now, as we said before, we believe that the library should be defined as a space of reading. It follows, then, that a self-reflecting work of art destined for such a space must find a way to explore this important human activity.",[95,720,721,722,724],{},"The work we envisage is titled ",[98,723,30],{},". We propose to place in the library space five 'history stations', each consisting of a schematic but functional replica of a piece of furniture designed for libraries in various periods of the past - a reading table, a book rack, a facility for storage and display of documents and two library ladders. These objects are meant to be used by the visitors to the library - as reading tables, ladders etc. Together, the five environments containing them form an essay on the social history and evolution of the act of reading. Such essays, we learned from our own praxis, are fairly useful as means for institutional self-reflection.",[95,726,727],{},"Practical reason tells us how to realize our plans and intentions - how to employ the objects available to us as effective means to a premeditated end. Self-reflection affords a bird's eye perspective on these procedures; it aims to question the particular nature of our special habits and practical routines. The self-reflective individual surveys the tools he possesses and the way they are commonly used; doing so helps him to evaluate his instinctive choices and to improve them to the extent possible.",[95,729,730],{},"The practice of institutional critique is a species of self-reflection - a way of answering queries about the nature of our current institutions and evaluate how they serve the purposes for which they were intended. The institutional critic reviews various aspects of the existing institutional arrangements - even those that seem unimportant or incidental - asking why they have the forms that they do and whether changing them might improve the functioning of the institution as a whole.",[95,732,733],{},"A self-reflective individual is one who is ready to see the shortcoming of his current practical routines and willing to contemplate the possibility of changing them. To the extent that he is defined through these choices and routines, he is therefore a being who questions his own nature. When he criticizes his institutions, the self-reflections gain a social dimension - the thoughts he forms about alternative ways of life take on the character of utopian thinking.",[95,735,736],{},"The reference to institutional history is one way of increasing awareness of the fact that the current institutional arrangements are not set in stone but are subject to improvement and change. This general proposition applies to the case at hand: When one is presented with different ways of storing, arranging and reading books, the disposition to see the present situation as unchangeable and absolute tends to vanish. When these examples are not merely fictitious constructions but pertain to the history of the institutions one calls his own, the willingness to consider alternative possibilities is bound to be stronger and more affective.",[95,738,739,740,742],{},"For this reason, we consider essays on the social history of a human activity, which pertain to the institutions that support it, a most effective means for encouraging self-critique and engendering self-reflection. The 'Chained Library' of Cambridge or Benjamin Franklin's 'Library Ladder' are not meant merely as examples of different library furniture; we expect them to hint at alternative ways of life where reading and other simple activities that define our daily existence are conducted in a completely different ways thereby gaining entirely different meaning. More generally, we hope that the visitor who encounters such objects would gain a window into another social reality; the effectiveness and self-reflectivity of artworks like ",[98,741,30],{}," depend on the extent to which they stimulate the social imagination.",[95,744,745,746,748],{},"In addition, as ridiculous as they might strike us at first, objects like a table that transforms into a library ladder, provide a testimony of the universality of the yearning of mankind for improvement. Rigid institutions, which attempt to convince us that life is fine as it is, obscures that essential longing; human beings thrive only when they overcome the boundaries set for their thinking - when they wake up and open to the possibility of change. In so far as we live in a society that erects strict institutions and resists alternatives, the inclusion in auxiliary means that encourage institutional self-reflection seems like a positive corrective; that is how we conceive of ",[98,747,30],{}," and other related works that we made in the past.",[750,751],"u-button",{"to":752,"label":753,"variant":754,"color":755,"external":428,"download":756},"/PDF/Illustrations_from_the_Social_History_of_Reading.pdf","Download PDF Version","subtle","neutral","Illustrations_from_the_Social_History_of_Reading.pdf",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":758},[759],{"id":110,"depth":429,"text":111},"2008-01-21T00:00:00.000Z","Proposal for the University and State Library in Innsbruck","/blog/Illustrations_from_the_Social_History_of_Reading.jpg",{"head":764},{"meta":765},[766,768,770,771,773,774],{"name":467,"content":767},"Public Project, Innsbruck University and State Library, 2008, Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":769},"Innsbruck University Library",{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":772},"© 2008 Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":479,"content":761},{"name":482,"content":30},1,{"title":30,"description":761},"false","6Kd4V-p0ToMgno1FESU_Vp1K5G7-T2f4WQ2vpdf3GIY",{"id":780,"title":34,"author":81,"body":781,"caption":81,"date":1425,"description":1426,"extension":461,"image":1427,"meta":1428,"minRead":1441,"navigation":85,"path":35,"seo":1442,"stem":36,"toc":486,"__hash__":1443},"blog/blog/Mach versus Boltzmann.md",{"type":92,"value":782,"toc":1360},[783,787,790,793,796,799,802,805,808,810,814,819,823,826,830,833,836,840,843,847,850,854,857,860,863,866,870,873,876,883,888,891,894,897,901,904,906,910,915,919,922,926,929,932,936,939,942,945,948,952,955,958,962,965,970,973,977,980,984,987,991,994,997,1000,1003,1005,1007,1011,1016,1019,1022,1029,1032,1036,1039,1042,1045,1048,1052,1055,1062,1066,1069,1071,1075,1078,1081,1084,1088,1091,1095,1098,1102,1105,1108,1111,1114,1116,1120,1123,1126,1130,1133,1137,1140,1144,1147,1151,1154,1158,1161,1164,1167,1169,1173,1178,1181,1184,1187,1191,1194,1198,1201,1205,1208,1210,1214,1219,1222,1225,1229,1232,1236,1239,1243,1246,1250,1253,1255,1259,1264,1267,1270,1274,1277,1280,1284,1287,1289,1293,1296,1299,1303,1310,1314,1317,1321,1324,1326,1328,1331,1334,1336,1340,1358],[103,784,786],{"id":785},"an-introduction","An Introduction",[95,788,789],{},"The present exhibition at the Secession in Vienna is an ideational construction - to use Mach's terms - having the form of a spatio-temporal composition with eight parts or, from another, Boltzmannian point of view, sequence of early modernist inspired cognitive exercises designed to further the cause of cognito-emotive reconciliation with the chaos, dissonance and discontinuity typical of the environment of the modern metropolis.",[95,791,792],{},"The exhibition is conceived of as concrete score, the different movements of which must be performed in order to be experienced aesthetically; some are individual or solo parts others, orchestral arrangements to be carried out in groups. The different elements of the installations are also games, embodying various conceptual revolutions associated with early modernism, inviting the viewers for intellectual self-reflection on the nature of their cognitive system, coordinated with bodily engagement.",[95,794,795],{},"The focus is on the cultural developments associated with the emergence of the modernist movement in Vienna in the 1890's and the 1900's. The two ways of looking at the installation correspond to a major division in the modernist camp, namely, the opposition between the philosophical views of Mach and Boltzmann, the main protagonists of the present project. The presentation highlights the opposition between the two physicists and philosophers of science, both of whom taught in the University of Vienna, treating it, both, as historically central narrative and, crucially important philosophical distinction between two types of modernist ideology, each invaluable for understanding the intellectual tenor of the period. Mach's phenomenalist approach, which placed the experience of individuals at center stage, defined the anti-metaphysical and anti-mechanical temperament of the fin de siecle, shared by positivists and expressionists alike; Boltzmann's statistical view, on the other hand, divorced mechanics from the bourgeois metaphysics of law and order, replacing the latter with chaotic and anarchic ethos, instead. The two positions and the opposition between them were given different formulations that demonstrated the relevance of both in aesthetic, ethical and cognitive contexts; indeed, it seems that understanding the two philosophers provides a major key to many perhaps most of the controversies of that eventful period.",[95,797,798],{},"From yet another perspective, the present installation constitutes an act of self-reflection on its own cultural and intellectual context. Indeed, more than any other cultural organ, the Secession represented the spirit and sensibilities of early modernist Vienna and thus, anyone mapping the fin de siecle consciousness of the Austrian-Hungarian capital, is engaged by implication in a reflection on the nature of the Secession and, its intellectual underpinning. One might say then that the project investigates the 'deep structure' of its own cultural language, reflecting on the conditions of its own cultural possibility. The questions underlying the project, in other words, concerns the origins of the concept of art behind it and thus it is positioned firmly within the boundaries of conceptual art.",[95,800,801],{},"But the installation is, first and foremost, historical drama of a new kind, animated presentation of the emergence of the early modernist philosophy, by all accounts a highly significant episode of Viennese intellectual history. In this drama the Secession played a leading role; it was embodiment of the Machian position par excellence, philosophical expression of the spirit of the alienated educated middle classes. After the rise of mass politics, the liberal democratic parties lost their political mandate; their position in the political life of Austria became marginal and in their place emerged the socialists, Christian Democrats and German nationalists. The loss of social relevance was experienced individually as sense of alienation. Consequently, instead of political engagement the educated youth of the turn of the 20th century invested their considerable talents, energy and resources in culture, instead. The departure from society was expressed in philosophical terms as radical subjectivism and individualism.",[95,803,804],{},"The Secession was a product of this spirit of social alienation, announcing its sensibilities in the choice of a strangely incongruent pagan temple as its home. The present exhibition pertains to this history, providing tools for understanding the graphic, architectural and institutional aspects of this extraordinary exhibition space and the artistic sensibilities of Klimt, Schiele, Hoffman and others who developed their artistic language in the context it provided. The historical reflection and its relation to the present are aided with a collection of video-tapes displayed in the exhibition where texts by Mach, Boltzmann, Weininger, Kafka, Musil, Kraus, Loos and other early modernists are read by contemporary Viennese cultural producers.",[95,806,807],{},"Ours is a period of confused identities, ambiguous political sensibilities, lack of strong cultural drives. A hundred years or so after the beginning of modernism we find ourselves deeply uncertain about what answers to give the most basic questions of ethics, aesthetics and politics. The existing ideologies seem unsatisfactory, leaving too much unsaid, the cultural agenda, conflicted and inconclusive. Perhaps an act of self-reflection on the origins of the current state of affairs might bring us closer to an insight concerning our identity thus providing us with invaluable tool to investigate where to go next.",[170,809],{},[103,811,813],{"id":812},"cognitive-exercise-m1-unstable-equilibrium-or-the-prisoners-dilemma","Cognitive Exercise #M1: Unstable Equilibrium or The Prisoner's Dilemma",[95,815,816],{},[156,817,818],{},"A two-person game",[108,820,822],{"id":821},"the-game","The Game",[95,824,825],{},"Two blindfolded players, identified as the Column Chooser and the Row Chooser, stand in front of their two respective options in the Game Matrix Platform. Upon receiving a signal each moves in front of the 'box' decided upon (Left or Right in the case of the Column Chooser, Up or Down for the Row Chooser.) When both players make a choice they untie their blindfolds and place a flag in the position they arrived at jointly, obtaining their respective payoffs represented by the four pairs of numbers on the game board. The position Up-Left corresponds to the payoffs -1/-1, Up-Right: 0/-8, Down-Left: -8/0, Down-Right: -8/-8.",[108,827,829],{"id":828},"introductory-remarks","Introductory Remarks",[95,831,832],{},"The Prisoner's Dilemma is a strategy game for two players: the Column Chooser and the Row Chooser. Each of them must decide between two options without knowledge of their opponent's decision. (The players are initially blindfolded in order to ensure the independence of the decisions.) A pair of simultaneous choices determines a position. Each position determines a payoff, represented by two numbers, one for each of the players. Each player aims to advance to the most advantageous position, namely, one where his payoff is maximal or minimal depending on the nature of the situation. The game requires the players to develop competitive strategies, whereby their vicissitudes are intertwined -- the decision of one influencing the payoff of the other.",[95,834,835],{},"The game is represented by a 2x2 matrix, where each of the entries represents a pair of simultaneous choices -- i.e. one box in the matrix corresponds to each possible combination of column choice and row choice. The following matrix corresponds to the Prisoner's Dilemma: Column chooser: Row chooser: -1/-1 0/-8 -8/0 -8/-8",[108,837,839],{"id":838},"the-prisoners-dilemma","The Prisoner's Dilemma",[95,841,842],{},"An example of the situation corresponding to the Prisoner's Dilemma regards the decisions of two criminals caught after having committed a crime together. As the evidence against them is circumstantial and sketchy, each faces a dilemma. They may refuse to admit to the crime, in which case each of them faces a year in prison. Alternatively, each may confess, aspiring to become a state witness and be pardoned, hoping the other does not do the same. If one confesses and the other does not, the state witness is released and his partner is imprisoned for eight years; if both confess they each receive the maximum sentence. Obviously, the two should refrain from confessing and face only one year in prison -- relatively lenient punishment. Knowing this to be the case, however, each might still try to do even better and become a state witness instead. The situation is, of course, perfectly symmetric and so each knows that the other faces a parallel dilemma; in other words, each knows that if the other thinks the same way he does and acts on this thought, they will both face an eightfold prison sentence. And so, having contemplated the possibility of betraying their friend, they may reconsider the strategy and return to the option of not confessing. Knowing, however, that the other faces precisely the same dilemma and so is reconsidering betrayal, each player faces the same dilemma as before once again; he is, in a word, again thinking of betrayal to outsmart his partner-opponent. In conclusion, even if both ought not confess, they are unlikely to arrive at that position in the game; both are more likely to choose betrayal, instead, and so be punished severely. They act against their self interest by trying to outmaneuver one another.",[108,844,846],{"id":845},"unstable-equilibrium","Unstable Equilibrium",[95,848,849],{},"The Prisoner's Dilemma is a game where one of the positions is preferable to both players, namely, a game with a point of equilibrium. This superior solution, though, is unstable; once there, both players have reasons to divert from it. Speaking abstractly, the situation is reminiscent of a ball standing on the tip of a mountain, where the slightest pressure is sufficient to send it downwards. Strictly speaking, the ball might stay on the tip but it is highly unlikely to do so. Positions of this kind are called unstable equilibrium.",[108,851,853],{"id":852},"symmetry-breaking","Symmetry Breaking",[95,855,856],{},"A theoretic problem that arises in relation to the notion of the unstable equilibrium is known as symmetry breaking. Once the situation destabilized, the fragile equilibrium broken, what 'chooses' the direction of the deviation from it? How is the departure from the unstable equilibrium determined? How, in other words, should we model unstable systems of this kind mathematically?",[95,858,859],{},"The questions bring to mind the story of Buridan's mule, which remained motionless and died of hunger because it was unable to choose between two identical loads of hay placed at equal distances. One wonders whether, analogously, not being able to 'decide' where to go, the ball remains 'paralyzed'; indeed, does the absence of sufficient reason to depart from equilibrium in any particular direction keep the ball standing on the tip of the mountain? Does symmetry introduce 'second order stability'?",[95,861,862],{},"Obviously, the answer is no. Balls do not stay on the tip 'out of respect for symmetry' any more than mules that do, die of hunger. Nevertheless, the problem of symmetry breaking is a puzzling one; when the reason for departure from unstable equilibrium is not presumed to be the 'decision maker' -- as is the case with a ball on the tip of the mountain that drifts down because of variations of air pressure, gusts of wind, deterioration of the soil etc. -- how do we explain the breaking of symmetry?",[95,864,865],{},"The first to demonstrate that symmetry does not imply second order stability was Leonard Euler. In 1714 the German mathematician analyzed how struts buckle right or left because of weight placed on top. The phenomenon of sudden symmetry breaking is known as bifurcation. Deterministic laws of motion that allow seemingly paradoxically multiple solutions correspond to such cases. A fork in the road is fixed in advance where the system has more than one option from which it must 'choose'. There is nothing random about such systems; the determination of the choice of the direction of the system is presumed entirely dependent on physical parameters. And yet, it is often beyond the powers of scientist to calculate in advance how the system will develop.",[108,867,869],{"id":868},"catastrophes","Catastrophes",[95,871,872],{},"The buckling of struts, sudden bending of weighted flexible rulers either to the right or left, and the snapping of rubber bands upon over-stretching are examples of mechanical systems undergoing catastrophes. Examples of this kind demonstrate that thresholds might be traversed for natural and immanent reasons. Euler, as mentioned, started mathematical inquiry into these issues, but it was Henri Poincare who systematized the research at the end of the 19th century and underlined the philosophical implications of the possibility of catastrophes in nature.",[95,874,875],{},"One of the strongest and most persistent beliefs about the physical world is that 'nature does not jump'. Objects do not vanish suddenly from their position and reappear later in another. We believe that spatio-temporal discontinuities do not occur in nature. For many centuries it was taken for granted that, in addition, physical systems do not change their tendencies or dispositions in sudden unexpected ways. What seems unexpected to humans is not objectively so. An omniscient being could always find rhyme and reason behind sudden shifts of direction, and do so ahead of time. Thresholds invariably reflect perceptual insensitivity. Those who cannot register minute details observe sudden jumps once their sensitivity thresholds are traversed; behind this, though, there was always some gradual build-up before the transformation took place. Abrupt reversal of direction -- kink, fold or sharp turn -- do not and cannot be given objective meaning. This belief was at the very core of the classic conception of mechanics.",[95,877,878,879,882],{},"The rejection of the idea that natural deterministic processes always develop gradually was expressed in the following passage of Poincare's seminal article 'Chance' that appeared in his book ",[98,880,881],{},"Science and Method"," of 1903:",[322,884,885],{},[95,886,887],{},"A cause so small that it escapes our notice determines a considerable effect which we can not fail to see... even if it were the case that the natural laws no longer had any secrets for us, we could only know the initial situation approximately... it may happen that small differences in initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.",[95,889,890],{},"Deterministic chaos, according to Poincare, was not a contradiction in terms.",[95,892,893],{},"The existence of catastrophes in physics, sudden departures from equilibrium in a direction no one can fathom, was a genuine conceptual revolution, one of several that took place in the 1890s, establishing various conditions of possibility for modernist thought, reconciling what previous generations of physicists and philosophers deemed contradictory notions. The cognitive exercises in this exhibition allude to different conceptual revolutions from the same period.",[95,895,896],{},"The present exercise concerns the reconciliation of determinism and chaos by demonstrating that deterministic systems might engender unforeseeable events with no sufficient reason. Determinism, you may note, was presumed until the end of the 19th century to rule out not only multiplicity of potential futures but also developments without sufficient reason. Catastrophes and other events involving abrupt symmetry breaking were thus considered anathema to natural regularity. Such events cannot be conceived of as the unfolding of fixed tendencies previously instated. In other words, the very idea of law-governed phenomena had to be reformulated; continuity and determinism were demonstrably consistent with abruptness, lack of sufficient reason and unpredictability. Nature admitted catastrophes.",[108,898,900],{"id":899},"the-alleviation-of-anxiety","The Alleviation of Anxiety",[95,902,903],{},"The social processes that brought modernism to Europe were themselves catastrophic processes; they proceeded in what seemed an arbitrary, chaotic and unpredictable manner, destroying the former habitat and bringing about an environment seemingly fragmented, void of coherence and lacking harmony and regularity. If beauty reflects a sense that the world is well adapted to man's cognitive faculties -- displaying recognizable symmetry, regularity of features and harmonic organization -- the chaotic and incomprehensible nature of the modern environment seemingly ruled out the very possibility of aesthetic pleasure. In other words, the appearance of catastrophes implied not only incomprehensibility, but the disappearance from life of the aesthetic dimension in toto. Furthermore, the constant fear that 'out of the blue' developments might occur involving malign new forces yet to be understood that are abrupt, destructive and unexpected, generated anxiety in the population of cities like Vienna on a large enough scale to make it a serious public health issue. The problem was wide-ranging and urgent; many were 'cracking up', 'snapping' under the intense cognitive strains the changes of the environment brought into their lives. Modernism was conceived of as the cultural means to combat the anxiety -- a reintroduction into the environment of new comprehensible order. It was to facilitate new projections of regularity into the external environment of a markedly different kind. Indeed, the new sense of order and regularity necessitated various conceptual revolutions; terms had to be redefined, their meaning expanded. Poincare's ideas about instability were an example, vital prerequisites of the new notions of order. Chaos, in particular, did not stem from an inner failure of cognitive organization, but reflected objective processes in the external world. It was not evidence of shadowy disruptive force but physical law of a new kind. This was one of the first steps necessary in order to alleviate fin de siecle anxiety.",[170,905],{},[103,907,909],{"id":908},"cognitive-exercise-m2-curve-fitting-and-boot-strapping","Cognitive Exercise #M2: Curve Fitting and Boot Strapping",[95,911,912],{},[156,913,914],{},"A cooperative game for a small group of players",[108,916,918],{"id":917},"instructions","Instructions",[95,920,921],{},"A small group of players gathers around a mechanical piano. One must operate the lever of the instrument and the rest listen carefully to the music trying to cull from harmonic patterns, regular rhythms or any other structural property of the 'bundle of sensations'. These should be notated in any symbolic representation the player see fit and transcribed with chalkmarks on the track around the piano. Afterwards the participants perform the score, interpreting the music, viewed in its relation to their notations, with 'symphony of bodily movements'. The exercise is then a collective interpretative exercise, culminating in creative communal composition for bodily motions. This is a creative exercise in the pre-jazz meaning of the term; in the turn of the 20th century notations were still considered central to the creative act, earning for it the status of ideational construction. There is yet no acknowledgement of the possibility of improvisation based aesthetics, syncopation, (see cognitive exercise #B2) was still relegated to ragtime music, a mass-entertainment form, removed in every way from the refined, serious and rigorous spirit of the Viennese modernists, the aesthetics we associate with Ernst Mach.",[108,923,925],{"id":924},"the-bootstrapping-game","The Bootstrapping Game",[95,927,928],{},"Bootstrapping is a communal cognitive exercise for an impromptu 'orchestra' -- a group simultaneously performing intercorrelated acts. The players are exposed to musical stimulus -- a heterogeneous bundle of incoming sounds originating from a mechanical piano-roll. They embark on a collective interpretative project, namely, an attempt to comprehend, translate and 'perform' the stimulus. They identify a structure or formal core in the incoming sounds and use it as the basis of a score for another time-based medium, which they then realize together. As they listen to the incoming sounds, the players must find rhythmic and harmonic regularities, which they transcribe and then perform. First, they must fix a vocabulary -- signs to be inscribed on the floor board, each associating particular physical movements or action with an aspect of the sound. Having done so, they begin constructing interpretative analog sequences. They output 'sentences' made of the 'words' available to them, threading the 'sentences' into 'phrases' in the language of the actions of the body, while retaining the original formal patterns, lifted from the original stimulus intact.",[95,930,931],{},"Once the players find rhythmic and harmonic patterns in their respective sources, they gain the ability to anticipate what is about to come next. (True comprehension of rhythm and harmony always implies the ability to follow the musical rule, namely, to predict the next elements of the sequence, and even join the source with analogs of one's choice.) First, the players set themselves to a constant rhythm expressing it as a regular pattern of movement; then they begin comprehending, predicting and realizing various harmonic patterns as well, superimposing on earlier ones each new pattern of movement they invented on the basis of laws they abstracted from the sound. The group thus begins dancing together to the music, jumping, turning sideways and adding further modulations and rhythmic patterns with their arms and upper body as embodiments of those they found. Together they can perform the total audible stimulus, giving to it the form of a multi-player composition for bodily movements.",[108,933,935],{"id":934},"the-machian-spirit-introductory-statement","The Machian Spirit -- Introductory Statement",[95,937,938],{},"'Curve Fitting and Bootstrapping' is an exercise inviting the player to find the general laws of empirical data -- patterns and regularities 'hidden' therein. The input is a sequence of musical sounds, the source -- a mechanical instrument 'playing' from notes etched on a cylinder. The objective is to determine the rules of organization of the sequence on the basis of limited and partial information based on particular instances. Using the laws, predictions can be made concerning the continuation of the sequence. In short, after listening for a while the players try to transcribe and analyse the music using a system of notation invented for that purpose. This is a simple illustration of the process of the construction of a theory, facilitating predictions, on the basis of observations.",[95,940,941],{},"Mach formulated the fundamental maxims of such theoretical activities. Ideational constructions, according to him, should be simple, economic and transparent to the extent possible. Simplicity implied that the law of the sequence should relate the greatest number of aspects of the sequence in the simplest way possible. The principle of economy recommends using only what is absolutely necessary for prediction, omitting everything else. Transparency means that the regularity found in the sequence should seem a natural phenomenon, inseparable from the sequence itself. Of particular importance to Mach was the prohibition against postulating the existence of entities or theoretical objects that cannot be directly observed. He regarded the predisposition to do so fetishistic and ornamental, two tendencies he associated with the bourgeois mentality of his time. Unobservable objects, he argued, don't have any potential explanatory value and thus postulating them contradicted the economy principle. Unexpected insight -- a new aspect of familiar object -- necessitates empirical observation; nothing new or unexpected can be gained about objects postulated by decree. And so, why bring into theories un-useful entities of this kind, ones as lacking of empirical content as the \"object-as-such\", the metaphysical subject, God etc? The case at hand illustrates well the cogency of Mach's theoretical position; if the sole purpose of the player is to predict the incoming sounds why postulate special entities which one cannot hear or see in order to do so? Could such entities facilitate musical comprehension?",[95,943,944],{},"Mach thought that Boltzmann's atoms belonged to the same objectionable category, and violent controversy on the topic ensued, dividing not only the Viennese intelligentsia but also the entire world of science and letters. In 1905 Boltzmann emerged a winner; the experiments of Perrin and the theory of Brownian motion by Einstein provided enough evidence to convince scientists of the existence of 'invisible' molecules and atoms of matter. Nevertheless, Boltzmann committed suicide a year later in Luino.",[95,946,947],{},"Bootstrapping concerns the Machian conception of science; it exercises the ability to find laws, patterns, rhythms and regularities in a stream of incoming stimulus. The players are to use Mach's Principles of Mental Construction to guide their efforts.",[108,949,951],{"id":950},"musical-comprehension-as-a-form-of-self-construction","Musical Comprehension as a Form of Self-Construction",[95,953,954],{},"The Bootstrapping game is primarily an exercise of the ability to construct formal laws, or other analogs to given stimulus, on the basis of abstraction. Even if the project involved is communal, here we are concerned mainly with a combination of individual processes rather than genuinely collective projects; the latter are revisited in other cognitive exercises.",[95,956,957],{},"One of the purposes of the game is to demonstrate the plausibility of Mach's thesis that the self was an ongoing construction rather than a fixed entity. As you may recall, Descartes' 'I' was thinker of the thoughts present in the mind, and Kant's, source and author of their unity. As such, the 'I' is, and must be, the sum total of the cognitive and emotive dispositions implicitly used to find rules and regularities in the stream of impressions. But the dispositions to find patterns and rhythms are not buried whole in the mind but developed in relation to incoming impressions. As Wittgenstein observed late in life following a rule is essentially an ill-defined affair that does not lend itself to any sense of closure; indeed, who knows how one might react to a new incoming stimulus? And thus, according to Mach, exercising the ability to find laws in the phenomena is, in very real sense, a self-constructive process or, in a word, Bootstrapping.",[108,959,961],{"id":960},"the-machian-weltanschauung","The Machian Weltanschauung",[95,963,964],{},"In order to better understand the gist of Mach's conception of the theorizing activity we shall end with few general remarks on various notions that illuminate his general point of view.",[966,967,969],"h4",{"id":968},"i-the-stream-of-thought","(i) The Stream of Thought",[95,971,972],{},"Imagine nothing beyond appearance, neither supersensible nor substratum, that nothing whatsoever exists, except an ever flowing stream of thought, smooth bundle of impressions tirelessly unfolding, admitting neither gap nor overlap. The manifolds Elements, soft 'building blocks' with little core and much fringe, all inter-penetrate, striving to reach beyond the range, to 'loosen the cage'. Ever rhythmically inclined, eagerness and cognitive hyperactivity fueled part anxiety, another, practicality, the stream is slave to one master and one master only -- beat from within pointing the way forwards.",[966,974,976],{"id":975},"ii-space","(ii) Space",[95,978,979],{},"Space is not another inner beat but what Wittgenstein called a net in the Tractatus -- a systematic descriptive framework expressing and organizing a family of relations. (In the geometric case we have the relations -- p stands to the left of q, p is to right of q, p is below q, p lies above q etc. The color space systematize the relations -- p is brighter than q, p is darker than q, p is the superposition of q and r etc.)",[966,981,983],{"id":982},"iii-objects","(iii) Objects",[95,985,986],{},"Objects do not exist except as semi-invariant bundles of properties and relations. In other words, whenever we discern in the flux of things a set of interrelated properties and relations that remain seemingly unchanged relative to a shifting background, we tend to extract them from the context and introduce the assumption that the relative invariance observed reflects the permanence of an independent self-sustaining object. Behind the inclination is a fetishistic mentality, an ancient tendency to endow man-made idols and gods with supernatural powers of their own. The decision to call a relatively invariant set of relations object must be given pragmatic justification; deeming an artificial construction independent reality must be demonstrably useful to overcome the obvious objection that doing so invariably goes counter to the actual facts of the matter.",[108,988,990],{"id":989},"the-convergence-of-the-scientific-ethical-and-aesthetic","The Convergence of the Scientific, Ethical and Aesthetic",[95,992,993],{},"From a scientific point of view the principle of economy of thought is a plea to retain the distinction between fact and artifact, observation and speculation, passive receptivity and personal preference. These distinctions were not only the basis of the scientific approach, but the very foundation of bourgeois individualism, according to which, the world should be divided into public inter-subjective domain of fact and personal subjective individual sphere. By Mach's time the distinction between the sphere of fact and the realm of individual preference had been eroded; the proud, honest and industrious bourgeois of the early 19th century metamorphosed into hypocritical, self-indulgent and egotistic specimen a half century later. Indeed, Mach's was a critique of bourgeois morality in the name of its original calling. The early modernists of Vienna were united in their conviction that if democracy, when properly understood, necessitated more radical changes than anticipated, so be it.",[95,995,996],{},"Initially, little genuine revolutionary spirit informed the milieu of the early modernists; they merely sought a more open and less censorious code of conduct. The very same guidelines involved in the principle of economy had, in fact, clear moral implications; general, simple and transparent construction is also one where the narcissism responsible for cultivating personal idiosyncrasy is held in check, and where intentions are given honest formulation that stand allows them to be communicated clearly to others.",[95,998,999],{},"In Kant's system the aesthetic judgment was anchored in the concept of form. A distinction was made between gratification and pleasure where the latter, though subjective, was void of any trace of dependence on interest or peculiarities of sense and thus deemed universally valid. The concept of form thus both informed the social sense and depended on it. Aesthetic judgment gave content to the notion that agreement on formal matters can be expected from 'anyone deserving of the name man'. Vice versa, a Kantian concept of 'cognitive community' was derived on the basis of common formal sensibilities.",[95,1001,1002],{},"Mach rejected form as any other synthetic a priori truths. The latter, in his mind, were mystifications reflecting confusion between fact and subjective disposition. Nevertheless, the principle of economy of thought provided a substitute to the notion of form inheriting certain aspects of its role in the Kantian system. Different subjects each adhering to the principle of economy might be able to communicate on that basis; lack of ornamentation, transparency of structure and clarity of intention thus pointed exactly in the same direction substantiating the new social sense of the modernists, namely, expression of the affinity of the alienated and self-enclosed.",[170,1004],{},[170,1006],{},[103,1008,1010],{"id":1009},"cognitive-exercise-m3-analysis-and-synthesis-of-sensations","Cognitive Exercise #M3: Analysis and Synthesis of Sensations",[95,1012,1013],{},[156,1014,1015],{},"A game for a single player",[108,1017,918],{"id":1018},"instructions-1",[95,1020,1021],{},"The present game invites the participants to analyze an object and its properties -- more specifically, the bronze sculpture presented on the Large Pedestal. The method of analysis is based on series of comparisons of the sculpture with other objects. Inside the hull of the pedestal is a collection of objects -- small toys representing animals, instruments and household objects, geometric shapes, colored strips of paper, cardboard cards with words, cutout numbers etc. Each round, the player picks out an object 'randomly' from a slot in the pedestal and compares it to the sculpture, trying to discern something common to both-- identifying, in other words, a shared property or, in Mach's terminology, similar sensation invoked by each of the two objects compared. The player is then required to specify explicitly the category used in the comparison and write it down on the blackboards prepared for that purpose on top of each pedestal -- 'same color', 'same shape', 'similar features' -- for example.",[95,1023,1024,1025,1028],{},"The game board -- a large wooden cutout on the floor -- determines the game sequence; (it is an enlarged reproduction of ",[98,1026,1027],{},"Network of Stoppages"," from 1914 by Marcel Duchamp.) The board spans a tree structure the player tries to 'climb', until reaching a terminal point at the 'top'. The junctures of the tree are labeled numerically from right to left -- according to their level and their location on each level. (The rightmost branch on the first level of the tree labeled '1', the one to its left '2' etc., the branch furthest right, splitting from '1' is labeled '11', the second '12', and so on.) At each juncture is a pedestal with the same numerical designation.",[95,1030,1031],{},"After picking up the first 'random object', the player places it on Pedestal No. 1 -- on the far right -- and, if successful in identifying a property the chosen object shares with the sculpture, the player writes down the relevant category on the pedestal, and proceeds straight ahead, placing the second object picked at random on Pedestal No. 11. On failing to find a common attribute, the player must move laterally, placing a new object on Pedestal No. 2, instead. Generally, after a success the player moves upwards and following a failure, sideways to the left. The game ends when the player reaches one of the terminal points on the board (winning) or, alternatively, when no lateral moves are available (losing). The number of stations the player went through, on the way to the top is the score; obviously, the lower the score, the better.",[108,1033,1035],{"id":1034},"remarks-on-the-game","Remarks on the Game",[95,1037,1038],{},"Analysis and Synthesis of Sensations is a game designed for single players, focusing on cognitive processes of individual subjects, thus embodying the psychological point of view, associated with Ernst Mach, leaving collective 'Boltzmannian' concerns, arising in other exercises, temporarily suspended. In this game the object of the analysis is the manifold of sensibility (or, bundle of sensations,) corresponding to a designated object. The method employed reflects Mach's theory of the mind; it consists of isolating various aspects thereof and investigates the respective contributions of each to the whole. Indirectly, the method also pertains to a domain of cognitive processes of which, according to Mach, ideational construction or synthesis normally consists.",[95,1040,1041],{},"The game begins once the player observes the object presented on the Large Pedestal; doing so invariably engenders in the mind sensations of various types -- visual, tactile, auditory etc. -- initially presented in unarticulated or bundled form. The analysis of the bundle of sensation is the process whereby the observer disentangles each individually, thereby comprehending it, until all aspects are attended to, in which case the player is said to comprehend the object, itself.",[95,1043,1044],{},"Clearly, the observer must focus first on an individual aspect of the bundle of sensations; separated from the rest, its contribution to the whole might be articulated. The analysis proceeds by varying this aspect of the manifold, while keeping others constant; using his or her imagination, the observer constructs new hypothetical manifolds, identical to the original in every respect, except those varied. Next the player contemplates the impact of the variations on his or her cognitive state as a whole, asking what would have been different if, instead of the actual bundle of sensations, the imaginary one were obtained in its place. The differences between the original manifold and the variations thereof so obtained reflect the systematic contribution of the aspect in question to the bundle as a whole.",[95,1046,1047],{},"Engaging in the process of analysis, then, the observer disentangles individual groups of sensations, thereby decomposing the bundle, creating for it a 'tree' of imaginary cognitive alternatives. Each node of the tree characterizes, hypothetically, what would have been one's cognitive state without having obtained a certain aspect of the manifold of sensations. What, for example, is the contribution of the color of the sculpture? Why does it have the shape it does and not another? What is the cognitive import of the proportions of the different parts of the object? The method of variation enables the player to answer questions of this kind, the typical concerns of Analysis.",[108,1049,1051],{"id":1050},"comparison-with-the-schematistic-theory-of-cognitive-analysis","Comparison with the Schematistic Theory of Cognitive Analysis",[95,1053,1054],{},"The variation method for the analysis of sensations stands in marked contrast to others, stemming from alternative conceptions of the mind; those derived from 'schematistic' cognitive theories were particularly influential until the end of the 19th century. In fact, Mach developed his point of view in opposition to schematistic theories. His objections, as we shall see shortly, stemmed from his general anti-metaphysical philosophy.",[95,1056,1057,1058,1061],{},"Cognitive theories based on schematism presuppose an abstract 'lexicon' of 'disembodied' properties present in the mind of every human subject, available for purposes of comparison and analysis. This a priori lexicon applies independently of experience; the fixture of the cognitive apparatus is not presumed subjected to revision in light of new sensory input. The assumption that such a fixed collection of categories and attributes existed was central to the ",[98,1059,1060],{},"Critique of Pure Reason","; those objecting to Kant's aprioristic metaphysics, tended to reject the cognitive theories it implied, as well.",[108,1063,1065],{"id":1064},"machs-conception-of-the-scientific-method","Mach's Conception of the Scientific Method",[95,1067,1068],{},"In scientific contexts, variational analysis is a task assigned to the laboratory technician, and not to the imagination. Instead of imagining an object with a different shape but the same color, scent, texture etc., experiments on actual systems are carried out where a single parameter varies continuously and attention is paid to the impact of that operation on the values of others. Scientific analysis, in other words, is by nature objective -- concerned with the diversity of sensations in its own right, regardless of its origin in the mind of a certain subject. Concerned merely with patterns and regularities and avoiding mention of underlying mechanisms, this type of investigation, according to Mach, nevertheless constitutes a search for causal relations, in the empiricist sense of the term.",[170,1070],{},[103,1072,1074],{"id":1073},"cognitive-exercise-b1-phase-transitions","Cognitive Exercise #B1: Phase Transitions",[108,1076,918],{"id":1077},"instructions-2",[95,1079,1080],{},"Sixteen players are situated on the court, each positioned near one of the intersections of the 4x4 grid on the game board. Above the court, the 'referee' sits on a high chair, instructing the players when a new round begins. The game is played repeatedly, in a succession of rounds. The number of rounds in each game is not determined in advance but depends on the speed in which a pattern emerges on the game board, i.e. when the colors of the flags, which are alternately black or white, are distributed regularly all over the Board.",[95,1082,1083],{},"The round begins when the referee tells each of the players whether to display a white or black flag in their position, determining the initial distribution of black and white flags on the board and, of course, the number of flags with each color. The number of black flags is the analog to the temperature of the system; the larger the number, the higher the 'temperature'. The referee should assign the position of the black flags in arbitrary fashion, avoiding orderly patterns as far as possible; it should be made obvious that the pattern emerges through a random process that depends on the number of black flags on the board but not other details of the initial distribution.",[108,1085,1087],{"id":1086},"the-ising-spin-lattice-model","The Ising Spin Lattice Model",[95,1089,1090],{},"The present cognitive exercise is a live demonstration of the workings of the so-called Ising-Lenz Spin Lattice Model of Phase Transitions. As mentioned above, mathematical proof exists in the model of the eventual emergence of order out of randomness. The present game of chance shares the mathematical structure of the model and, thus, the proof of the emergence of order applies to it as well. The Ising Spin Model is the best available explanation of phase transitions of various types -- qualitative changes of matter arising in a law-like fashion once certain quantitative thresholds are breached.",[108,1092,1094],{"id":1093},"the-reality-of-objective-random-processes","The Reality of Objective Random Processes",[95,1096,1097],{},"It is easy enough to construct 'artificial' examples, where special circumstances prevent phase transitions from taking place even with temperature kept near the critical level. The Ising model allows us to derive the emergence of new phases statistically and not absolutely, and thus counter-examples, however rare, always exist and are possible to construct. Every proposition of statistical mechanics has this character, even the second law of thermodynamics admits exceptions.",[108,1099,1101],{"id":1100},"the-sociological-turn","The Sociological Turn",[95,1103,1104],{},"The sociological turn required the aforementioned statistical revolution as one of the conditions of its possibility. Statistical analysis is an invaluable tool for the study of wholes like social ones, having as a rule many independent parts whose separate evolutions obey entirely different laws than their communal social sum. Of particular importance was the willingness to see emergent phenomena in society, analogous to phase transitions in the physical realm.",[95,1106,1107],{},"In the 1890s there were episodes of mass unrest in a great many cities around the world -- Chicago, Latvia, Italy, Belgium, Sweden and Germany, among others. In each of these places events had a different character and independent reasons, and yet, in each case, the high level of social cohesion and sharp strategic maneuvers of the local organization astonished those reporting on the events.",[95,1109,1110],{},"John Dewey, who observed the rail workers' strike in Chicago, saw in the events proof for the greed and ruthlessness of the corporate leaders and the violent tendencies of the civil society; in the behavior of the strikers he saw evidence for a capacity for self-organization and self-determination among the working class. Together, the two insights pointed at the possibility that social unrest might cause broader social transformation. Dewey became, in a word, a socialist.",[95,1112,1113],{},"Rosa Luxemburg took part in the strikes in Latvia. She, too, was overwhelmed by the solidarity and generosity of the workers and by the brutality of the police reaction. In her case, too, the events led to considerations of a more abstract nature, namely, how to manage a revolutionary movement.",[170,1115],{},[103,1117,1119],{"id":1118},"cognitive-exercise-b2-syncopating-with-machine-beat","Cognitive Exercise #B2: Syncopating with Machine Beat",[108,1121,918],{"id":1122},"instructions-3",[95,1124,1125],{},"The present cognitive exercise invites the players to improvise on the drum set or dance on the pedestals to the sound of an ensemble of machines operating simultaneously. The players are encouraged to syncopate -- to 'play off' of the rhythm, placing accents slightly before or after the beat, thereby mixing an individual rhythmic signature with the wall of mechanical sound. Syncopation is at the heart of jazz, what distinguishes it from traditional European music. It constitutes the listener as an active participant, superimposing his or her individual input into the primary musical source. Harmonic structures are of secondary importance, making it possible for mechanical rhythms and noises to be employed as musical sources. For this reason jazz is broadly regarded as the music of the modern metropolis, where thousands of different beats play together in unison and everyone is invited to join in.",[108,1127,1129],{"id":1128},"the-history-of-syncopated-music","The History of Syncopated Music",[95,1131,1132],{},"The syncopate rhythms of jazz originated in West African music, imported by slaves to the Caribbean islands and then to the southern United States. Nevertheless, it is wrong to think of the modern syncopated sound as African in nature; it represents a fusion of the African beat with European music that changed both in essential ways. In no metaphorical way syncopation developed as musical dramatization of the narrative of the master-slave dialectics -- the love-hate relationship between the dominant power and its subordinates that eventually transforms the nature and culture of both.",[108,1134,1136],{"id":1135},"the-cakewalk","The Cakewalk",[95,1138,1139],{},"Together with the first ragtime songs, a dance style emerged that contributed greatly to the popularity of the new musical genre. Those wishing to emulate the new rhythm deeply, to accompany passive musical experience with bodily interpretation, twisted and turned to the cakewalk. The dance style took Europe by storm; a few decades after the waltz had revolutionized dancehalls across the continent, ragtime supplemented modern dancing, expanding its expressive scope and transcending its limitations.",[108,1141,1143],{"id":1142},"syncopation-and-the-cognitive-abilities-developed-in-the-chain-gang","Syncopation and the Cognitive Abilities Developed in the Chain Gang",[95,1145,1146],{},"Syncopation developed out of the experience of the chain gang and the galley. Groups of slaves were chained at their ankles to one another with rigid metal rods, requiring completely coordinated movements; the slightest deviation disrupted the communal effort of rowers in the galleys of the ships. In order to communicate while working in unison the slaves had to develop cognitive capacity missing entirely in Europe, namely: the ability to follow two incommensurable rhythms at the same time or for several to engage in independent activities while following a regimented beat. This cognitive development resulted from of the condition of slavery, it was not imported from the African continent.",[108,1148,1150],{"id":1149},"syncopation-in-the-machine-age","Syncopation in the 'Machine Age'",[95,1152,1153],{},"The extreme enthusiasm in Europe for ragtime music and the syncopated cakewalk dance proved deep-seated, part and parcel of the modernist legacy. Syncopation was the cognitive ability inherited from the experience of slavery, helping the metropolitan man to reconcile regimentation and individual activity; this time, it pertained to the 'slaves of the machine age' -- to the industrial proletariat, in particular, and to the citizenry of the modern metropolis.",[108,1155,1157],{"id":1156},"boltzmanns-reconciliation-of-determinism-and-randomness","Boltzmann's Reconciliation of Determinism and Randomness",[95,1159,1160],{},"Another conceptually related development that happened in the same decade, the last of the 19th century, was the reconciliation of determinism and randomness. The breakthrough was primarily the result of the genius of Boltzmann.",[95,1162,1163],{},"Until the late 19th century the concept of random regularity or random pattern was considered a contradiction in terms. Patterns and regularities are byproducts of laws. Randomness, on the other hand, is the complete absence of law by definition. And so, it was surmised, the very idea of random regularity is self-contradictory; if a process is random, it cannot abide by laws.",[95,1165,1166],{},"Boltzmann's solution to the confounding problem was to declare the second law of thermodynamics as statistically but not absolutely valid. In other words, even if it is physically possible for the milk and coffee molecules to separate spontaneously, they are highly unlikely to do so. Boltzmann thus deemed the second law of thermodynamics statistical law, -- regularity emerging out of randomness.",[170,1168],{},[103,1170,1172],{"id":1171},"cognitive-exercise-m4-continuous-draftsmanshipexquisite-corpse","Cognitive Exercise #M4: Continuous Draftsmanship/Exquisite Corpse",[95,1174,1175],{},[156,1176,1177],{},"Cognitive exercise for a group of five players",[108,1179,918],{"id":1180},"instructions-4",[95,1182,1183],{},"Five players stand around a column with a pentagon base, one stands in front of each surface. The surfaces are coated in blackboard paint so the participants can draw on them with chalks available for this purpose. The column rotates around its central axis; it stacks together five horizontal sections, one above the other, each of which can be moved individually.",[95,1185,1186],{},"The participants draw figures of each other on the different segments of the column -- each on a different section, the one facing them. After a few minutes the players stop, each rotating their own segment either left or right, thereby each placing their drawing in front of another player. Next, each of the players continues the process, drawing a different face on the same segment now placed in front of them, using the drawing by another as an element in their own composition.",[108,1188,1190],{"id":1189},"the-revolt-against-reason","The Revolt Against Reason",[95,1192,1193],{},"Viennese modernism was founded on the so-called 'revolt against reason' -- a rebellion of the educated middle class youth against the bourgeois culture of their fathers' generation. The older liberal democrats presumed their values and judgments universal truths of reason; their alienated children loathed the pretence to objectivity, deeming it a product of a hypocritical, self-centered and morally indifferent mentality.",[108,1195,1197],{"id":1196},"rodins-method-of-continuous-drawing","Rodin's Method of Continuous Drawing",[95,1199,1200],{},"The development of techniques that allow the artist to bar the influence of reason on their creative processes was considered the primary task of those among the rebels against reason who applied their ideas to the aesthetic domain. One of the first techniques of this kind, brainchild of Auguste Rodin, was known as continuous drawing, a method where the draftsman keeps looking at the model while his hand draws on paper.",[108,1202,1204],{"id":1203},"schiele-and-kokoschka-drawing-prepubescent-proletarians","Schiele and Kokoschka Drawing Prepubescent Proletarians",[95,1206,1207],{},"The early developments of Schiele and Kokoschka -- among the first true Viennese modern artists -- illustrate well what the concept of expression meant in the first decade of the 20th century. Both Schiele and Kokoschka, avidly studied the corrupting impact of the metropolis on their unhealthy bodies and, contorted minds; in their eyes, they were not merely channels to the modern reality but products and victims of the same.",[170,1209],{},[103,1211,1213],{"id":1212},"cognitive-exercise-b3-sensitivity-to-initial-conditions","Cognitive Exercise #B3: Sensitivity to Initial Conditions",[95,1215,1216],{},[156,1217,1218],{},"A game for two or more players",[108,1220,918],{"id":1221},"instructions-5",[95,1223,1224],{},"Sensitivity to Initial Conditions is a modified 'symbolic' billiard game having two exit ramps instead of a table as the game board. On the ramp are drawings of the trajectories for two hypothetical billiard balls, tracing the imaginary curves of their motion as they move forth, bouncing off boundaries. The players may add new trajectories, or use those existing as notation for a collective jumping game -- a dance of sorts, performed by a group numbering at least two, that realizes mechanical motion.",[108,1226,1228],{"id":1227},"the-laws-of-mechanical-motion","The Laws of Mechanical Motion",[95,1230,1231],{},"Clearly, the Law of Motion of billiard balls is deterministic; positing either linear motion or, reflection, it determines the course of the ball at each point of time. You may note that the Law of Motion is also time-symmetric. First, motion along linear curve in the opposite (backward) direction remains linear; secondly, when reflected 'backwardly', the angle of incidence still equals the angle of reflection.",[108,1233,1235],{"id":1234},"instability","Instability",[95,1237,1238],{},"The initial points of the two trajectories drawn on the surface of the ramp are located near each other and the two develop, for a while, in almost parallel fashion; soon enough, though, they separate, evolving differently and independently, until one takes the right exit ramp and the second, the left. The eventual separation of neighboring trajectories of motion, is the defining property of unstable systems.",[108,1240,1242],{"id":1241},"ergodicity-and-disorder","Ergodicity and Disorder",[95,1244,1245],{},"On the opposite pole of orderliness one encounters systems that do not repeat their motion after finite periods of time or exhibit cyclical behavior of more complex kind; by implication, such systems must realize in the course of time all the possibilities open to it and thus extrapolating the laws of motion in such cases is a difficult and uncertain task.",[108,1247,1249],{"id":1248},"the-flaneur-as-test-particle","The Flaneur as Test Particle",[95,1251,1252],{},"The concept of quasi-ergodicity justifies an empirical way of researching fields of forces, namely, the test particle method. The same idea applies to the exhilarating and frightening world of the modern metropolis. There, too, freedom in both extrinsic and intrinsic senses, namely, the absence of inner or outer prohibitions, guarantees those willing a 'taste' of anything human, thus what vicissitudes there are in store. The flaneurs, those who go botanizing on asphalt, as Benjamin famously put it, thus fashioned themselves as test particles for the field of metropolitan forces.",[170,1254],{},[103,1256,1258],{"id":1257},"cognitive-exercise-m5-and-b4-are-you-an-expressionist-dream-machinecurved-surface","Cognitive Exercise #M5 and #B4: Are You an Expressionist? Dream Machine/Curved Surface",[95,1260,1261],{},[156,1262,1263],{},"Assisted Self-Reflection",[108,1265,918],{"id":1266},"instructions-6",[95,1268,1269],{},"Operating the Dream Machine requires the player to move the lever at a speed of approximately 78 rpm (like an old gramophone). Standing near the instrument with closed eyes, the player receives an electromagnetic stimulus that invokes spontaneous imagery in the mind. The surface of the instrument is reflective. When the lever is operated the images located at its base are shown on the moving cylinder, as if in a state of motion.",[108,1271,1273],{"id":1272},"symbolism-and-expressionism","Symbolism and Expressionism",[95,1275,1276],{},"In the turn of the 20th century many considered symbolism and expressionism the principal rival aesthetic alternatives of the times; both were cultural expressions of the revolt against reason, alternative strategies aiming to undermine the culture of the bourgeoisie, historicism, in particular.",[95,1278,1279],{},"The so called Wagnerians choose the psychophysical approach to art, emphasizing the determining role of physiological response, direct route leading from nervous stimulus to aesthetic experience, proper. The second camp -- 'Schönbergians', 'Krausians' and 'Loosians' -- deemed the Wagnerian approach vulgar and morally demeaning, refusing to see in art well aimed 'conditioning', passively administered.",[108,1281,1283],{"id":1282},"expressionism","Expressionism",[95,1285,1286],{},"The change of guards took place around 1905, delivering defeat to Art Nouveau and the symbolist ethos in general. Suggesting the distance between human individuals was reflection of the uniqueness of each, Expressionism provided, indeed, powerful new philosophical formulation of alienation. This view, what we call philosophical expressionism, regards the unbridgeable gap between individuals positively, namely, as essence of the freedom of the imagination.",[170,1288],{},[103,1290,1292],{"id":1291},"cognitive-exercise-b6-the-collage-or-beyond-the-modernist-sublime","Cognitive Exercise #B6: The Collage or Beyond the Modernist Sublime",[108,1294,918],{"id":1295},"instructions-7",[95,1297,1298],{},"The three video projectors show urban views of the city of Vienna. These are mostly images of roads and pavements from the turn of the 20th century. Using the projections as instruments and the images, 'building blocks', the visitor is invited to create an impromptu composition -- a temporally extended ideational construction of spatial imagery.",[108,1300,1302],{"id":1301},"the-i-in-space","The 'I' in Space",[95,1304,1305,1306,1309],{},"Wittgenstein famously remarked in the ",[98,1307,1308],{},"Tractatus"," that the 'I' is not part of space but located in the 'limits of the world'. Projecting itself into space, the 'I' does not assign itself place therein, but constructs itself merely as a 'point of view'.",[108,1311,1313],{"id":1312},"the-sublime","The Sublime",[95,1315,1316],{},"According to Kant, tall mountains, steep cliffs, the enormous waves of the ocean and other scenes we call sublime are those 'we cannot find words to describe'. The fear the sublime inspires is the result of this realization, namely, the knowledge things existed so much greater than us we cannot even find words to describe them.",[108,1318,1320],{"id":1319},"ideational-constructions-employing-the-method-of-the-sublime","Ideational Constructions Employing the Method of the Sublime",[95,1322,1323],{},"At certain moments of history, the desire for a transcendent and unbounded consciousness becomes as tangible and urgent as any associated with practical aims. It arouses deep and highly imprudent yearning for apocalypse and utopia combined, a conflation of the historical and the mythical. In such moments fear of the void is dwarfed, overruled, by the excitement of discovering a new nonsensible reality.",[170,1325],{},[103,1327,662],{"id":661},[95,1329,1330],{},"The exhibition \"Mach versus Boltzmann\" represents a comprehensive exploration of early Viennese modernism through interactive cognitive exercises that embody the philosophical tensions between phenomenalism and statistical mechanics, between individual experience and collective emergence, between order and chaos. Through these eight exercises, visitors are invited to physically and intellectually engage with the conceptual revolutions that shaped modernist consciousness at the turn of the 20th century.",[95,1332,1333],{},"The opposition between Mach's emphasis on direct sensory experience and economy of thought, and Boltzmann's statistical worldview that reconciled determinism with randomness, provided the intellectual framework for understanding the anxieties and possibilities of metropolitan modernity. The cognitive exercises demonstrate that modernism was not merely an aesthetic movement but a fundamental reorganization of human consciousness in response to the unprecedented transformations of urban, industrial life.",[170,1335],{},[95,1337,1338],{},[156,1339,672],{},[95,1341,1342,1345,1346,1348,1351,1352,1354,1357],{},[156,1343,1344],{},"Venue:"," Secession Vienna",[679,1347],{},[156,1349,1350],{},"Artists:"," Clegg & Guttmann",[679,1353],{},[156,1355,1356],{},"Period:"," Early 20th Century Viennese Modernism (1890s-1910s)",[170,1359],{},{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":1361},[1362,1363,1372,1380,1386,1392,1400,1406,1413,1418,1424],{"id":785,"depth":429,"text":786},{"id":812,"depth":429,"text":813,"children":1364},[1365,1366,1367,1368,1369,1370,1371],{"id":821,"depth":434,"text":822},{"id":828,"depth":434,"text":829},{"id":838,"depth":434,"text":839},{"id":845,"depth":434,"text":846},{"id":852,"depth":434,"text":853},{"id":868,"depth":434,"text":869},{"id":899,"depth":434,"text":900},{"id":908,"depth":429,"text":909,"children":1373},[1374,1375,1376,1377,1378,1379],{"id":917,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":924,"depth":434,"text":925},{"id":934,"depth":434,"text":935},{"id":950,"depth":434,"text":951},{"id":960,"depth":434,"text":961},{"id":989,"depth":434,"text":990},{"id":1009,"depth":429,"text":1010,"children":1381},[1382,1383,1384,1385],{"id":1018,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":1034,"depth":434,"text":1035},{"id":1050,"depth":434,"text":1051},{"id":1064,"depth":434,"text":1065},{"id":1073,"depth":429,"text":1074,"children":1387},[1388,1389,1390,1391],{"id":1077,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":1086,"depth":434,"text":1087},{"id":1093,"depth":434,"text":1094},{"id":1100,"depth":434,"text":1101},{"id":1118,"depth":429,"text":1119,"children":1393},[1394,1395,1396,1397,1398,1399],{"id":1122,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":1128,"depth":434,"text":1129},{"id":1135,"depth":434,"text":1136},{"id":1142,"depth":434,"text":1143},{"id":1149,"depth":434,"text":1150},{"id":1156,"depth":434,"text":1157},{"id":1171,"depth":429,"text":1172,"children":1401},[1402,1403,1404,1405],{"id":1180,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":1189,"depth":434,"text":1190},{"id":1196,"depth":434,"text":1197},{"id":1203,"depth":434,"text":1204},{"id":1212,"depth":429,"text":1213,"children":1407},[1408,1409,1410,1411,1412],{"id":1221,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":1227,"depth":434,"text":1228},{"id":1234,"depth":434,"text":1235},{"id":1241,"depth":434,"text":1242},{"id":1248,"depth":434,"text":1249},{"id":1257,"depth":429,"text":1258,"children":1414},[1415,1416,1417],{"id":1266,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":1272,"depth":434,"text":1273},{"id":1282,"depth":434,"text":1283},{"id":1291,"depth":429,"text":1292,"children":1419},[1420,1421,1422,1423],{"id":1295,"depth":434,"text":918},{"id":1301,"depth":434,"text":1302},{"id":1312,"depth":434,"text":1313},{"id":1319,"depth":434,"text":1320},{"id":661,"depth":429,"text":662},"2006-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","Spatio-temporal construction in eight parts or Composition for early modernist cognitive exercises","/blog/Mach-v-Boltzmann.jpg",{"venue":1429,"head":1430},"Vienna Sécession, Vienna, Austria and Braunschweig Kunsthalle, Braunschweig, Germany",{"meta":1431},[1432,1434,1435,1436,1438,1440],{"name":467,"content":1433},"Public Project, Vienna Sécession, 2006, Mach versus Boltzmann, Clegg & Guttmann, Braunschweig Kunsthalle, 2006",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":1437},"© 2006 Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":479,"content":1439},"Catalog text for show at Vienna Sécession 2006",{"name":482,"content":483},7,{"title":34,"description":1426},"P7aXE6sDcN6z-l2Hni09ji-4mytwQR8ii2mURR6CNI8",{"id":1445,"title":42,"author":580,"body":1446,"caption":81,"date":1511,"description":1512,"extension":461,"image":1513,"meta":1514,"minRead":1527,"navigation":85,"path":43,"seo":1528,"stem":44,"toc":486,"__hash__":1529},"blog/blog/On the Jewish Metaphysics of Death.md",{"type":92,"value":1447,"toc":1505},[1448,1450,1453,1456,1460,1463,1466,1469,1472,1475,1479,1486,1489,1493,1496,1499,1502],[103,1449,111],{"id":110},[95,1451,1452],{},"This project is a latest in the series of Open Public Libraries by the artist team Clegg & Guttmann. It is a collection of books on the topic of the Jewish Philosophy of Death which is placed outdoors, in three weather protective bookcases, in the Jewish Cemetery in Krems.",[95,1454,1455],{},"The Jewish Cemetery in Krems has been unused since the Second World War. The Open Public Library in Krems is a revival project which will give a reason and an opportunity for a public access to one of the few reminders that there was once a lively Jewish community in this Lower Austrian city. The collection of books in the library is divided into three parts, one in each book-case. The first book-case contains original religious material in Hebrew. The second cabinet contains introductory material on Jewish law in German and English. The third part of the collection specializes in various topics related to the Jewish philosophy of death.",[103,1457,1459],{"id":1458},"the-jewish-grave-stone-in-the-pieristische-kirche","The Jewish grave stone in the Pieristische Kirche",[95,1461,1462],{},"The project originated from the discovery of a Jewish grave-stone from the 14th century embedded in one of the walls of the tower of the Pieristische Kirche in Krems. From an archeological point of view, it was an interesting discovery. The grave-stone is one of the few remaining objects associated with the Jewish community of Krems in this period. Rabbi Isaac, whose grave it was, must have been a member of the first generation of Jews who settled in Lower Austria.",[95,1464,1465],{},"The Pieristische Kirche was built a hundred years or so later. It belonged to a monastery of the Pieristische order, known for its emphasis on complete seclusion from the environment. Currently, the monastery has a sole monk who is eighty years old. In addition, there is a care taker, a forty year old Man.",[95,1467,1468],{},"The grave-stone embedded in the tower was discovered in the 1990's by a historian who grew up in Krems. He remembers that, as a child, he asked his father about the strange pattern visible through the plaster which suggested there was something underneath over which letters were written in high relief. His fathered feigned indifference and warned his son against excessive curiosity. Later, the son became a researcher who specializes in the history of the area and, in this capacity, he organized an \"expedition\" whose aim it was to remove the object under the plaster. That is how the headstone from Rabbi Isaac grave was discovered.",[95,1470,1471],{},"The circumstances under which the stone left the grave and became embedded in the tower are rather unclear. It seems that the events are related to a pogrom which took place during the construction of the church. During the pogrom, the Jewish cemetery must have been vandalized and the perpetrators must have removed the stone from the grave. We are not aware of the details of the incident but hundreds of violent attacks against Jews are known to have taken place in Austria during that period.",[95,1473,1474],{},"We do not know whether there was any connection between the Pieristische Order and the pogrom during which the stone was removed. It is possible that the stone was brought to the construction-site without the explicit consent of the order. It seems likely, though, that someone related to the religious authorities was aware of the presence in the tower of a grave-stone on which Hebrew letters were inscribed, before the building was plastered over. Indeed, it would not be surprising if the order had a more direct relation to these events. Similar pogroms were the direct results of religious incitement. It should be remarked that acts of vandalism of Jewish graveyards carry great significance for religious Jews. The act of burial is an important event in Jewish life and the Jewish religious law devotes much space to the regulation of burials. Certain aspects of the significance of Jewish burial laws stem from a belief in the resurrection of the dead in the end of days as it is described in the Vision of the Dry Bones of Ezekiel. Perhaps, a proper burial is required if one of the dead is to arise.",[103,1476,1478],{"id":1477},"on-the-history-of-the-public-library-project-in-krems","On the history of the Public Library project in Krems",[95,1480,1481,1482,1485],{},"Once the grave-stone was removed from the wall of the church it was decided that the stone should be presented to the citizens of Krems and that in the hole left in the wall an artwork will be placed. A competition was announced by the Lower Austria Public Art Fund. The winning entry was ",[98,1483,1484],{},"A Public Library for the Pieristische Kirche in Krems",", the first version of the present project of Clegg & Guttmann. A structure with shelves was supposed to fill the hole where books related to Jewish burial and other related topics were to be Placed.",[95,1487,1488],{},"After lengthy negotiations a meeting took place in Vienna in which representatives of the Pieristische Order were present as well as various other interested parties. In the meeting the order announced its objection to place the Clegg & Guttmann project in the hole left in the tower. Instead, it was decided that a library on the same topics was to be placed in the Jewish Cemetery of Krems. Eventually, the stone will be placed in the graveyard as well.",[103,1490,1492],{"id":1491},"some-general-methodological-remarks-on-the-public-library-in-krems","Some general methodological remarks on the Public Library in Krems",[95,1494,1495],{},"On the surface, the Public Library in the Jewish Cemetery in Krems is a revival project. It aims to give a 'new lease on life' to a semi-abandoned site. Indeed, the beautiful overgrown cemetery has not been used or visited since the Second World War, when the entire population of this small community of Krems Jews was expelled from the city, placed in various camps and, eventually, murdered in extermination camps. Very few people from the community survived and, as a result, there are no Jews currently living in Krems.",[95,1497,1498],{},"However, the idea of placing a library outdoors in a graveyard has other concerns but revival. As much as it attempts, superficially, to take on an optimistic viewpoint and to offer constructive solutions it also points to the limitations of such simple positive constructive thinking as far as cases like the present one, regarding the Jewish graveyard in Krems, is concerned. In a sense, the urban revival attitude is, itself, the topic the Public Library in Krems tries to examine.",[95,1500,1501],{},"More generally, the current project in Krems exemplifies a group of artworks which Clegg & Guttmann refer to as social sculptures. Such sculptures are conceived of as constructions whose building blocks are ideational and not material - institutional arrangements, cultural forms, intellectual constructions etc. When the building blocks are combined they are expected to reverberate and exchange content and sensibilities. In the process, each is examined afresh when it is placed next to the others.",[95,1503,1504],{},"In this case the ancient Jewish culture of death is confronted with the modern pragmatic urban revivalism. The cozy arrangement of book shelves in the enclosed overgrown garden of the graveyard is thus confronted with the a layer after layer of the history of the Jewish people, with the Second World War, the Pogroms, the early settlement in Krems and, finally, as one leafs through the books, with the two millennia long thinking about the place of death in Jewish life. Pathos is, thus, an important element of the Public Library in Krems. It signifies that a contact was made with the remains of an old tradition which was planted a root in this small town in Lower Austria.",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":1506},[1507,1508,1509,1510],{"id":110,"depth":429,"text":111},{"id":1458,"depth":429,"text":1459},{"id":1477,"depth":429,"text":1478},{"id":1491,"depth":429,"text":1492},"2004-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","The Open Public Library in the Jewish Cemetery in Piaristenkirche Krems, Austria 2004","/blog/JMD_Krems03.jpg",{"location":1515,"project_type":1516,"artists":580,"wordCount":1517,"photo_credit":1518,"head":1519},"Krems, Lower Austria","Open Public Library",1095,"Christian Wachter, 2004",{"meta":1520},[1521,1523,1524,1526],{"name":467,"content":1522},"Public Project, Krems, Lower Austria, Jewish Philosophy of Death, , Jewish Cemetery in Piaristenkirche, 2004",{"name":473,"content":580},{"name":479,"content":1525},"Press release for the public project at the Jewish Cemetery in Piaristenkirche Krems, Austria 2004",{"name":482,"content":483},6,{"title":42,"description":1512},"L5rs28PBaRhJy67gMDXmX2U8MaJzBzGlaDG3D1_1g0Q",{"id":1531,"title":10,"author":81,"body":1532,"caption":81,"date":1553,"description":1554,"extension":461,"image":1555,"meta":1556,"minRead":429,"navigation":85,"path":11,"seo":1568,"stem":12,"toc":777,"__hash__":1569},"blog/blog/100 years zionist congress.md",{"type":92,"value":1533,"toc":1551},[1534,1540,1543,1546,1549],[95,1535,1536],{},[98,1537,1539],{"style":1538},"; font-size: 12px; color: gray; line-height: 8px; ","100 Years to the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel (Photo credit: Gina Folly Courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel)",[95,1541,1542],{},"A Hundred years ago young Jews from England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia and Poland, met in the Casino Hotel in Basel. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a new solution to the rising tide of the of new European anti-semitism, the proposal for the discussion was of a secular foundation of a Jewish State.\nThe meeting was a success. The participants left with a feeling that they opened a new  of chapter of Jewish history. Indeed, they were right. A process has began that culminated  51 years later, in the foundation of the state of Israel.",[95,1544,1545],{},"The main objective of the exhibition is to commemorate 100 years of the 1st Zionist congress. The focus is on the congress as a unique  event which took place in Basel. The exhibition will contain material on the background of the participants, on the congress itself and on the consequences of this historical event, where young Europeans, who did not have much in common, defined for themselves a new identity and a new plan. The cogency of their analysis can not be questioned. 40 years or so later, it became evident the European Jews were indeed in danger of being annihilated. The option of assimilation which was advocated by previous generations of Jews was not a real option.",[95,1547,1548],{},"The exhibition is divided into various environments:  The Heder, the Salon, the University, the Cafe etc., which typify the variety of the Jewish life styles in the 19th. Century. The viewer is invited to read booklets, pamphlets and newspapers which are related to the congress, to watch movies of different aspects of Zionism, or simply, to browse in a setting from which vantage point one can reflect on the experience of Jewish life in the European diaspora. Also exhibited are photographic portrait of European Jews. The exhibition was organized by the history department of the university of Basel in collaboration with Clegg & Guttmann, a New York based artistic  team who grew up in Israel.",[170,1550],{},{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":1552},[],"1998-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","Press release for the show at the Basel Kunstverein 1998","/blog/Installation the First Zionist Congress in Basel 1987 Basel Kunsthalle.jpg",{"head":1557},{"meta":1558},[1559,1561,1562,1563,1565,1567],{"name":467,"content":1560},"Basel Kunstverein, Switzerland, 1998, First Zionist congress 1898, Zionism, Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":1564},"© 2023 Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":479,"content":1566},"The text first appeared in the as a press release for the Clegg & Guttmann show in the Basel Kunstverein - 100 Years to the first Zionist Congress",{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":10,"description":1554},"RRE0xCN7k5HhrEzFMolsESGYsH2KLTZeaIS8FB0hzeY",{"id":1571,"title":18,"author":81,"body":1572,"caption":81,"date":1553,"description":2064,"extension":461,"image":1555,"meta":2065,"minRead":584,"navigation":85,"path":19,"seo":2074,"stem":20,"toc":486,"__hash__":2075},"blog/blog/1897, The First Zionist Congress.md",{"type":92,"value":1573,"toc":2044},[1574,1578,1592,1595,1610,1617,1619,1623,1634,1641,1660,1671,1673,1677,1687,1702,1706,1720,1727,1734,1736,1740,1746,1762,1773,1777,1783,1790,1805,1809,1819,1831,1835,1845,1850,1864,1866,1870,1873,1878,1896,1903,1907,1922,1928,1930,1934,1937,1941,1956,1960,1966,1982,1992,2000,2006,2008,2012,2019,2037],[103,1575,1577],{"id":1576},"_1-the-exhibition-history-and-reflection","1. The Exhibition: History and Reflection",[95,1579,1580,1581,1584,1585,1588,1589,1591],{},"The exhibition \"",[156,1582,1583],{},"1897, The First Zionist Congress in Basel","\" is a collaboration between ",[156,1586,1587],{},"Professor Haumann"," from the University of Basel and a group of historians of Zionism, along with ",[156,1590,580],{},", a team of artists from Israel (who now live and work in the United States).",[95,1593,1594],{},"The show operates on two levels:",[412,1596,1597,1604],{},[415,1598,1599,1600,1603],{},"A ",[156,1601,1602],{},"historical exhibition"," centered on the pivotal event of the first Zionist Congress in June 1897.",[415,1605,1599,1606,1609],{},[156,1607,1608],{},"meditation on the concept of a historical show"," itself.",[95,1611,1612,1613,1616],{},"We aspire to present the historical material compellingly while drawing attention to the methods and devices used in its construction. The exhibited objects are typically archival material, \"unearthed\" and brought together to make a coherent story accessible to the public. We believe the ",[156,1614,1615],{},"mode"," in which this process is effected deserves critical attention and reflection, as the construction of history is too important to be treated uncritically.",[170,1618],{},[103,1620,1622],{"id":1621},"_2-on-curating-historical-shows","2. On Curating Historical Shows",[95,1624,1625,1626,1629,1630,1633],{},"The basic elements of a historical show are ",[156,1627,1628],{},"documents, photographs, and souvenirs",". Sometimes works of art and furniture are added. Curators often try to exhibit objects with an independent ",[156,1631,1632],{},"aesthetic value"," to serve as a \"lure\" for viewers, encouraging them to invest time in the more challenging parts of the exhibition.",[95,1635,1636,1637,1640],{},"While this aesthetic strategy has justification, particularly when the historical subjects themselves produced artful objects, the question remains: ",[156,1638,1639],{},"Do we need to feel apologetic about presenting meaningful \"pieces of life\" without obvious aesthetic value"," to gain a better understanding of past events?",[412,1642,1643,1654],{},[415,1644,1645,1646,1649,1650,1653],{},"Historical exhibitions must appeal to the ",[156,1647,1648],{},"visual"," and the ",[156,1651,1652],{},"immediate"," organization of material, different from a book presentation.",[415,1655,1656,1657,361],{},"However, we believe an object becomes ",[156,1658,1659],{},"important the moment we make it the focus of attention",[95,1661,1662,1663,1666,1667,1670],{},"This urgency is heightened when trying to conjure the historical memories of people, like the first Zionists, who represented themselves primarily through ",[156,1664,1665],{},"spoken and written words"," (discussions and arguments). When we invite you to immerse yourself in the environments where the first Zionists read, wrote, and debated—the ",[156,1668,1669],{},"Heder, the café, the synagogue, and the parlor","—we do so without relying on the rhetoric of the \"important object.\"",[170,1672],{},[103,1674,1676],{"id":1675},"_3-the-first-zionist-congress-a-european-event","3. The First Zionist Congress: A European Event",[95,1678,1679,1680,1683,1684,361],{},"In the summer of ",[156,1681,1682],{},"1897",", a group of young Jewish individuals—English, Russian, French, Germans, and Austro-Hungarians, many in their twenties and thirties—congregated in the ",[156,1685,1686],{},"Stadtcasino of Basel",[95,1688,1689,1690,1693,1694,1697,1698,1701],{},"The main agenda was the ambitious plan to create a ",[156,1691,1692],{},"secular Jewish state",". The meeting was a success, leading participants to believe a new sense of secular Jewish identity, based on a life-sustaining idea, had been born. They were right: ",[156,1695,1696],{},"51 years later"," the state of Israel was declared in ",[156,1699,1700],{},"1948",", and the first Basel congress was the seminal event in that process.",[108,1703,1705],{"id":1704},"herzl-and-identity","Herzl and Identity",[95,1707,1708,1709,1715,1716,1719],{},"While the Zionist congress led its followers to the Middle East, the congress itself was an ",[156,1710,1711,1712],{},"European event ",[98,1713,1714],{},"par excellence",". The main organizer, ",[156,1717,1718],{},"Theodor Herzl",", a Viennese dandy and Paris correspondent, conceived the idea in 1895. He wrote his pamphlet in a state of trance, listening to Wagner and walking in the Tuileries.",[95,1721,1722,1723,1726],{},"Herzl wrote: \"The promised land... no one has ever tried to look for it where it really is ",[156,1724,1725],{},"deep inside us","... the promised land is where we want it to be... a land where we will be permitted to grow down turned noses, black and red beards and crooked legs without being scorned... where we can live like free men on our land... where the derogatory term Jew will become an honorific term on the same footing as English, French or German.\"$^1$",[95,1728,1729,1730,1733],{},"This sentiment echoes today. Replacing \"Jew\" with any other marginalized group and the visual insults with any racist idea gives, in a nutshell, the grounds for the ",[156,1731,1732],{},"separatist vision encapsulated in any form of identity politics",". This is the impetus behind confronting the misery of feeling one's birthplace is not one's home.",[170,1735],{},[103,1737,1739],{"id":1738},"_4-background-the-revolt-against-reason","4. Background: The Revolt Against Reason",[95,1741,1742,1743,361],{},"The Zionist movement emerged against the background of a monumental shift in European consciousness: the erosion of the ",[156,1744,1745],{},"Enlightenment ideals",[412,1747,1748,1755],{},[415,1749,1750,1751,1754],{},"The Enlightenment held that the world was open to ",[156,1752,1753],{},"rational understanding"," and that reason could lead to a just government.",[415,1756,1757,1758,1761],{},"It was in the name of ",[156,1759,1760],{},"enlightened universalism"," that the Jews were emancipated in Europe.",[95,1763,1764,1765,1768,1769,1772],{},"The erosion of this belief directly impacted the stability of Jewish emancipation. Although liberal democratic ideals ",[98,1766,1767],{},"seemed"," solid, everything changed dramatically in the ",[156,1770,1771],{},"1880s and 1890s",", which was the background for the emergence of the Zionist idea.",[108,1774,1776],{"id":1775},"the-rise-of-anti-semitism-and-the-culture-of-denial","The Rise of Anti-Semitism and the Culture of Denial",[95,1778,1779,1780,361],{},"The last two decades of the 19th century saw a violent assault on rationalism and liberalism (e.g., Anarchist terror, the Panama Canal scandal in Paris). Corresponding to each outburst was a ",[156,1781,1782],{},"growth of anti-Semitic sentiment",[95,1784,1785,1786,1789],{},"The assimilated Jews, often the only ones faithful to the Enlightenment spirit, developed a ",[156,1787,1788],{},"culture of denial, quietism, and self-hatred",":",[412,1791,1792,1795,1802],{},[415,1793,1794],{},"The vast majority of West European Jews refused to acknowledge the gravity of anti-Semitism.",[415,1796,1797,1798,1801],{},"Those who did often blamed themselves for not trying sincerely enough to ",[156,1799,1800],{},"assimilate"," and \"lose their Jewish-ness.\"",[415,1803,1804],{},"Attempts to \"pass for non-Jews\" were met with scorn by non-Jewish neighbors.",[108,1806,1808],{"id":1807},"zionism-as-a-realist-movement","Zionism as a \"Realist\" Movement",[95,1810,1811,1812,1649,1815,1818],{},"The Zionists recognized the ",[156,1813,1814],{},"inevitability of anti-Semitic sentiment",[156,1816,1817],{},"futility of attempts to ignore it",". They despised the culture of denial.",[412,1820,1821,1828],{},[415,1822,1823,1824,1827],{},"Zionism was a ",[156,1825,1826],{},"\"realist\" movement"," aiming to counter the tendency among Jews to repress and obscure their perceptions.",[415,1829,1830],{},"In their perception that anti-Semitism was ingrained, the Zionists also contributed to the erosion of the liberal democratic spirit and the \"revolt against reason.\"",[108,1832,1834],{"id":1833},"zionisms-twofold-aim","Zionism's Twofold Aim",[95,1836,1837,1838,1841,1842,1789],{},"The primary aim of Zionism was to create the conditions for Jews to finally look at themselves without self-censorship. While Herzl saw Zionism as an answer to anti-Semitism, others, like ",[156,1839,1840],{},"Gershon Scholem"," years later, saw it as an aspiration for ",[156,1843,1844],{},"spiritual renewal",[322,1846,1847],{},[95,1848,1849],{},"\"What influenced me was the undercurrent which emphasized the creation of a condition which would make a self-reflection of the Jews of their own culture and history possible and aimed at a spiritual, cultural and social renewal.\"$^2$",[95,1851,1852,1853,1856,1857,1860,1861,361],{},"This combination of ",[156,1854,1855],{},"confronting hatred from without"," and anticipating a ",[156,1858,1859],{},"spiritual revolution from within"," made Zionism extraordinarily effective. This twofold aim is a defining characteristic of many modern ",[156,1862,1863],{},"\"identity politics\" movements",[170,1865],{},[103,1867,1869],{"id":1868},"_5-the-birth-of-a-nation","5. The Birth of a Nation",[95,1871,1872],{},"Herzl's analogy in the fall of 1897, on the occasion of Hanukkah:",[322,1874,1875],{},[95,1876,1877],{},"\"First, one candle is lit. Alone, it cannot defeat the darkness, and its solitary light seems melancholy. Then, another light joins in and another and another. Finally, the darkness must recede... No labor brings about so much happiness as work at the service of the lights.\"$^3$",[412,1879,1880,1886],{},[415,1881,1882,1883,361],{},"A single person speaks the language of ",[156,1884,1885],{},"personal misery",[415,1887,1888,1889,1892,1893,361],{},"When others join, a ",[156,1890,1891],{},"collective entity is born",", and wretchedness gives way to collective ",[156,1894,1895],{},"pride",[95,1897,1898,1899,1902],{},"When the collective aims to transform the social fabric, it is revolutionary. When the primary goal is to ",[156,1900,1901],{},"separate itself from its origins",", a new nation is born.",[108,1904,1906],{"id":1905},"phase-transition","Phase Transition",[95,1908,1909,1910,1913,1914,1917,1918,1921],{},"The logic of separatism strongly encourages the formation of a ",[156,1911,1912],{},"new country"," and the adaptation of a ",[156,1915,1916],{},"new national language",". When this process succeeds, it is akin to ",[156,1919,1920],{},"phase transition in physics",": aimless individuals, through faith in their associates, give rise to a new, coherent whole—a \"social crystal.\"",[95,1923,1924,1925,361],{},"It is easy to forget that in the beginning there were only separate individuals. The secret lies not in a secret nature they discovered, but in their ",[156,1926,1927],{},"willingness to believe there is enough that is similar to counter the differences",[170,1929],{},[103,1931,1933],{"id":1932},"_6-zionism-and-identity-politics","6. Zionism and Identity Politics",[95,1935,1936],{},"Placing Zionism in the lineage of identity politics offers two insights:",[108,1938,1940],{"id":1939},"reflection-on-the-european-context","Reflection on the European Context",[95,1942,1943,1944,1947,1948,1951,1952,1955],{},"At present, ",[156,1945,1946],{},"xenophobic sensibility"," has considerable acceptance in Europe (e.g., the slogan \"The Boat is Full\"). We must remind the European audience of the ",[156,1949,1950],{},"bigoted legacy of Europe"," and the fact that there is little real tolerance for differences even today. Zionism was the result of ",[156,1953,1954],{},"Europe's failure"," to allow a \"model minority,\" the Jews, to assimilate.",[108,1957,1959],{"id":1958},"a-remark-to-practitioners-of-identity-politics","A Remark to Practitioners of Identity Politics",[95,1961,1962,1963,361],{},"Zionist history is a case study that reminds newer movements of the ",[156,1964,1965],{},"dangers inherent in identity politics",[412,1967,1968,1975],{},[415,1969,1970,1971,1974],{},"Zionism started as a sincerely ",[156,1972,1973],{},"Utopian solution"," (Herzl thought it could apply to American blacks).",[415,1976,1977,1978,1981],{},"Later, it helped the creation of a ",[156,1979,1980],{},"new Palestinian nation"," fighting for national rights on similar principles.",[95,1983,1984,1985,1988,1989],{},"A key theme that emerges is the ",[156,1986,1987],{},"rejection of the present situation",". This negative mentality raises a systematic problem: ",[156,1990,1991],{},"leaving one situation always means entering a new one with its own problems.",[322,1993,1994],{},[95,1995,1996,1997,361],{},"The world has no vacuum. When you migrate from one location you always move into ",[156,1998,1999],{},"someone else's territory",[95,2001,2002,2003,361],{},"Herzl and his associates were documented as being ",[156,2004,2005],{},"not very preoccupied with the issue of relations with the local Palestinian population",[170,2007],{},[103,2009,2011],{"id":2010},"_7-the-power-of-the-visual","7. The Power of the Visual",[95,2013,2014,2015,2018],{},"So much of the message of anti-Semitism is expressed in ",[156,2016,2017],{},"visual language"," (facial expression, physiognomy). Consequently, many Jewish self-attitudes were tied to their self-image.",[412,2020,2021,2027],{},[415,2022,2023,2026],{},[156,2024,2025],{},"Assimilationism"," repressed the awareness of one's appearance and did not produce a culture of portraiture.",[415,2028,2029,2032,2033,2036],{},[156,2030,2031],{},"Zionists"," negated assimilationism, creating an immense awareness of the power of photography to create ",[156,2034,2035],{},"new Jewish icons",", but concentrating on the visionary and mythical.",[95,2038,2039,2040,2043],{},"We seek to shed a new light on the early Zionists—the generation of ",[156,2041,2042],{},"Proust, Freud, Kafka, Kraus, Mahler, and Schoenberg","—to regain access to their memory.",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":2045},[2046,2047,2048,2051,2056,2059,2063],{"id":1576,"depth":429,"text":1577},{"id":1621,"depth":429,"text":1622},{"id":1675,"depth":429,"text":1676,"children":2049},[2050],{"id":1704,"depth":434,"text":1705},{"id":1738,"depth":429,"text":1739,"children":2052},[2053,2054,2055],{"id":1775,"depth":434,"text":1776},{"id":1807,"depth":434,"text":1808},{"id":1833,"depth":434,"text":1834},{"id":1868,"depth":429,"text":1869,"children":2057},[2058],{"id":1905,"depth":434,"text":1906},{"id":1932,"depth":429,"text":1933,"children":2060},[2061,2062],{"id":1939,"depth":434,"text":1940},{"id":1958,"depth":434,"text":1959},{"id":2010,"depth":429,"text":2011},"Catalog text for the show at the Basel Kunstverein 1998",{"head":2066},{"meta":2067},[2068,2069,2070,2071,2072,2073],{"name":467,"content":1560},{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":1564},{"name":479,"content":1566},{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":18,"description":2064},"L17FV1vdg2i6bUcHWryj_9xjdy3fc62Fj4IwbG4dM28",{"id":2077,"title":62,"author":81,"body":2078,"caption":81,"date":1553,"description":2423,"extension":461,"image":2424,"meta":2425,"minRead":434,"navigation":85,"path":63,"seo":2430,"stem":64,"toc":486,"__hash__":2431},"blog/blog/The Sick Soul IV.md",{"type":92,"value":2079,"toc":2415},[2080,2083,2085,2090,2094,2099,2105,2110,2115,2120,2125,2130,2135,2140,2145,2149,2154,2159,2164,2169,2174,2179,2184,2189,2194,2199,2204,2209,2214,2219,2224,2229,2233,2238,2243,2248,2253,2258,2263,2268,2273,2277,2282,2287,2292,2297,2302,2307,2312,2317,2321,2326,2331,2336,2341,2346,2351,2356,2361,2366,2371,2375,2380,2385,2390,2395,2400,2405,2410],[95,2081,2082],{},"For the show in Mexico City we had build a large number of wooden cubes, the cubes built by a pavement side carpenter were designed to perform multifunctional purposes for a series of event staged in the gallery. The first evening the cubes formed a pyramid like seating structure for a video projection, the second event featured DJ Carlos on a podium made of the same cubes; the third and final event was a fashion show in which the cubes were arranged to form a walkway. We had advertised in local papers a request for teenagers to appear in a fashion show displaying of their school sportswear. Confusing and chaotic as one could image each event and each experiment we conducted (inviting an old Indian lady who administered electric shocks to the visitors and us for example) each event transformed to be different and acquired a life of its own.",[170,2084],{},[2086,2087,2089],"h1",{"id":2088},"the-sick-soul-1996","The Sick Soul, 1996",[103,2091,2093],{"id":2092},"_1-on-the-borderline-of-healthy-mindedness","1. On the Borderline of Healthy Mindedness",[95,2095,2096],{},[156,2097,2098],{},"What do you mean by the title \"The Sick Soul\"?",[95,2100,2101,2104],{},[156,2102,2103],{},"C&G:"," The sick soul is a term that W. James coined in his book \"The Varieties of Religious Experience\". The healthy minded person, according to James, is one who ignores those aspects of life which are irrational, aberrant, inexplicable and deviant. He is one who concentrates on (he normal, the rational, the law-governed. In contrast to healthy mindedness, James talks about the sensibilities of the sick soul. This type of person is morbidly fascinated with the irrational and the deviant. For him these aspects of life are deeply important and meaningful and therefore cannot be ignored.",[95,2106,2107],{},[156,2108,2109],{},"Is it always clear to people where the law-governed ends and the aberrant begins?",[95,2111,2112,2114],{},[156,2113,2103],{}," The line demarcation between the two is, precisely, what separates what we currently understand from what we do not. When new discoveries are made, the line shifts. In James' time some of these shifts were quite dramatic and new scientific theories were developed in order to explain domains of the world which were formally shrouded in mystery. However, at any given time there are facts which we cannot explain and which do not conform to our general conception of the world. The healthy minded tend to ignore these facts and sometimes even to suppress them in order to preserve their view of the world. For example, the evidence that some people have telepathic connections is usually ignored because we have no theory capable of explaining the phenomenon.",[95,2116,2117],{},[156,2118,2119],{},"What, according to James, is the difference between the religious sensibilities of the two types?",[95,2121,2122,2124],{},[156,2123,2103],{}," James talks about the analogy between the healthy minded scientist who ignores inexplicable facts to preserve his world view and his religious counterpart who ignores the manifestations of evil in order to follow his simple minded optimistic religion. The sick soul refuses to ignore the inexplicable aspects of life; in particular he is obsessed with questions concerning the nature of evil.",[95,2126,2127],{},[156,2128,2129],{},"How seriously should we take the terms \"health\" and \"sickness\"?",[95,2131,2132,2134],{},[156,2133,2103],{}," There is no doubt that when one focuses on the irrational and the aberrant too closely one is likely to lose one's sense of reality. We are all familiar with many narratives which revolve around these phenomena. The story of Dr. Jekyll is one such example; he merely investigated the side-effects of certain drugs. Victor Frankenstein, too, was a man of the medical profession who strayed off the religious path. You can add Captain Nemo to the list of scientists who paid a high price for their fascination with aberrant phenomena. These stories were especially popular at the end of the last century.",[95,2136,2137],{},[156,2138,2139],{},"What is your attitude towards these figures? To borrow a phrase of Kuhns, are these people revolutionary scientists who try to transcend the scientific paradigms of their times?",[95,2141,2142,2144],{},[156,2143,2103],{}," Most aberrant scientists never manage to cause a paradigm shift. The number of success stories is relatively small. The interest lies more in the narratives around these tragic figures, namely, with the idea that there is a gray area between the normal and the deviant scientist. Many horror movies exploit this narrative.",[103,2146,2148],{"id":2147},"_2-the-open-public-library","2. The Open Public Library",[95,2150,2151],{},[156,2152,2153],{},"You have been recently working on a number of public projects, including the Open Public Library which you showed in Graz. These projects involved sociological research. Can you say a few words about them? Is there any connection with the subject of this discussion?",[95,2155,2156,2158],{},[156,2157,2103],{}," There is a connection between our discussion and these projects but it is rather roundabout. In 1989 we began to plan our first Open Public Library. The idea was to place cabinets full of books outdoors, without librarians or guards, and to see how well they will function as lending libraries. The libraries were not presented as art objects. The only indication that there was some connection with the art world was a plaque which directed people to the Grazer Kunstverein if they wanted further information on the project and, conversely, the visitors to the Kunstverein were informed that the installation continued outdoors and invited them to visit the outdoor locations. In this way we wanted to create a \"flow\" which tied the libraries with the art world...",[95,2160,2161],{},[156,2162,2163],{},"What do you mean by a \"flow\"?",[95,2165,2166,2168],{},[156,2167,2103],{}," We wanted to see whether we could create a connection between areas in the social environment which are usually completely foreign to one another. More plainly, we wanted to see if we could bring the art-crowd into the relatively remote and seldom visited locations, mostly in the suburbs of Graz, where we placed the libraries, and we wanted to see whether people from the communities around the libraries were going to visit the Kunstverein.",[95,2170,2171],{},[156,2172,2173],{},"What was the objective of creating such a flow?",[95,2175,2176,2178],{},[156,2177,2103],{}," We wanted to continue the investigation on the definition of art. Many people implicitly accept a rather simplistic version of the institutional definition of art. They think that relatively stable art institutions are necessary for the very definition of art. We wanted to experiment with a much looser framework. The idea was to take a non-art entity like an outdoor library and to connect to an art project without physically removing it from its non-art environment. Our point was that the necessary ingredient is a self conscience art audience and not a stable art institution.",[95,2180,2181],{},[156,2182,2183],{},"Isn't that a rather subtle distinction?",[95,2185,2186,2188],{},[156,2187,2103],{}," In our times there are few stable art institutions and they tend to be privately financed and rather conservative. Our Project was the result of a train of thought about the possibility of \"homeless art\". We wanted to see whether art can survive without being totally dependent on stable art institutions. Our hypothesis was that the creation of a \"flow\" was sufficient.",[95,2190,2191],{},[156,2192,2193],{},"How did you register the creation of a flow?",[95,2195,2196,2198],{},[156,2197,2103],{}," We had a team of sociology students from the Graz University who helped us gather data about the library users.",[95,2200,2201],{},[156,2202,2203],{},"What did they find out?",[95,2205,2206,2208],{},[156,2207,2103],{}," The first thing we wanted to know was whether the libraries would function well. In that regard, the data was rather inconclusive. In one location the library functioned very well for the entire three month period of the project. In another location the library was vandalized almost immediately. In the third location the library was not used very much. It was quite interesting, though, that three years later, when we prepared a film about the project, we found that most of the people who we interviewed remembered the project and expressed positive opinions about it.",[95,2210,2211],{},[156,2212,2213],{},"Did you manage to create a \"flow\"?",[95,2215,2216,2218],{},[156,2217,2103],{}," We know that there were an appreciable number of library users who came to visit the Kunstverein. But we do not have precise data.",[95,2220,2221],{},[156,2222,2223],{},"So, you began to think of yourselves as experimental sociologists?",[95,2225,2226,2228],{},[156,2227,2103],{}," We began to be more interested in sociological experiments a bit later when we prepared the second library project which took place in Hamburg. This time we worked with Ulf Wuggenig and his students from Lüneburg University. Ulf told us about a body of research from the late 50's and early 60's on the sociology of everyday life which he thought we would be interested in. After reading these articles we started seeing our work in relation to the sociology of everyday life.",[103,2230,2232],{"id":2231},"_3-on-the-routine-grounds-of-everyday-activities","3. On the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities",[95,2234,2235],{},[156,2236,2237],{},"Can you mention a few examples?",[95,2239,2240,2242],{},[156,2241,2103],{}," Some of them are reprinted in this issue. We were particularly impressed by Garfinkel's \"On the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities.\"",[95,2244,2245],{},[156,2246,2247],{},"What was it about the article that you found fascinating?",[95,2249,2250,2252],{},[156,2251,2103],{}," Garfinkel asked his students to perform elementary and unstructured experiments in their own homes. The subjects were often the student's spouse's, their children and their friends. For instance, the students came home and refused to speak. In this way they could register the anxiety they created when they ignored their everyday routines. Or, they responded to simple questions which their mates asked them with constant requests for further clarifications of the meaning of the terms used. Again, anger, frustration and anxiety were immediately registered.",[95,2254,2255],{},[156,2256,2257],{},"So, you started thinking about your library projects as loosely structured sociological experiments?",[95,2259,2260,2262],{},[156,2261,2103],{}," In a way we did. We started looking for more sociological articles which had this strange existential quality and we found many more.",[95,2264,2265],{},[156,2266,2267],{},"Which ones, for example?",[95,2269,2270,2272],{},[156,2271,2103],{}," Many of the more memorable ones are reprinted here. For example, an experiment where the sociologist hid in a stall of a public toilet. He sat in a stall wearing earphones connected to a powerful microphone and he used a stop-watch to time the interval between the unzipping of the pants and the beginning of the urination. In another article the experimenter stole people's garbage in order to determine what they threw away. These articles made it clear to us that there was a lot more going on with these experiments than simple healthy scientific curiosity.",[103,2274,2276],{"id":2275},"_4-the-candid-camera","4. The Candid Camera",[95,2278,2279],{},[156,2280,2281],{},"Was that also when you started researching early episodes of Candid Camera?",[95,2283,2284,2286],{},[156,2285,2103],{}," That was, actually, another coincidence. At the time we met a TV producer from Munich who was working on pilot episodes for a new type of TV show. Her idea was to use auditions for TV commercials as an opportunity for creating weird situations. Something unexpected always happened and the TV crew was there to film it. We went on the set with our own equipment and photographed off-character behavior, so to speak.",[95,2288,2289],{},[156,2290,2291],{},"Why the fascination with Candid Camera?",[95,2293,2294,2296],{},[156,2295,2103],{}," Candid Camera episodes constitute a form of freestyle experimentation in the social field. The early episodes, in particular, clearly stem from a fascination with the strangeness and the complexity of the network of social relations. The difference with other forms of experimentation is that the results are presented as a form of entertainment. Therefore, there was no need to deny that there was a lot of sadism and voyeurism going on, along side with the healthy curiosity.",[95,2298,2299],{},[156,2300,2301],{},"Can you give examples of Candid Camera episodes where the similarity with the sociological experiments is evident?",[95,2303,2304,2306],{},[156,2305,2103],{}," There are many such examples and some images from these episodes are reproduced in this issue. Take, for example, an episode where a family is brought to a rigged bowling alley. It was rigged in a way that the wife would always win. Predictably, the husband became increasingly irritated. In another episode, a woman was ordered to leave the stage, but there was no exit from the stage. The woman, of course, became anxious and angry. These situations, like the ones studied by the sociologists of everyday life, allow the researcher to register what happens when our expectations are frustrated, when the conventions which govern our everyday life are violated.",[95,2308,2309],{},[156,2310,2311],{},"Do sociological experiments involve as much over cruelty as Candid Camera episodes?",[95,2313,2314,2316],{},[156,2315,2103],{}," Some of them clearly do. Take the Milgram study of obedience, for example Just imagine being one of the experimental subjects who had to face the fact that their obedience overshadowed their moral judgment, that they administered electric shocks to human beings without any reason. At the time, the study of obedience was widely regarded as an explanation of the behavior of ordinary Germans during the Nazi period or ordinary soldiers who took part in the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam.",[103,2318,2320],{"id":2319},"_5-the-origins-of-generic-portraiture","5. The Origins of Generic Portraiture",[95,2322,2323],{},[156,2324,2325],{},"But what is the relevance of this discussion to your art and art in general?",[95,2327,2328,2330],{},[156,2329,2103],{}," Our interest in various loose forms of experimentation in the social field allowed us to see our work, and the work of others, in a wider context. It allowed us to reformulate in a different way a recent tradition which stems from the work of the Situationists. You can locate many artists in this tradition who attempted to expand the definition of art, to frustrate the expectation of the art viewer. Artists as different from each other as Buren and Beuys, Burden and Acconci. Haacke and Walter. Ordinarily, the discourse on these artists concentrates on the performative aspects of their work. We would like to redirect the discussion. For our purposes the interest lies in the fact that these artists have managed to create interventions in the social field which allowed them to learn about the social environment. They presented their \"findings\" as artworks.",[95,2332,2333],{},[156,2334,2335],{},"Why did the artists choose to rely on the art context for the presentation of their \"findings\"?",[95,2337,2338,2340],{},[156,2339,2103],{}," There is no doubt that this presentation is not ideal for communicating scientific ideas. But the information is, nevertheless, there to be found. But the advantage of using the art context is that artists don't have to deny the complexity of their motivations. On the contrary, a certain amount of self-reflectiveness is expected of artists. It is quite rare to find this type of attitude among scientists.",[95,2342,2343],{},[156,2344,2345],{},"How do you locate your own work in this tradition?",[95,2347,2348,2350],{},[156,2349,2103],{}," We always felt that our portraits contained important information about the process of the representation of power, of the construction of an image of power. In our early work, we concentrated on the presentation of the basic semiotic framework. Gradually we started producing pieces which displayed some of the implicit information which we had accumulated in a more structured manner. We gathered together rejected portraits; we arranged portraits according to the intensity of the gaze of the persons portrayed; more generally, we started to look at our past work as an archive and we started organizing it in a creative manner.",[95,2352,2353],{},[156,2354,2355],{},"Is this preoccupation unique to your work or is it endemic to portraiture?",[95,2357,2358,2360],{},[156,2359,2103],{}," This is the \"healthy minded\" side of portraiture. It is equally true, though, that portraits also involve voyeurism and other forms of morbid fascination which are somewhat independent of the information the portraits convey. In this sense, portraits demonstrate and even thematized the workings of \"The Sick Soul\". The portrait artist is a combination of a social researcher and a voyeur.",[95,2362,2363],{},[156,2364,2365],{},"Can you give an example?",[95,2367,2368,2370],{},[156,2369,2103],{}," The best example we can think of is the work of Caravaggio. It contains extremely important information about the outward expression or characteristic physiognomy of various psychological states. In particular, the religious work of Caravaggio was deeply informed by his studies of the physiognomy of ecstasy, fear and introspection. The reason why his work contains such a powerful interpretation of the religious subjects is, precisely, because of Caravaggio's insights into the physiognomy of his characters. However, Caravaggio's paintings also display a morbid fascination with his sitters, which is independent of the general themes of his paintings. The portraits lead an independent life.",[103,2372,2374],{"id":2373},"_6-the-double-life-of-photography","6. The Double Life of Photography",[95,2376,2377],{},[156,2378,2379],{},"You produced a work called \"The Political Physiognomical Library\" in the early 90ies. Do you intend to continue producing works which are engaged in physiognomical research?",[95,2381,2382,2384],{},[156,2383,2103],{}," We are currently working on a new body of work which is concerned with the representation of emotions and of behavior.",[95,2386,2387],{},[156,2388,2389],{},"Do you think of these photographs as the documentation of experiments?",[95,2391,2392,2394],{},[156,2393,2103],{}," We tried to move away from the academic experimental tradition. We regard the people we work with as collaborators and not experimental subjects. We work with a San Francisco based group of artists called CCSIS who collaborate with each other on their projects.",[95,2396,2397],{},[156,2398,2399],{},"This is quite a move away from the confrontational model which you developed when you were preoccupied with commissioned portraits.",[95,2401,2402,2404],{},[156,2403,2103],{}," Yes. We are currently working on our interpretation of generic portraiture.",[95,2406,2407],{},[156,2408,2409],{},"Can you say something about the graphic layout of this issue of DURCH 10 and to the connection between the magazine and the exhibition in the Grazer Kunstverein? Are they related to the general themes we discussed?",[95,2411,2412,2414],{},[156,2413,2103],{}," In a way they are. We wanted to transform the magazine from a collection of documents into an exhibition space and to transform the space of the Grazer Kunstverein into a library of images. We wanted to make it possible to look at the same material from different points of view. We wanted to present the academic texts as scenes from a strange existential theater, the episodes of Candid Camera as the work of aberrant scientists and our own work as a combination of both.",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":2416},[2417,2418,2419,2420,2421,2422],{"id":2092,"depth":429,"text":2093},{"id":2147,"depth":429,"text":2148},{"id":2231,"depth":429,"text":2232},{"id":2275,"depth":429,"text":2276},{"id":2319,"depth":429,"text":2320},{"id":2373,"depth":429,"text":2374},"Mamacita Fashion gallery, Mexico City 1997","/blog/The-Sick-Soul-II-AFA-NY-1996.jpg",{"artists":580,"type":2426,"publication":2427,"topics":2428,"head":2429},"Exhibition Documentation & Interview","DURCH 10 Grazer Kunstverein 1996","art theory, sociological experiments, portraiture, everyday life, institutional critique",{"meta":81,"name":482,"content":483},{"title":62,"description":2423},"4vO9hoBxUKEfFWME84ZX_bC63X_sQkr5RBdfc5f7-xs",{"id":2433,"title":74,"author":81,"body":2434,"caption":81,"date":1553,"description":2476,"extension":461,"image":81,"meta":2477,"minRead":434,"navigation":85,"path":75,"seo":2489,"stem":76,"toc":486,"__hash__":2490},"blog/blog/zionism as Seperatism.md",{"type":92,"value":2435,"toc":2469},[2436,2438,2441,2445,2448,2452,2455,2459,2462,2466],[103,2437,111],{"id":110},[95,2439,2440],{},"Zionism As Separatism is a musical event organized by\nClegg & Guttmann in conjunction with their exhibition in the Kunsthalle\nBasel. The event will take place on the evening of June 13th in the\nreading room of the library of the Basel University. The visitors will\nbe invited to wander in the reading area or to sit down and to listen to\na team of actors who will read aloud from texts on the topic of Zionism\nAs Separatism which Clegg & Guttmann gathered and placed on various\nshelves in the reading room.",[103,2442,2444],{"id":2443},"the-general-conception-of-the-evening","The general conception of the evening",[95,2446,2447],{},"The evening is an attempt to\ninterpret Zionism in a new way: to present Zionism, as it was developed\n100 years ago, as an example of separatism. Zionism originated from a\nrenewed sense of Jewish identity. Many young European Jews who reflected\non the new wave of antisemitism began to believe that assimilation was\nimpossible. Their conclusion was that the only way for Jews to survive\nwas to leave Europe and establish a new country. In many ways, Zionism\nis a precursor of the politics of identity which is typical of our\nperiod. Today, various social groups experience a combination of a new\nsense of identity and a deep alienation from the prevailing norms and\nmorals. This basic pattern, which combines Utopianism and pessimism, is\nwhat characterize the separatist sensibility. This perspective on\nZionism and other related sensibilities is the central theme of the\nevening.",[103,2449,2451],{"id":2450},"the-organization-of-the-evening","The organization of the evening",[95,2453,2454],{},"The reading will last for\napproximately 90 minutes. During that time ten readers who will stand in\nvarious locations in the reading room, select reading material from the\ndesignated shelves and read it aloud. The audience will be able to walk\nthrough the locations and stop at each one for a while to listen to the\nreaders. As the listeners are walking through the library, the voices of\nthe various readers will be interwoven into one another, combining into\na chance musical composition which will be determined by the route\nchosen by the listeners.",[103,2456,2458],{"id":2457},"instructions-to-the-readers","Instructions to the readers",[95,2460,2461],{},"The readers will be instructed to stand\nnear the designated shelves, choose a book or a publication from their\nshelves, read from it aloud for a while and then select another text.\nThe criterion for the choice of reading material from the designated\nshelf and the duration of the reading from each text will be decided by\nthe readers. It may reflect their interests or, alternatively, it can be\na completely random choice.",[103,2463,2465],{"id":2464},"the-reading-material","The reading material",[95,2467,2468],{},"The reading material gathered in the various\nshelves will include literature on Zionism and other separatist\nmovements. There will be books and articles on black separatism, gay\nseparatism and feminist separatism. In addition there will be reading\nmaterial about various political ideologies related to separatism. For\nexample, books about anarchism and about various secessionist movements\nwill be included as well. What all these movements have in common is a\nstrong sense of alienation, a willingness to turn away from the existing\nsociety and to start a new society. Some of these efforts lead to\nmigration. Others center on civil disobedience. And others still\nadvocate ignoring the law and refusing to participate in the political\nprocess. We hope that this new perspective will contribute to our\nunderstanding of Zionism and other separatist movements.",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":2470},[2471,2472,2473,2474,2475],{"id":110,"depth":429,"text":111},{"id":2443,"depth":429,"text":2444},{"id":2450,"depth":429,"text":2451},{"id":2457,"depth":429,"text":2458},{"id":2464,"depth":429,"text":2465},"A proposal for a project in the Basel University Library",{"head":2478},{"meta":2479},[2480,2482,2483,2484,2486,2488],{"name":467,"content":2481},"Public Project, 1998, Performance Basel University Library, Zionism as Separatism, Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":1351},{"name":476,"content":2485},"© 1998 Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":479,"content":2487},"The text first appeared in the accompanying project documentation Clegg & Guttmann: Die Offene Bibliothek/The Open Public Library, edited by Achim Könneke on behalf of the Kulturbehörde der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, Cantz Verlag, 1994",{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":74,"description":2476},"QN7-X6KWVaPcDuQnoEtZ3QELADdiIiFFzPEwvZPJx5U",{"id":2492,"title":22,"author":81,"body":2493,"caption":3167,"date":3168,"description":3169,"extension":461,"image":3170,"meta":3171,"minRead":3186,"navigation":85,"path":23,"seo":3187,"stem":24,"toc":486,"__hash__":3188},"blog/blog/Breaking_Down_the_Boundaries_between_Art_and_Life_chapters.md",{"type":92,"value":2494,"toc":3148},[2495,2499,2502,2505,2508,2511,2515,2518,2521,2524,2528,2531,2534,2537,2541,2544,2547,2550,2553,2557,2560,2563,2566,2569,2572,2575,2578,2582,2585,2588,2591,2594,2597,2600,2603,2607,2610,2613,2616,2619,2622,2625,2629,2632,2635,2638,2641,2644,2647,2650,2653,2656,2659,2662,2665,2668,2671,2674,2677,2680,2683,2686,2689,2692,2695,2698,2702,2705,2708,2711,2714,2717,2720,2723,2726,2729,2732,2735,2738,2741,2744,2747,2750,2753,2756,2759,2762,2765,2768,2771,2774,2777,2780,2783,2786,2789,2792,2795,2798,2801,2804,2807,2810,2813,2816,2819,2822,2825,2828,2832,2835,2838,2841,2844,2847,2850,2853,2856,2859,2862,2865,2868,2871,2874,2877,2881,2884,2887,2890,2893,2896,2899,2902,2905,2908,2911,2914,2917,2920,2923,2926,2929,2932,2935,2938,2941,2944,2947,2950,2953,2956,2960,2963,2966,2969,2972,2975,2978,2981,2984,2987,2990,2993,2996,2999,3002,3005,3008,3011,3014,3018,3021,3024,3027,3030,3033,3036,3039,3042,3045,3048,3051,3054,3058,3061,3064,3067,3070,3073,3077,3080,3083,3086,3089,3092,3095,3099,3102,3105,3108,3111,3114,3117,3120,3123,3126,3129,3133,3136,3139,3142,3145],[108,2496,2498],{"id":2497},"the-genesis-from-open-libraries-to-sociological-research","The Genesis: From Open Libraries to Sociological Research",[95,2500,2501],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: We want to present a discourse around a piece of work that was shown in Cologne and with slight variations in Lüneburg.\nThis piece of work developed out of an earlier project we did, the Open Libraries. When we first started developing those libraries in Hamburg we had a conversation in a seminar of Ulf Wuggenig at the Lüneburg University. We tried to explain how we thought about the concept of the Open Library and talked about it in terms of a theory of democratizing institutions. After a while we realized that from Ulf's point of view this seemed to be somehow strange or at least this was not the way he thought about it. We were referred to a body of material by sociologists from the late fifties who tried to research the very basic parameters about everyday behavior. We read some of those articles and found them quite fascinating. They were actually scientists who were asking very basic questions about in how far everyday behavior is rule-governed and who were trying to identify some of the most basic aspects. One of those scientists, Harold Garfinkel* for example did experiments like the following: He asked his students to go home, not to speak to their family and to see what kind of behavior would be provoked. The father would come home, sit on the table, and when his wife asked: \"How are you?\" he wouldn't say anything. And if the children asked: \"What is wrong with you?\" he again wouldn't say anything, and so on. Garfinkel tried to find out what kind of behavior one can expect when the most basic rules are broken. Other experiments that were mentioned in this article were for example the research on the concept of personal space: A person was sitting on a bench in the park. Somebody came and stuck his head very close to the others face. Again Garfinkel recorded the behavior of that person and how long it would take before she moved to another bench. The same experiments were done in libraries.",[95,2503,2504],{},"Together with that particular article we discovered a whole body of other articles, more or less at the same time as we were having this similar aspiration to investigate the basic parameters of everyday life. We started to discover that the motivation of those sociologists was to open up the field of sociology, for the sociology of the past has been oriented too much towards hermetic theory. The new sociologists tried to question basic presuppositions and to get data from the most elementary aspects of everyday life. We started discovering other articles in that area, for example the Garbage Project*, a very big project that actually cost several million Dollars. Sociologists researched the content of people's garbage for approximately one year, trying to make various analyses by correlating the type of garbage with the area, the type of people etc.",[95,2506,2507],{},"Another example: There was a guy, who was researching things like - it seemed fairly absurd - how long it takes people to urinate in public toilets in connection with how close the next person was standing to them. In order to do that - there was a little methodological part in this article - the researcher was hiding in the toilet with a stop watch and measured the time between the first time the zipper was opened till the moment when some liquid hit the urinal.",[95,2509,2510],{},"Then we rediscovered some even more famous articles like for example the Milgram* experiments that were done a little bit later. Some of you may know this fairly famous experiment: Test persons were asked to participate in a psychological research about learning. They were sitting in semi-transparent booths, so that they could see what was happening inside, but the people inside the booth couldn't see them. The idea was, that the test persons should punish the people inside the booth with an electric shock if they did not fulfill the test properly. They had a handle with electricity and were told that if they punished the people inside the booth severe damage was going to be caused. The people inside the booth were actors and the idea was to find out how far the test persons would punish the people inside the booth. It turned out that about 30 percent of the observing people actually would have killed the people who had learning problems. They punished them very severely.",[108,2512,2514],{"id":2513},"parallel-developments-sociology-candid-camera-and-popular-entertainment","Parallel Developments: Sociology, Candid Camera, and Popular Entertainment",[95,2516,2517],{},"As we were reading those articles it became very obvious that there was something there that wasn't quite mentioned, a lot of voyeurism and sadism. So we started thinking about those experiments in relation to Candid Camera shows and began to research the beginning of Candid Camera that took place exactly at the same time. The first thing we found quite interesting was that there are two cultural products appearing at the same time with some similarity in their basic approach. The early Candid Camera episodes were really oriented towards experimentation in the urban field. They were not so much oriented towards soft porno as they became in the seventies, but more oriented towards everyday situations.",[95,2519,2520],{},"There the voyeurism and sadism was a lot more accentuated. However, there was a genuine interest in trying to find out data about the behavior of people in particular situations. In fact some of the early Candid Camera episodes were actually structured more or less like an experiment. They would bring many people into the same situation and the film crew would just record one reaction after another, so that some kind of generalization became possible.",[95,2522,2523],{},"This became quite interesting and we started formulating the hypothesis that there were two parallel currents in culture, one in sociology and the other one in popular entertainment, both with very obvious parallel themes. We started reflecting on this phenomenon, how the same sensibility could be transformed into two cultural forms and what this exactly means.",[108,2525,2527],{"id":2526},"early-pop-art-and-direct-contact-with-everyday-life","Early Pop Art and Direct Contact with Everyday Life",[95,2529,2530],{},"Then we realized that precisely at this time the period of early Pop art had begun.",[95,2532,2533],{},"Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Jones spoke very much in the same terms. Rauschenberg talked about the fact that the way he made his painting was to take a walk around the block where his studio was, every day. He would take stuff that he found on the street, come back to the studio and make a painting. Again the idea seemed to be that one should try to get the material for art directly from everyday life, without recourse to too much transformation. One wanted to revive the medium to more or less direct contact with everyday life. Cage was quite clear about this point. He spoke about every type of noise as music, and again the idea was that one should not think of music in terms of specialized sets of sounds but that any type of sounds can make music. The emphasis again was on directness, lack of any transformation of strategy and a kind of openness. So this became another clue for us.",[95,2535,2536],{},"It became interesting to situate the discourse of art between the two developments, namely between popular entertainment on the one hand and sociology on the other hand. Within these three forms we began to think about how to articulate those three parallel lines.",[108,2538,2540],{"id":2539},"wittgenstein-situationists-and-breaking-down-cultural-boundaries","Wittgenstein, Situationists, and Breaking Down Cultural Boundaries",[95,2542,2543],{},"One can really continue and talk about other developments with very similar ideas and motivations. For example, in philosophy in the early fifties again there was a fascinating development that started with Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations*. He repudiated his earlier writings as being too closed, too idealized as an analysis of language. His new method was to look at concrete examples from the English language, directly analyze phrases that people actually use and to derive the philosophical categories in the philosophical grammar directly from observing how people spoke.",[95,2545,2546],{},"One can go further now and look at other developments at the same time: The situationists in the mid and late fifties had another fairly parallel discourse. People took a lot of ideas from the surrealistic development but tried to transform them into a very direct action that is taking place in the urban field. They were actually taking walks rather than sit at home and fantasize like Breton. They were outside in the urban field trying to intervene and to take the clues directly from the flow of people in the cities. Finally, having observed all the parallel developments, we started thinking in more general terms. On a more abstract level we realized that it was quite difficult to find a point of view that could develop themes like parallelism in culture, because most of the discourses in art, sociology, philosophy and so on always tried to establish a very hermetic field with its own methodology, its own terminology and so on. So we ended up discovering here a new theme that we would call: Breaking Down the Boundaries between Art and Life.",[95,2548,2549],{},"We are going to show you right now work that is also about breaking down those boundaries. The difference to earlier work that we did is that there we were very much interested in working with material that clearly seems to indicate that it has a social relevance. The libraries are a good example in that sense. Libraries are a very clear, public medium. When you are involved in the construction of a library, you are by necessity dealing with institutions, politics and society. You can have your own interpretation of what it means, what your own political agenda is and so on, but it was very clear to everybody that you are dealing with a social medium.",[95,2551,2552],{},"This work here is going in a different direction. What we were trying to do here is to indicate that even in the most hermetic type of work, like experimental research to the behavior of people in particular types of situations, you are still in a sense dealing with political material. At the same time, on the level of the experiment itself, one can bring it so close to the real situation, that eventually the experiment turns into a real social action where the experimentation is not just experiment anymore but already a social act. So this actually is the other way around: you can enter the social dimension by being as hermetic and as experimental as you want. You don't necessarily need to do something that has a very obvious political or social relevance.",[108,2554,2556],{"id":2555},"presenting-the-work-open-libraries-and-the-atm-video-installation","Presenting the Work: Open Libraries and the ATM Video Installation",[95,2558,2559],{},"Let us show you the slides:",[95,2561,2562],{},"This is the Open Library in Lüneburg. It was a city-wide project during a city festival in the summer. It was 24 libraries that were placed into the city. This is Graz. It's the Library of the Steirischer Herbst that we did with the festival last year. Grazer Kunstverein, we placed a library there. This is Hamburg. This is where we actually started the discourse I was talking about.",[95,2564,2565],{},"Here you see the location in front of the Lüneburg University where we placed one of those libraries. Actually I wanted to show you another image but we couldn't find it, which is very strange. But I will try to explain later the story with this library that will give you an indication what I mean by the idea that the library itself can produce evidence.",[95,2567,2568],{},"Here you see the library of Luneburg in detail. You see that there is a transparent structure. There are two walls that are made out of transparent material so that the books are visible. You can take a book out, you can bring a book back. The idea was that there were books that were placed in, but if somebody wanted to take a book from his home and bring it to the library, he could do that. Also you could read on the streets. You could also take the book home and never bring it back.",[95,2570,2571],{},"This is the exhibition, a video installation that we made for the Kunstverein in Cologne and it was also shown in Lüneburg University during a symposium.",[95,2573,2574],{},"Here you see a monitor. There's about 12 monitors in the gallery space in Cologne. Each monitor shows an edited version of real documentary material that we shot on the streets of Cologne. We will explain in detail in a minute what this material is and how the editing works. I will just try to give you an overview about the installation itself. The idea was that we just put those monitors into the exhibition space with no further explication, no wall text whatsoever about the work. The only thing you could get was a pamphlet in which you could read the whole discourse about the parallel developments of sociology, popular entertainment and so on as I indicated before.",[95,2576,2577],{},"People would come into the gallery space and they would see those monitors and they would try to understand: \"What is this? What is going on here?\" They would just see people in very particular behavior on the streets. Okay, so here it starts to get interesting.",[108,2579,2581],{"id":2580},"the-atm-experiment-filming-human-machine-interaction","The ATM Experiment: Filming Human-Machine Interaction",[95,2583,2584],{},"This is now the material that we showed in those monitors. This is shot in real time. We stationed ourselves in the city of Cologne in front of an ATM machine with a video camera. We were hiding behind the window so that people wouldn't see us and we filmed people while they were getting money. The camera was zooming in on their face at the moment when they were putting in their code. We wanted to test if people's face changed when they were putting in their code, whether they became somehow more nervous, more concentrated or whether there was absolutely no change.",[95,2586,2587],{},"It turned out that the effect was zero. There was absolutely no change in behavior. People don't get nervous when putting in their code. But once we did about 100 people we started analyzing the material for an editing. Precisely at this moment it became obvious that something much more interesting was happening.",[95,2589,2590],{},"We started realizing that the way people look when they put money into a machine is slightly different from how they look when talking to you. Not in any particular way that you can specify in words, it's just a certain look, a certain quality. You start recognizing a human being vis-à-vis a machine and you can maybe start working with the hypothesis that people are not being watched, they are not thinking that there is a social communication involved, and this in fact creates a different expression. We became interested in collecting the material that proved this hypothesis.",[95,2592,2593],{},"So what we did: We took out a segment where people were putting in the code which were about 2 to 3 seconds long. We edited them into a loop. We did about 100 people. Some of those loops were 2 seconds, some 4 seconds and so on. And then we programmed the video so that the loops were shown in a random order. This means that you were looking at the monitor and after 2 seconds a new person would appear, then 4 seconds, somebody else, and so on. Since people do not know that this is a loop, they see the person appearing, they recognize that there is a certain type of stare in the face. They wait to see what is going to happen next. But what happens next is that the person appears again and again and stares in exactly the same way. People start wondering: \"Is this person mentally retarded or what's the problem with this person?\" It gives them a fairly uncanny experience. Usually people in front of those monitors after a minute or two start having the urge to look for some explanation. They go around the exhibition space and see if there are wall labels. And since they don't find wall labels they usually will get the pamphlet.",[95,2595,2596],{},"At that point they will read the discourse and they will be referred back to the Milgram experiments. They will read about Candid Camera and they will read about all the other experiments that were done. They will also read a very extensive account about various theories of experimental practice, how is it possible that one can make experiments and what is the political meaning of experimental practice. So they will have something to read for about 20 to 30 minutes. And then they come back to the images and they try to reevaluate the images from another point of view. Now they know it's an experiment. Now they start realizing that there must be people in the real city. They see that those are just like everyday people and they will ask themselves questions: \"Were those people told? Did they give permission? What was the extent of the control? What are we doing here in the gallery watching those people?\"",[95,2598,2599],{},"Since the discourse in the pamphlet refers very directly to the tradition of Milgram, Garfinkel and so on, they recognize very quickly the connection to the tradition that always had this very thin line between legitimate experimentation and voyeurism and even sadism. They start recognizing something like a gray zone that is opened up by the experiment. And they become very quickly also very uncomfortable because they recognize that they are also sitting there and watching those people. In other words they don't have any control, they cannot distance themselves in that sense. They are implicated in the sadism and voyeurism themselves.",[95,2601,2602],{},"In Cologne we had fairly interesting reactions to the work. About every second person or something like that in the exhibition space had fairly clear moral objections about what we were doing. They thought that what we are doing is highly immoral, highly objectionable, highly questionable and so on. We wanted to open up this gray zone and we wanted to see what kind of reaction people have to it. We deliberately didn't tell people in the city. There was no contract. People were not told that they were filmed. We were just watching them and recording them. In Germany there is a law that forbids filming in public without permission. We knew about that and we decided to do it anyway.",[108,2604,2606],{"id":2605},"ethics-vs-legality-the-gray-zone-of-research","Ethics vs. Legality: The Gray Zone of Research",[95,2608,2609],{},"Okay, this brings me to the next theme, the discourse about the relationship between the legality and the ethics of an action. I want to go into this in detail because I think this is very crucial for understanding the work. Let me just sketch a very simple argument: There are obviously codes in any society that define what is legitimate, what is legal and what is not legal. But those legal structures are actually not in any simple way the same thing as ethics. Ethics is a much more general question about what is good and what is bad. And very often the legal structure is actually in conflict with what one would consider ethical behavior.",[95,2611,2612],{},"Let me give you an historical example: When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, one of the things they did was they started forbidding people to employ Jews. Now according to the law at that time in Germany this was perfectly legal. If you employed a Jew after a certain date you would actually break the law. However, if you think about ethics, if you believe that human beings should be treated in an egalitarian way, then you would say that the ethical thing to do is to break the law and to continue to employ Jewish people. So you see: there is a fundamental conflict between legality and ethics.",[95,2614,2615],{},"Now we can go forward in history and we can ask ourselves: Are there current laws that are equally problematic? I think there are many laws that are questionable. For example the law in Germany about filming in public: We think that there are good arguments why this law exists, namely it protects people's privacy. But we also think there are good arguments why in particular cases it would be justifiable to break this law. For example if you are doing research, if you are trying to collect material about how people behave in public and if the material is used in an ethical way, meaning that you are not trying to damage those people, you are not trying to use the material against them or harm them, then we think it's actually justifiable to break the law. We think the law is too restrictive in that sense.",[95,2617,2618],{},"Now the question is: Can art be one of those areas where it would be legitimate to break this particular law? We think yes. We think that if art has a research dimension, if it's trying to understand something about the social reality and if the material is used in a way that is not harmful to people, then it should be possible for art to break this law. However we also think that we cannot take this decision by ourselves. In other words we cannot decide: \"Okay, we break the law and that's fine.\" We think that this decision has to be made by the public sphere, by the people who are looking at the work, by critics, by curators, by other artists and so on.",[95,2620,2621],{},"That's exactly what we wanted to provoke with this installation. We wanted people to confront this question: Is it okay what we are doing here or is it not okay? And we wanted to see what kind of reactions we get. We deliberately made the work in such a way that it's very difficult to have a clear answer. Some people said: \"This is completely unethical, you shouldn't be allowed to do this.\" Other people said: \"No, this is actually very important research and it's okay that you did it.\" We wanted to create this ambiguity because we think this is where interesting things happen.",[95,2623,2624],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Now we can continue. Michael will present another aspect of the discourse around the work.",[108,2626,2628],{"id":2627},"intention-and-reception-the-gap-between-artist-and-audience","Intention and Reception: The Gap Between Artist and Audience",[95,2630,2631],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: One of the things we wanted to raise with this work is the question: What is the relationship between the intention of the artist and the reception of the work? This is a classical question in aesthetics but we wanted to give it a particular spin.",[95,2633,2634],{},"Usually when we think about art we think that the artist has a certain intention, creates a work and then the public receives the work and interprets it. There's always a gap between what the artist intended and what the public understands. This is completely normal and everybody accepts this. However, we wanted to radicalize this gap. We wanted to create a situation where the gap between intention and reception becomes so large that it actually creates a new quality.",[95,2636,2637],{},"How did we do this? Well, first of all we created a work where people don't know initially what they're looking at. They see these images on the monitors but they don't understand what's going on. They have to read the pamphlet to understand the context. So there's already a temporal gap: first you see the images, then you read about them, then you come back to the images. This temporal structure already creates a certain ambiguity.",[95,2639,2640],{},"But more importantly, we created a situation where our intention is actually impossible to determine from the work itself. If you just look at the images on the monitors, you could think: \"Maybe these artists are just voyeurs. Maybe they just enjoy watching people.\" You don't know. You need the pamphlet to understand that we're actually trying to create a discourse about experimentation, about the ethics of research, about the boundaries between art and life and so on. But even after you read the pamphlet, you still don't know: Are we really serious about this discourse or are we just using it as an excuse to do voyeuristic work?",[95,2642,2643],{},"We deliberately created this ambiguity because we think it's very productive. It forces people to take a position. They cannot just passively consume the work. They have to decide: Do I believe these artists are serious? Do I think what they're doing is justified? Or do I think they're just being cynical?",[95,2645,2646],{},"This brings me to another point which is very important for understanding our work: We don't believe that the meaning of a work of art is determined by the artist's intention. We think that the meaning of a work emerges in the social process of reception, interpretation, discussion and so on. The artist can initiate this process but cannot control it.",[95,2648,2649],{},"This is very different from how most artists think about their work. Most artists believe that they know what their work means and they want the public to understand it correctly. We don't think like this. We think that our work is successful if it generates interesting discussions, if it provokes people to think, if it creates controversy and so on. We don't care if people \"misunderstand\" our work because we don't think there's a correct understanding.",[95,2651,2652],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Let me add something to what Michael just said. This relates to a very fundamental question about the nature of political art. There's a long tradition in the left, especially in Germany, of thinking that political art should have a very clear message. The idea is: the artist has a political position, creates a work that expresses this position, and the public receives the message and is convinced by it. This is a very instrumental understanding of political art.",[95,2654,2655],{},"We completely reject this model. We think it's naive and actually counterproductive. Why? Because in reality people are not convinced by being told what to think. If you create a work that says \"capitalism is bad\" or \"racism is bad\" or whatever, people who already agree with you will like it and people who don't agree with you will ignore it or reject it. You're not changing anything.",[95,2657,2658],{},"We think political art should work differently. It should create situations where people are forced to think for themselves, where they cannot rely on pre-existing opinions, where they have to make difficult decisions. This is what we tried to do with this work. We created a situation where people cannot easily say \"this is good\" or \"this is bad.\" They have to think about it. They have to ask themselves: What do I think about the ethics of experimentation? What do I think about the relationship between legality and ethics? What do I think about the role of art in society?",[95,2660,2661],{},"This is a much more radical form of political art because it actually challenges people's thinking process itself. It doesn't just tell them what to think but makes them think differently.",[95,2663,2664],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: But don't you think there's a danger that people will just say \"this is unethical\" and walk away without engaging with the deeper questions?",[95,2666,2667],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Yes, absolutely. Many people did exactly that. But we think that's also interesting. It shows something about how people think about ethics. It shows that many people have a very rigid, rule-based understanding of ethics where they just apply a simple rule: \"filming people without permission is bad\" and that's it. They don't think about the context, they don't think about the purpose, they don't think about the consequences. They just apply the rule.",[95,2669,2670],{},"We think this is a problem. We think ethics should be more contextual, more situational. And by creating a work where people's rule-based ethics doesn't give them a clear answer, we're challenging them to think more deeply.",[95,2672,2673],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: But didn't some people actually feel violated? The people who were filmed without their knowledge?",[95,2675,2676],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: That's a good question. Actually we don't know because we never contacted them. We deliberately didn't contact them because that would have changed the nature of the experiment. If we had told them afterwards \"hey, by the way, we filmed you and showed you in an art exhibition,\" that would have created a completely different situation.",[95,2678,2679],{},"But you're right to ask about this because it points to a real ethical problem. And we don't have a simple answer. We can say that we tried to be careful. We didn't show people in embarrassing situations. We just showed them putting in their code at an ATM machine, which is a completely normal, everyday action. We didn't use the material to harm them in any way. But still, you could argue that we violated their privacy.",[95,2681,2682],{},"This is exactly the gray zone we wanted to explore. We think this gray zone is very important because it's where real ethical thinking has to happen. It's easy to say \"never film people without permission.\" It's much harder to think about the specific context and ask: In this particular case, with this particular purpose, with this particular usage of the material, is it ethical or not?",[95,2684,2685],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Let me add something. You have to understand that we're not saying \"anything goes.\" We're not saying that any violation of privacy is okay as long as it's done for art. We're saying something much more specific: We think that in certain contexts, for certain purposes, it can be justifiable to break certain rules. But this justification has to be argued for, it has to be defended in public, it has to be discussed. That's exactly what we're doing here. We're not just breaking the rule and saying \"trust us, we're artists.\" We're breaking the rule and then exposing ourselves to public criticism and discussion.",[95,2687,2688],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: But you're exposing yourselves after the fact. The people who were filmed didn't have a choice.",[95,2690,2691],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: That's true. But that's also the nature of many social experiments. If you tell people in advance what you're doing, you change their behavior. That's exactly what Garfinkel discovered. If he had told the father \"we're doing an experiment where you don't talk to your family,\" it wouldn't have been an experiment anymore. The whole point is to observe natural behavior.",[95,2693,2694],{},"Now you could say: social experiments should be forbidden. And maybe you're right. But then you have to accept the consequences: we lose the ability to do certain types of research about human behavior. We lose the ability to gain certain types of knowledge about society.",[95,2696,2697],{},"We think this would be a loss. We think experimental research, including controversial experimental research, has value. But we also think this value has to be constantly questioned and discussed. That's what we're trying to do with this work.",[108,2699,2701],{"id":2700},"critical-debate-political-art-and-bourgeois-ideology","Critical Debate: Political Art and Bourgeois Ideology",[95,2703,2704],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: I have a fundamental problem with your approach. You're presenting yourselves as if you're doing radical, political work. You're talking about breaking boundaries, about challenging ethics, about creating controversy. But actually what you're doing is just reproducing the most traditional role of the artist: the artist as provocateur, the artist as someone who stands outside society and criticizes it.",[95,2706,2707],{},"This is not radical at all. This is the most bourgeois understanding of art possible. The real radical question would be: How can we actually change society? How can we actually create new forms of social organization? Not: How can we create controversial art exhibitions?",[95,2709,2710],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: I think you're confusing two different things. On the one hand there's the question: What is the role of art in society? On the other hand there's the question: What is the role of political action in society? We're not claiming that art can replace political action. We're not saying that making art exhibitions is the same thing as organizing workers or fighting for political change.",[95,2712,2713],{},"What we are saying is that art has its own specific role to play. And this role is related to thinking, to reflection, to questioning assumptions. Art cannot change society directly but it can change how people think about society. And changing how people think is also a form of political work.",[95,2715,2716],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But that's exactly the problem. You're accepting the bourgeois separation between thinking and acting, between theory and practice. Real revolutionary politics means overcoming this separation. It means thinking through action, not thinking and then maybe acting or not acting.",[95,2718,2719],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: I don't think we're accepting this separation. Look at the Open Libraries project: that was very much about action. We didn't just think about libraries, we actually built them and placed them in public space. We created a real social intervention. And the same is true for the ATM work: we actually filmed people, we actually created a situation that had real social consequences.",[95,2721,2722],{},"The difference is that we don't think our actions are going to directly create revolutionary change. We think they're going to create a certain type of experience, a certain type of reflection, a certain type of discussion. And we think this has value.",[95,2724,2725],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But this is exactly what I mean by bourgeois individualism. You're creating experiences for individual visitors to art exhibitions. You're not creating collective political action. You're not organizing people. You're not building movements. You're just making art for the art world.",[95,2727,2728],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: But we don't think the art world is hermetically sealed from the rest of society. People who come to art exhibitions are also people who vote, who work, who have families, who participate in society in many ways. If we can change how they think about ethics, about experimentation, about the boundaries between public and private, then this can have effects beyond the art world.",[95,2730,2731],{},"Also, you're assuming that the only valuable political action is mass action, collective action, revolutionary action. We don't think that's true. We think there are many different forms of political action at many different scales. And we think that even small-scale actions, even individual experiences, can have political significance.",[95,2733,2734],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: That's a very convenient position for artists. It means you never have to actually prove that your work has any political effect. You can always say \"well, maybe it changed someone's thinking\" even if there's no evidence of this.",[95,2736,2737],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: You're right that it's difficult to measure the political effects of art. But the same is true for many forms of political action. How do you measure the effects of a demonstration? How do you measure the effects of a political speech? How do you measure the effects of a political pamphlet? You can't measure these things precisely but that doesn't mean they have no effect.",[95,2739,2740],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: I think we need to be more specific about what we mean by \"political.\" There are different levels of political action. There's the level of organized politics: parties, unions, movements and so on. But there's also the level of everyday politics: how people interact with each other, how institutions function, how norms are established and challenged.",[95,2742,2743],{},"Our work is not operating at the level of organized politics. We're not trying to organize a political party or start a revolution. We're operating at the level of everyday politics. We're trying to understand how institutions work, how norms function, how people behave in specific situations. And we think this understanding is also politically valuable.",[95,2745,2746],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But understanding is not enough. Marx said: philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.",[95,2748,2749],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Yes, but Marx also spent most of his life writing books. He didn't just go out and organize workers. He did both: he organized and he wrote theoretical works. And I would argue that his theoretical works have had a much bigger impact than his organizational activities.",[95,2751,2752],{},"We're not comparing ourselves to Marx, obviously. But we're making a similar point: theoretical work, analytical work, investigative work is also important. It's not the only thing that's important but it is important.",[95,2754,2755],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But Marx's theoretical work was directly connected to the workers' movement. It wasn't just abstract analysis. It was analysis for the purpose of revolutionary change.",[95,2757,2758],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: And our work is also connected to social movements and social change. Maybe not in such a direct way as Marx's work but it's still connected. The Open Libraries project, for example, was very much about democratizing access to information, about creating public space, about challenging institutional hierarchies. These are all themes that are relevant to progressive social movements.",[95,2760,2761],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can I ask a practical question? What happened with the people who objected to the ATM work? Did anyone take legal action?",[95,2763,2764],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: No, nobody took legal action. Some people complained to the gallery. Some people complained to us directly. But nobody actually sued us or reported us to the police.",[95,2766,2767],{},"I think this is interesting because it shows that even though people had moral objections, they didn't necessarily want to use legal mechanisms to stop us. Maybe because they understood that there's a difference between legal rules and ethical judgment. Maybe because they understood that the work was raising important questions even if they disagreed with our methods.",[95,2769,2770],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Or maybe because they didn't want to deal with the hassle of a lawsuit.",[95,2772,2773],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: That's also possible. But either way, the fact is that the work generated discussion and controversy without anyone actually using legal mechanisms to shut it down. And we think this is good. This is how public discourse should work: through argument and discussion, not through legal prohibition.",[95,2775,2776],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Let me come back to Lukas's critique because I think there's something important we need to address. You're accusing us of bourgeois individualism. But I want to turn this around: I think your position is actually the one that's problematic.",[95,2778,2779],{},"You seem to have a very rigid idea of what counts as political action. It has to be collective, it has to be organized, it has to aim at revolutionary change. Anything else is dismissed as bourgeois individualism. But this position has a problem: it dismisses 99% of human activity as politically irrelevant. According to this logic, if you're not organizing a revolution, you're not doing anything political.",[95,2781,2782],{},"We think this is wrong. We think politics happens at many levels and in many forms. Yes, organized collective action is important. But so is everyday resistance. So is questioning norms. So is experimenting with new forms of social interaction. So is creating spaces for reflection and discussion.",[95,2784,2785],{},"Our work is trying to operate at these different levels. Sometimes we create collective projects like the Open Libraries. Sometimes we create more experimental, research-oriented work like the ATM piece. But in both cases we're trying to engage with political questions, just in different ways.",[95,2787,2788],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: I still don't see what's political about filming people without their consent and showing it in an art gallery. That's not politics, that's just voyeurism with a theoretical justification.",[95,2790,2791],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: But you're missing the point. The political dimension is not in the filming itself. The political dimension is in the discourse that the work generates. The work creates a situation where people have to think about questions like: What is privacy? What is the public sphere? What is legitimate research? What is the role of institutions? What is the relationship between individual rights and collective knowledge?",[95,2793,2794],{},"These are all political questions. And by creating a work that doesn't give simple answers to these questions, we're forcing people to think about them in a more complex way.",[95,2796,2797],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But these questions are only political if they're connected to actual political struggles. If they're just abstract questions discussed in art galleries, they're not political, they're just philosophy.",[95,2799,2800],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: But they're not abstract. They're very concrete. The question of privacy is directly relevant to current political debates about surveillance, about data collection, about the power of corporations and governments. The question of legitimate research is directly relevant to debates about scientific ethics, about medical experiments, about the limits of investigative journalism. These are not abstract questions, they're questions that affect people's lives.",[95,2802,2803],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: And I would add: the fact that these discussions are happening in art galleries doesn't make them apolitical. Art galleries are part of the public sphere. They're places where public discourse happens. Not the only places, obviously, but they are part of it.",[95,2805,2806],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: Art galleries are elite spaces. They're not accessible to most people. So even if important discussions are happening there, they're only happening among a small elite.",[95,2808,2809],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: That's partly true. But it's also changing. More and more people are visiting art exhibitions. More and more people are engaging with contemporary art. And also, the discussions that happen in art galleries don't stay in art galleries. They spread through publications, through media coverage, through word of mouth.",[95,2811,2812],{},"Also, we don't only work in art galleries. The Open Libraries were placed in public streets, in neighborhoods, in places where anyone could access them. So we're not just working within elite spaces.",[95,2814,2815],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But the Open Libraries are still art projects. They're still framed as art. And this framing changes everything. It means they're not really libraries, they're representations of libraries. They're not really public institutions, they're art institutions.",[95,2817,2818],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: I disagree completely. The Open Libraries were real libraries. People could really take books. People could really donate books. They functioned as real public institutions. The fact that they were also art projects doesn't negate this reality.",[95,2820,2821],{},"This is exactly what we mean by breaking down the boundaries between art and life. We're not interested in creating representations of social institutions. We're interested in creating real social institutions that also function as art. The two things are not mutually exclusive.",[95,2823,2824],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: This is a very important point. A lot of political art makes the mistake of thinking that it has to represent political reality rather than intervene in political reality. So you get art that shows images of poverty or oppression or whatever. But this doesn't change anything. It just represents what already exists.",[95,2826,2827],{},"We're trying to do something different. We're trying to create real interventions that actually change something, even if it's small. The Open Libraries actually changed the information infrastructure of the neighborhoods where they were placed. The ATM work actually changed people's thinking about privacy and experimentation. These are real effects, not just representations.",[108,2829,2831],{"id":2830},"the-open-libraries-real-institutions-vs-art-institutions","The Open Libraries: Real Institutions vs. Art Institutions",[95,2833,2834],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But the effects are temporary. The libraries were taken down after a few months. The ATM work was shown in a gallery for a few weeks. Nothing permanent changed.",[95,2836,2837],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: But permanent change is very rare. Even successful political movements often have temporary effects that later get reversed. Does that mean they weren't valuable? I don't think so.",[95,2839,2840],{},"Also, some effects are invisible. They're changes in consciousness, changes in thinking, changes in possibility. These things don't disappear when the physical installation is taken down.",[95,2842,2843],{},"KURT KLADLER: Maybe I can intervene here. I think there's a fundamental disagreement about the relationship between critical practice and emancipatory practice. Lukas seems to be demanding emancipatory practice: practice that directly contributes to human liberation. Martin and Michael seem to be defending critical practice: practice that questions and analyzes without necessarily offering solutions.",[95,2845,2846],{},"These are two different models of political engagement and they can't be easily reconciled. But I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. They serve different functions.",[95,2848,2849],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: I think that's a fair characterization. We are definitely more interested in critical practice than in emancipatory practice, at least in the sense that we don't think our work is going to directly liberate anyone. But we do think that critical practice has political value. We think that questioning assumptions, exposing contradictions, creating spaces for discussion - these are all politically valuable activities.",[95,2851,2852],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But critical practice without emancipatory goals just becomes endless criticism. It becomes a comfortable position where you can always criticize everything but never commit to anything.",[95,2854,2855],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: That's a risk, I agree. But I think there's an equal risk on the other side: emancipatory practice without critical reflection can become dogmatic. It can lead to the belief that you know exactly what liberation looks like and anyone who disagrees is an enemy.",[95,2857,2858],{},"We're trying to maintain a critical stance precisely because we don't think we know all the answers. We think political reality is complex and we need to keep questioning our own assumptions as much as we question others' assumptions.",[95,2860,2861],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: And I would add that we do have political commitments. We're committed to democratization. We're committed to public access to information and culture. We're committed to questioning institutional hierarchies. These are not just abstract values, they guide our actual practice.",[95,2863,2864],{},"But we don't think these commitments should lead to dogmatism. We think they should lead to experimentation. We should try different approaches, see what works, learn from failures, adjust our methods. This is a pragmatic approach to politics, not an ideological approach.",[95,2866,2867],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: Pragmatism is just another word for reformism. It means accepting the basic structures of society and just trying to make small improvements.",[95,2869,2870],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: I don't think that's necessarily true. Pragmatism can also mean being realistic about what's possible while still working towards radical change. It means not wasting energy on symbolic actions that don't have real effects while still maintaining a vision of deep transformation.",[95,2872,2873],{},"Also, I think there's a false dichotomy here between reform and revolution. In reality, most significant social changes happen through a combination of reforms and more radical transformations. The idea that there's going to be one big revolution that changes everything is, I think, a fantasy.",[95,2875,2876],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can I bring this back to the specific work? I'm still not clear about what you learned from the ATM experiment. You said people's faces don't change when they put in their code. So what was the point?",[108,2878,2880],{"id":2879},"human-machine-interaction-and-surveillance-culture","Human-Machine Interaction and Surveillance Culture",[95,2882,2883],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: The point wasn't just to collect data about facial expressions. The point was to create a situation where we could observe the relationship between humans and machines, between public and private, between being watched and not being watched.",[95,2885,2886],{},"What we discovered - and this only became clear during the editing process - was that people do look different when they interact with machines compared to when they interact with humans. There's a certain quality to the gaze, a certain way of being, that's different. It's hard to describe in words but it's visible in the images.",[95,2888,2889],{},"And this discovery has implications. It suggests that our relationship with technology is changing how we present ourselves, how we perform our identity. When we interact with machines, we can afford to be less self-conscious, less performative. But this also means we're more vulnerable. We're revealing aspects of ourselves that we normally keep hidden.",[95,2891,2892],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: And this connects to larger questions about surveillance, about digital technology, about the transformation of public space. We live in a society where we're constantly being recorded by machines: security cameras, smartphones, computer systems. But we don't really think about what this means for our behavior, for our sense of self, for our relationship to public space.",[95,2894,2895],{},"The ATM work was trying to make this visible. It was trying to show people something about their own behavior that they're normally not aware of. And by making it visible in an art context, we were creating a space for reflection and discussion.",[95,2897,2898],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: But couldn't you have done this without actually filming real people? Couldn't you have used actors or something?",[95,2900,2901],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: We could have, but then it wouldn't have been the same work. The whole point is that these are real people in real situations. If they were actors, the whole dynamic would change. It would become a representation rather than documentation. And we're specifically interested in the ethical and political questions that arise from documenting real behavior without consent.",[95,2903,2904],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: So the ethical controversy is actually part of the work?",[95,2906,2907],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Exactly. The ethical controversy is not a side effect of the work, it's central to the work. We deliberately created a situation that would generate ethical discussion because we think these discussions are important. We think society needs to have these discussions about the limits of research, about privacy, about surveillance and so on.",[95,2909,2910],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But that's just instrumentalizing people for your art project. You're using them without their consent to create controversy in the art world. That's deeply problematic.",[95,2912,2913],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: I understand your objection. But I would argue that journalism does the same thing all the time. Journalists film people in public without consent, use their images to make points about society, generate controversy and discussion. We don't usually object to this because we think journalism serves a public function.",[95,2915,2916],{},"The question is: Can art serve a similar public function? Can art also engage in this kind of investigative, documentary practice? We think yes. But we also think this requires public discussion and debate. That's exactly what we're having right now.",[95,2918,2919],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But journalists have professional standards. They have codes of ethics. They're accountable to editors and publishers. Artists just do whatever they want and call it freedom of expression.",[95,2921,2922],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: That's not entirely fair. Artists also have professional standards, though they're different from journalistic standards. And artists are accountable to galleries, curators, critics, the art public. The difference is that artistic accountability is more diffuse, less institutionalized. But it's still real.",[95,2924,2925],{},"Also, I would question whether journalistic standards are always adequate. There are many cases where journalism violates privacy, causes harm, serves corporate or political interests. The existence of professional standards doesn't automatically make practice ethical.",[95,2927,2928],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: I think we need to accept that there's an inevitable tension here. On the one hand, we have legitimate concerns about privacy and consent. On the other hand, we have legitimate needs for research, investigation, documentation. These two things are in conflict and there's no simple way to resolve the conflict.",[95,2930,2931],{},"What we're trying to do with our work is make this tension visible and productive. We're not claiming to have solved the problem. We're claiming to have created a situation where the problem can be discussed and thought about in a concrete way.",[95,2933,2934],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Has anyone from the media written about this work?",[95,2936,2937],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Yes, there were several reviews in art magazines and newspapers. The reactions were mixed. Some critics praised the work for raising important questions. Others criticized it for being voyeuristic or unethical. Which is exactly what we expected and wanted.",[95,2939,2940],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Were you ever contacted by privacy advocates or civil liberties organizations?",[95,2942,2943],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: No, we weren't. I think the work remained too much within the art world context to attract that kind of attention. If we had done it on a larger scale or in a more public way, maybe we would have gotten more attention from those organizations.",[95,2945,2946],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: And maybe that would have been interesting. Maybe we should do a version of the work that deliberately tries to engage with privacy advocacy groups, with ethicists, with legal scholars and so on. That could create an even more interesting public discussion.",[95,2948,2949],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: This just confirms what I was saying. You're operating within the art world. You're not really engaging with actual political institutions or movements. You're just creating controversy within a very limited context.",[95,2951,2952],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: But we have to start somewhere. We can't just immediately engage with the entire political system. We start with the contexts we have access to, which is the art world. And then we try to expand from there. The Open Libraries project was an attempt to do exactly that: to work in public space, to engage with local institutions, to create something that's accessible to people outside the art world.",[95,2954,2955],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you talk more about the Open Libraries? How did they work in practice?",[108,2957,2959],{"id":2958},"artistic-research-anecdotes-documentation-and-social-knowledge","Artistic Research: Anecdotes, Documentation, and Social Knowledge",[95,2961,2962],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: Sure. The basic concept was simple: we built wooden structures that looked like library shelves, filled them with books, and placed them in public spaces. People could take books without any registration or identification. They could also donate books if they wanted.",[95,2964,2965],{},"The interesting thing was that each library developed its own character depending on where it was placed and who used it. Some libraries became meeting points for the neighborhood. Some libraries were heavily used, others less so. Some libraries were vandalized, others were carefully maintained by local residents.",[95,2967,2968],{},"In Hamburg, for example, we placed a library in a working-class neighborhood with a high percentage of immigrants. We were nervous about whether it would be accepted or vandalized. It turned out that local residents took very good care of it. They organized themselves to make sure it was maintained. Some people even built a roof over it to protect it from rain.",[95,2970,2971],{},"This was fascinating to us because it showed that people were taking ownership of the library. It wasn't just an art installation anymore. It had become a real community resource.",[95,2973,2974],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: And this is where the research dimension comes in. By observing how different communities interact with the libraries, we learn something about those communities. We learn about their relationship to public space, to cultural institutions, to collective resources. This is social research through artistic practice.",[95,2976,2977],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But you didn't do any systematic analysis of this data. You didn't publish any research findings. So how is this research?",[95,2979,2980],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: It's a different kind of research. It's not social science research with statistical analysis and peer review. It's artistic research where the findings are communicated through the work itself, through documentation, through discussion.",[95,2982,2983],{},"Also, we did document the project extensively. We took photographs, we conducted interviews, we kept records of what happened. This documentation is part of the work.",[95,2985,2986],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But documentation is not the same as analysis. Without analysis, you just have anecdotes, not knowledge.",[95,2988,2989],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: I disagree. I think anecdotes can be a form of knowledge, especially when they're carefully selected and contextualized. Not all knowledge has to be statistical or systematic.",[95,2991,2992],{},"Also, the knowledge produced by the Open Libraries is not just about what happened in specific neighborhoods. It's also about demonstrating what's possible. It's about showing that alternative forms of cultural institution are possible, that people will engage with them, that they can function without bureaucracy or control.",[95,2994,2995],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: And this connects back to our earlier discussion about emancipatory practice. The Open Libraries are not just critical of existing institutions, they're also offering an alternative. They're showing what a more democratic cultural institution could look like.",[95,2997,2998],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But they're temporary. They don't challenge the permanent institutional structures.",[95,3000,3001],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: That's true. But they do demonstrate possibility. And demonstrating possibility is important. A lot of people think that more democratic institutions are impossible, that they wouldn't work, that people would abuse them. The Open Libraries show that these assumptions are wrong.",[95,3003,3004],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Did you ever consider making the libraries permanent?",[95,3006,3007],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: We have considered it. And in some cases we've tried. But it's very difficult because permanent installations require ongoing funding, maintenance, legal clarification and so on. It becomes much more complicated than a temporary project.",[95,3009,3010],{},"Also, there's something valuable about the temporary nature. It creates a certain urgency, a certain intensity that might be lost in a permanent installation.",[95,3012,3013],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: But we're not dogmatic about this. If there was an opportunity to create a permanent open library that really functioned well, we would definitely be interested.",[108,3015,3017],{"id":3016},"peter-bürger-and-the-theory-of-the-avant-garde","Peter Bürger and the Theory of the Avant-Garde",[95,3019,3020],{},"KURT KLADLER: I want to come back to the theoretical framework. You mentioned Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde in your presentation. How do you relate your work to his analysis?",[95,3022,3023],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Bürger's basic argument is that the historical avant-garde tried to dissolve the separation between art and life, but failed because this attempt was recuperated by the institution of art. Everything the avant-garde did just became another category of art.",[95,3025,3026],{},"We're interested in this problem but we don't think it's necessarily fatal. We think it's possible to work within the art institution while still maintaining a critical relationship to it. You don't have to completely reject the art institution, you can work with it and against it at the same time.",[95,3028,3029],{},"The Open Libraries are a good example. They're clearly art projects - they're funded by art institutions, presented in art contexts and so on. But they also function as real libraries. They have a practical use that goes beyond their status as art. So they're both art and not-art at the same time.",[95,3031,3032],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: But isn't that still within Bürger's framework? You're still operating within the art institution, you're still being recuperated.",[95,3034,3035],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Maybe. But I think Bürger's model is too binary. He thinks either you're completely outside the art institution or you're completely recuperated. We think there are more complex positions possible. You can be partially inside and partially outside. You can use the resources of the art institution while also creating something that escapes its logic.",[95,3037,3038],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: And I think Bürger underestimates the political potential of working within institutions while being critical of them. You don't have to be completely outside to be effective. In fact, being completely outside often means being ineffective because you have no resources, no audience, no infrastructure.",[95,3040,3041],{},"We prefer to work with the contradictions of the institutional framework rather than trying to escape them entirely.",[95,3043,3044],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But this is exactly the reformist position I was criticizing earlier. You're accepting the institutional framework and just trying to make small changes within it.",[95,3046,3047],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Or you could say we're being realistic about what's possible while still pushing the limits. We're not going to overthrow the art institution. But we can create projects that challenge it, that expose its contradictions, that create spaces for different practices.",[95,3049,3050],{},"Also, I think you're overestimating the coherence and power of institutions. Institutions are not monolithic. They're full of contradictions, conflicts, competing interests. There's more space for critical practice within institutions than you seem to think.",[95,3052,3053],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you see your work as part of a larger movement or tendency in contemporary art?",[108,3055,3057],{"id":3056},"contemporary-context-institutional-critique-and-research-based-practice","Contemporary Context: Institutional Critique and Research-Based Practice",[95,3059,3060],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: There are definitely other artists working with similar concerns. Artists interested in institutional critique, in social engagement, in research-based practice, in blurring the boundaries between art and non-art. We're part of a broader conversation.",[95,3062,3063],{},"But we're also trying to do something specific. We're particularly interested in the relationship between artistic practice and social research, between aesthetic experience and political analysis. Not all artists working in this area share these concerns.",[95,3065,3066],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: And we're also trying to maintain a connection to the historical avant-garde while acknowledging that we're in a completely different situation. We can't just repeat what the Dadaists or Situationists did. We have to find new strategies for a new context.",[95,3068,3069],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: But without revolutionary politics, these strategies will always remain within the limits of the existing system.",[95,3071,3072],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Maybe. But I would rather work within those limits and try to push them than wait for a revolution that may never come. This is where we fundamentally disagree: you seem to think that anything short of revolution is worthless. We think that smaller changes, experimental practices, critical interventions - all of these have value even if they don't overthrow capitalism.",[108,3074,3076],{"id":3075},"accessibility-elitism-and-levels-of-complexity","Accessibility, Elitism, and Levels of Complexity",[95,3078,3079],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you respond to the accusation that your work is elitist? That it requires too much theoretical knowledge to understand?",[95,3081,3082],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: It's a fair criticism. Some of our work does require background knowledge to fully appreciate. The ATM piece, for example, works much better if you know about Garfinkel and Milgram and the history of experimental sociology.",[95,3084,3085],{},"But we don't think this makes the work elitist in a problematic sense. All cultural forms require some background knowledge. You can't fully appreciate classical music without knowing something about musical history. You can't fully appreciate literature without knowing something about literary traditions.",[95,3087,3088],{},"The question is: Do we make it possible for people to acquire this knowledge? And I think we do. We provide extensive documentation, we write texts that explain the context, we give talks like this one. We're not trying to be deliberately obscure.",[95,3090,3091],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Also, some of our work is more accessible than others. The Open Libraries, for example, don't require any theoretical knowledge. Anyone can use them. They work on a very simple, direct level.",[95,3093,3094],{},"We think it's okay to have different levels of complexity in different projects. Some projects are more theoretical, some are more practical. Some require more background knowledge, some don't.",[108,3096,3098],{"id":3097},"future-directions-and-measuring-impact","Future Directions and Measuring Impact",[95,3100,3101],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: What are you working on now?",[95,3103,3104],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: We're continuing to develop the library projects in different contexts. We're also working on some new experiments that deal with questions of public space and social behavior. But we're still in the early stages so we can't say too much about them yet.",[95,3106,3107],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: We're also interested in developing the theoretical framework further. We think there's a lot more to say about the relationship between artistic practice and social research, about the ethics of experimentation, about the politics of institutional critique. These are ongoing concerns for us.",[95,3109,3110],{},"AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you think your work will have a lasting impact?",[95,3112,3113],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: It's impossible to say. We hope so. But we also think that's not entirely the right question. The value of the work is not just in its lasting impact but also in its immediate effects, in the discussions it generates, in the experiences it creates.",[95,3115,3116],{},"If the work makes people think differently about public space or privacy or institutions or research ethics, even if this effect is temporary, that's already valuable. We don't need to create monuments that last forever.",[95,3118,3119],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: And impact is also hard to measure. Sometimes the effects of a work only become visible years later, in unexpected ways. An artist can influence other artists, who influence others, and eventually something changes in the culture. But it's very hard to trace these connections directly.",[95,3121,3122],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: This is why I think your approach is fundamentally limited. You're producing work whose effects are unmeasurable, possibly non-existent, and you're calling this political practice. Real political practice has clear goals and measurable outcomes.",[95,3124,3125],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: But that's not true. Most political practice doesn't have clear measurable outcomes. Think about a political speech: how do you measure its impact? Think about a demonstration: how do you measure its effects? Political practice is not like engineering where you can precisely calculate results.",[95,3127,3128],{},"Also, some of the most important political effects are exactly the ones that are hardest to measure: changes in consciousness, shifts in discourse, transformations of possibility. These things are real even if they're not quantifiable.",[108,3130,3132],{"id":3131},"closing-reflections-multiple-approaches-to-political-practice","Closing Reflections: Multiple Approaches to Political Practice",[95,3134,3135],{},"MICHAEL CLEGG: I think we should wrap up soon. But I want to say one more thing in response to Lukas's critiques. I appreciate that you're pushing us to think more clearly about the political dimensions of our work. These are important questions and we don't claim to have all the answers.",[95,3137,3138],{},"But I also think you're operating with a very narrow definition of political practice. You seem to think that only organized collective action aimed at revolutionary transformation counts as politics. We think politics is broader than that. We think experimental practice, critical analysis, institutional intervention - all of these can be political.",[95,3140,3141],{},"We're not saying our way is the only way. We're saying it's one way among others. And we think there's value in having multiple approaches to political and cultural practice rather than insisting that everyone follow the same revolutionary program.",[95,3143,3144],{},"LUKAS PUSCH: Fair enough. I still think you're too comfortable within the existing system. But I appreciate the discussion.",[95,3146,3147],{},"MARTIN GUTTMANN: Thank you. And thank you all for coming and for engaging with the work. These kinds of discussions are exactly what we hope to generate with our projects.",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":3149},[3150,3151,3152,3153,3154,3155,3156,3157,3158,3159,3160,3161,3162,3163,3164,3165,3166],{"id":2497,"depth":434,"text":2498},{"id":2513,"depth":434,"text":2514},{"id":2526,"depth":434,"text":2527},{"id":2539,"depth":434,"text":2540},{"id":2555,"depth":434,"text":2556},{"id":2580,"depth":434,"text":2581},{"id":2605,"depth":434,"text":2606},{"id":2627,"depth":434,"text":2628},{"id":2700,"depth":434,"text":2701},{"id":2830,"depth":434,"text":2831},{"id":2879,"depth":434,"text":2880},{"id":2958,"depth":434,"text":2959},{"id":3016,"depth":434,"text":3017},{"id":3056,"depth":434,"text":3057},{"id":3075,"depth":434,"text":3076},{"id":3097,"depth":434,"text":3098},{"id":3131,"depth":434,"text":3132},"Invasion of Personal Space I(The Sick Soul II), 1996","1995-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","Presentation at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna 1995","/blog/Invasion_of_Personal_Space_1200px1996.jpg",{"location":3172,"words":3173,"head":3174},"Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, 27. Januar 1995",15000,{"meta":3175},[3176,3178,3179,3181,3183,3185],{"name":467,"content":3177},"Basel The Open Libraries project , Political dimensions of artistic practice, Candid Camera and popular entertainment, 1960 Sociology experiments, Wittgenstein philosophical investigations, Situationists Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":3180},"Michael Clegg, Martin Guttmann, Lukas Pusch, Ulf Wuggenig, Peter Pakesch, Kurt Kladler",{"name":476,"content":3182},"© 1995 Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":479,"content":3184},"The text first appeared in a publication of the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna 1995",{"name":482,"content":22},45,{"title":22,"description":3169},"2tfxuvqwVEQc1Iqg7F362k6nOVFWBB16TnhWFvwE8-U",{"id":3190,"title":66,"author":81,"body":3191,"caption":81,"date":3217,"description":3218,"extension":461,"image":3219,"meta":3220,"minRead":775,"navigation":85,"path":67,"seo":3231,"stem":68,"toc":777,"__hash__":3232},"blog/blog/The Train Library.md",{"type":92,"value":3192,"toc":3212},[3193,3195,3198,3202,3205,3209],[103,3194,111],{"id":110},[95,3196,3197],{},"The main objective of this proposal is to introduce the idea of a train-library and to give a rough description of our ideas concerning its design and realization.",[103,3199,3201],{"id":3200},"basic-concept","Basic concept",[95,3203,3204],{},"The fundamental concept of the project is the design of a library-car to be used by the train passengers, they could borrow books and read them while on board the train. The selection of the books and their organization will reflect the particular route of the train. The passengers,  will read about the places to which they travel and learn about the history of the representation or those locals. The passengers could also supplement the reading experience with direct observation of the landscape.",[103,3206,3208],{"id":3207},"the-design-of-the-library","The design of the library",[95,3210,3211],{},"We propose to house the books in a cabinet that will be placed in the middle of the train compartment, surrounded by small reading tables and chairs. The compartment should be reminiscent of a library and not a \"moving living room\". The tables should be placed near the windows so that one could easily glance outside while reading.",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":3213},[3214,3215,3216],{"id":110,"depth":429,"text":111},{"id":3200,"depth":429,"text":3201},{"id":3207,"depth":429,"text":3208},"1993-11-21T00:00:00.000Z","Notes for a proposal for the Deutsche Bahn","/blog/train_library_drawing.jpg",{"head":3221},{"meta":3222},[3223,3225,3226,3227,3228,3230],{"name":467,"content":3224},"Public Project, Deutsche Bahn, 1990, Train, Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":1564},{"name":479,"content":3229},"T",{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":66,"description":3218},"IXN0afvPb2IjZDcC-tDdPho9FfOyRoykHP693Um9S3M",{"id":3234,"title":38,"author":81,"body":3235,"caption":81,"date":3382,"description":3383,"extension":461,"image":3384,"meta":3385,"minRead":1441,"navigation":85,"path":39,"seo":3393,"stem":40,"toc":486,"__hash__":3394},"blog/blog/Notes on the OPL Hamburg.md",{"type":92,"value":3236,"toc":3369},[3237,3244,3246,3249,3253,3256,3259,3263,3266,3269,3273,3288,3292,3299,3303,3312,3316,3325,3327,3331,3338,3350,3361],[412,3238,3239],{},[415,3240,3241],{},[98,3242,3243],{},"In 1993 Clegg & Guttmann realized The Open Public Library in Hamburg as part of the city's Art in Public Space project. They erected library cabinets in three different parts of the city and offered them to neighborhoods for active use",[103,3245,111],{"id":110},[95,3247,3248],{},"From the present point of view, the library is the environment where the image of knowledge is integrated with the image of state power and private patronage. Libraries are often located near government buildings. The architecture of libraries, especially in small towns, is often similar to that of other state institutions. Inside the library, it is very common to find portraits of presidents and patrons. The explanation of these facts may be rather involved. But one should acknowledge the fact that these features, as consistent as they are, are unrelated to the primary function. The second stage is to think of the library environment as being only partially determined by its primary function. The stage after that is to think about other possible ways to organize libraries.",[108,3250,3252],{"id":3251},"the-temple-of-learning","The temple of learning",[95,3254,3255],{},"\"The temple of learning syndrome led, internally, to the hush quiet beloved by librarians and, externally, to an architectural style which made the new users feel oppressed rather than welcome and at ease and generally to an atmosphere repellent to many young people today.\"",[95,3257,3258],{},"The image of a large reading room where many self-absorbed citizens are working quietly on their respective projects is a formative image of the liberal-democratic concept of community. Each reader has his/her own subjectivity, his/her own internal monologue and life plan, but no man is an island. Often, young people feel repelled by the atmosphere of libraries because they have other democratic ideals. Rather than the secluded, monadic private spheres which touch each other ever so lightly, they prefer a more symbiotic model of a public which they find in the best rock 'n' roll concerts. They expect the breakdown of the private sphere and the emergence of a public subjectivity.",[108,3260,3262],{"id":3261},"order","Order",[95,3264,3265],{},"\"The books are organized in abstract categories and the architecture of the library gives a concrete representation of the abstract system of organization.\"",[95,3267,3268],{},"The library offers a glimpse into an important process where abstract categories and values are translated into concrete institutional arrangements. More to the point, the environment of each library is supposed to embody an abstract system of organization. The belief that such processes of concretization are possible is the basis of the claim that bureaucratic institutions are presented as concretizations of the democratic ideals.",[103,3270,3272],{"id":3271},"the-democratic-library","The Democratic Library",[95,3274,3275,3276,3278,3279,3281,3282,3284,3285,3287],{},"The appeal of theories of direct democracy is derived, at least partially, from the dislike of bureaucracy. One may even go further and speak of direct democracy as being motivated by an antipathy towards abstractions in general. These are, not doubt, populist sentiments. Nevertheless, the target of the praxis of direct democrats is more specific, it concerns the \"blindness of institutions\", that is, the inability of institutions to perform their primary function. In that sense, the ",[98,3277,1516],{}," is a model of a directly democratic institution. It is an attempt to strip libraries of their symbolic connection with state power and private patrons, and to make them more adapted to their primary function, that is, to the distribution of reading material among the population. The guidelines of the ",[98,3280,1516],{}," are the following: 1. No hierarchy should be created by the ",[98,3283,1516],{},", 2. No mechanism of security or control should defend the ",[98,3286,1516],{},", 3. No auxiliary set of rules will be imposed on the users of the library beyond the definition of the library as a point where reading material is distributed for a limited amount of time, 4. No criteria for selecting the reading material will be employed.",[103,3289,3291],{"id":3290},"the-library-and-the-museum","The Library and the Museum",[95,3293,3294,3295,3298],{},"An interesting duality exists between libraries and museums. An elaborate system of labels makes it almost impossible to forget that the environment of the library, as spectacular as it may be, is subordinated to an abstract system of indexing. Therefore, one gains important insights when one concentrates on the physical organization of the library. The situation of museums is rather different. A lot more attention is usually paid by the visitor to the physical organization of the museum. The space is organized as a system of frames within frames which ultimately lead to the individual works of art. These works of art are the raison d'être of the museum. In a good museum the exhibition space should present itself as being subordinated to the peculiar character of the collection. The museum public offers another formative image of a democratic community. The attention of the viewers is gradually focused on the individual works of art. In the process they stop thinking about the contingencies of their concrete viewing experience and begin to be absorbed by the paintings and sculptures. The mundane observers find their capacity for absorption, for subjectivity; they discover their private spheres. The mechanism by which the attention is focused has to remain hidden. Otherwise, self-consciousness springs back to life and the capacity for absorption is lost. In particular, any system which contextualizes the individual works of art is a disruption which the keen aesthete learns to resent. Particular attention, then, should be paid to the abstract systems of organization of museums. One may expect to gain important insights when one directs one's attention to a system which was designed to remain invisible. We propose, therefore, to look at the library as museum of accumulated knowledge; that is, as an environment where books are installed. We suggest the name ",[98,3296,3297],{},"Bibliopolis",", the city of books, to describe the details of the installation, or the physical environment of the library. The perspective of city planning seems particularly relevant. The individual shelf cabinets are to be regarded as city blocks with access to roads and transportation routes between them.",[103,3300,3302],{"id":3301},"social-sculpture","Social Sculpture",[95,3304,3305,3306,3308,3309,3311],{},"We also propose to look at the museum differently. Rather than being absorbed into the individual works of art, we propose to look at works of art as reflections of their immediate environment and, hence, to look at these works of art as being in and of themselves essentially incomplete. The principle guided the way that we conceived of the installation in the Kunstverein Hamburg, which accompanied the ",[98,3307,1516],{},". The objects which we place in the museum – large photographs of the three locations of the ",[98,3310,1516],{},", tables with documentary material, etc. – constituted merely one part of a larger whole which included the libraries themselves in their outdoor locations. This presented a dilemma to the viewer: Either making to do with an incomplete work, or leaving the museum in order to complete it. More generally, the project spawned many off-shoots which began to take independent forms that could not have been anticipated in advance. The students of Lüneburg University, for example, who interviewed people who used the open libraries, developed and interesting type of activism which extended the project in new directions. This activism-without-a-cause made it possible to have a new relationship with the local community. The users of the library were neither an art public, nor a politicized public. But the extraordinary and utopian aspects of the project made the library users engaged, implicitly, in questions about creativity and about social and political issues. The students were also empowered by the research because the acted as activists and not as passive onlookers.",[103,3313,3315],{"id":3314},"new-duchampian-strategies","New Duchampian Strategies",[95,3317,3318,3319,3321,3322,3324],{},"Initially, the philosophical issues which were discussed in relation to Duchamp's ready-made concerned the pre-conditions which have to be satisfied for an object to be a work of art. These topics were already implicit in the discourse around the Cubist collages. The next group of issues raised by later reflections on the ready-made regarded the institutional arrangements necessary for exhibiting an object as a work of art. A third issue which needs to be raised concerns the identity of the art audience. In other words, what are the pre-conditions for an audience to be an art audience. When does an everyday experience shared by a group of people become an aesthetic experience? The ",[98,3320,1516],{}," allowed us to begin to investigate this issue. Initially, the library users were clearly not an art audience. However, the ",[98,3323,1516],{}," created a portrait of the community of users by allowing them to reflect on their responses to a novel proposition. Once this point was appreciated, the moment of self-reflection which the project made possible added substance to the claim that ii is interesting to view the project as art. More generally, questions concerning the defining features of the art experience and the art audience should guide our thinking about art institutions. Here, again, one may be inspired by the ideas of direct democracy. One should be prepared to confront the blindness of art institutions by inventing new forms that will enable art to be truer to its primary function, that is, an effective discourse on the possibilities of creativity and freedom.",[108,3326],{"id":428},[103,3328,3330],{"id":3329},"notes","Notes",[95,3332,3333,3334,3337],{},"The text first appeared in the accompanying project documentation ",[98,3335,3336],{},"Clegg & Guttmann: Die Offene Bibliothek/The Open Public Library",", edited by Achim Könneke on behalf of the Kulturbehörde der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, Cantz Verlag, 1994.",[95,3339,3340,3345,3346,3349],{},[3341,3342,3344],"a",{"href":3343},"#sdfootnote1anc","1"," F. A. Sharr: „The Public Library: dodo or phoenix? New directions in public library policy\", in: Barry Totterdell and Clive Bingley (Ed.), ",[98,3347,3348],{},"Public Library Purpose",", London 1978",[95,3351,3352,3356,3357,3360],{},[3341,3353,3355],{"href":3354},"#sdfootnote2anc","2"," Gulten S. Wagner: „Public Libraries as Agents of Communication\", in: ",[98,3358,3359],{},"The Scarecrow Press",", Metuchen/New Jersey, 1992",[95,3362,3363],{},[98,3364,3365,3366,3368],{},"Clegg & Guttmann is an artist duo consisting of Michael Clegg (* 1957 in Dublin) and Yair Martin Guttmann (* 1957 in Jerusalem). They have been working together since the 1980s. Michael Clegg was professor of artistic photography at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Yair Martin Guttmann teaches as a professor in the Department of Art and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. They have had numerous exhibitions in international art institutions and realized projects and monuments in public space. In addition to Hamburg, they realized the ",[98,3367,1516],{}," in Graz (1991), Vienna (1992), Firminy (1993) and Mainz (1994)",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":3370},[3371,3375,3376,3377,3378,3381],{"id":110,"depth":429,"text":111,"children":3372},[3373,3374],{"id":3251,"depth":434,"text":3252},{"id":3261,"depth":434,"text":3262},{"id":3271,"depth":429,"text":3272},{"id":3290,"depth":429,"text":3291},{"id":3301,"depth":429,"text":3302},{"id":3314,"depth":429,"text":3315,"children":3379},[3380],{"id":428,"depth":434,"text":428},{"id":3329,"depth":429,"text":3330},"1993-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","A proposal for a public project in Hamburg, Lüneburg University 1993","/blog/Hamburg OPL.jpg",{"head":3386},{"meta":3387},[3388,3390,3391,3392],{"name":467,"content":3389},"Public Project, Hamburg, Lüneburg University, Clegg & Guttmann, Achim Könneke, Cantz Verlag, 1993",{"name":473,"content":580},{"name":479,"content":2487},{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":38,"description":3383},"M6ksmT5OhhIchBqq1kwvRsRictHDb0va8LI1OVAKaKo",{"id":3396,"title":46,"author":81,"body":3397,"caption":81,"date":3498,"description":3403,"extension":461,"image":3499,"meta":3500,"minRead":81,"navigation":85,"path":47,"seo":3518,"stem":48,"toc":777,"__hash__":3519},"blog/blog/The Open Public Library Graz, Location No. 1 Terminal Point.md",{"type":92,"value":3398},[3399,3404,3408,3428,3440,3444,3447,3450,3452,3456],[95,3400,3401],{},[98,3402,3403],{},"The project was part of the exhibition „Knowledge: Aspects of Contemporary Conceptual Art” at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, 1992",[103,3405,3407],{"id":3406},"project-description","Project Description",[95,3409,3410,3411,3420,3421],{},"The Open library was constructed at three urban sites. They are free standing structures, fully functional, designed bookshelves.",[3412,3413,3414],"sup",{},[3341,3415,3344],{"href":3416,"ariaDescribedBy":3417,"dataFootnoteRef":428,"id":3419},"#user-content-fn-1",[3418],"footnote-label","user-content-fnref-1"," The libraries were operated without librarians or guards, and no restrictions were imposed on the contents of the reading material. The books in each library were collected from the residents of the area where the library was placed.",[3412,3422,3423],{},[3341,3424,3355],{"href":3425,"ariaDescribedBy":3426,"dataFootnoteRef":428,"id":3427},"#user-content-fn-2",[3418],"user-content-fnref-2",[95,3429,3430,3431,3439],{},"The collection of the library gradually changed, books were taken and replaced (or exchanged) at the discretion of the users.",[3412,3432,3433],{},[3341,3434,3438],{"href":3435,"ariaDescribedBy":3436,"dataFootnoteRef":428,"id":3437},"#user-content-fn-3",[3418],"user-content-fnref-3","3"," The library became a local institution that helped define the community by reflecting its reading habits, intellectual preoccupations, and mirrored the community's investment in its own institutions. As such the library can be seen as portrait of that community.",[103,3441,3443],{"id":3442},"documentation-and-exhibition","Documentation and Exhibition",[95,3445,3446],{},"As a counterpart to the outdoor library, a photographic model of the library was installed indoors (in the Grazer Kunstverein). The exhibition served as a documentation center where the overall impact of the project could be evaluated. Visitors of the Kunstverein were encouraged to visit the libraries. Conversely, the residents of the communities in which the libraries were installed were invited to the museum.",[95,3448,3449],{},"\"The Open Library, Graz - Location #1, Terminal Point\" documents the condition of the library at location #1 at the end of the project. On the table you will find three lists of the books which were available at the library during the 'life' of the project. The books are sorted by Author, Title and publication date.",[170,3451],{},[103,3453,3455],{"id":3454},"technical-notes","Technical Notes",[3457,3458,3461,3466],"section",{"className":3459,"dataFootnotes":428},[3460],"footnotes",[103,3462,3465],{"className":3463,"id":3418},[3464],"sr-only","Footnotes",[3467,3468,3469,3480,3489],"ol",{},[415,3470,3472,3473],{"id":3471},"user-content-fn-1","The library measured approximately 6' x 4.5' x 3.5' and had a cement foundation. The construction itself was made of wood, the open side of the bookshelf is protected by two glass doors. ",[3341,3474,3479],{"href":3475,"ariaLabel":3476,"className":3477,"dataFootnoteBackref":428},"#user-content-fnref-1","Back to reference 1",[3478],"data-footnote-backref","↩",[415,3481,3483,3484],{"id":3482},"user-content-fn-2","A few months prior to the opening of the library a drive to collect books was initiated, this we done by means of posters, notices in local newspapers etc. ",[3341,3485,3479],{"href":3486,"ariaLabel":3487,"className":3488,"dataFootnoteBackref":428},"#user-content-fnref-2","Back to reference 2",[3478],[415,3490,3492,3493],{"id":3491},"user-content-fn-3","A small metal plaque was placed on the side of the library, it read: \"You can take a limited number of books for a limited amount of time, for further information contact the Grazer Kunstverein\" ",[3341,3494,3479],{"href":3495,"ariaLabel":3496,"className":3497,"dataFootnoteBackref":428},"#user-content-fnref-3","Back to reference 3",[3478],"1992-09-01T00:00:00.000Z","/blog/OPL Graz terminal point 1.jpg",{"project":3501,"location":3502,"artists":580,"type":3503,"topics":3504,"keywords":3505,"institutions":3506,"head":3507},"Open Public Library, Graz","Location #1, Terminal Point, Graz, Austria","Project Documentation","social sculpture, community portrait, institutional critique, urban intervention, lending library","outdoor library, community engagement, documentation, reading habits, local institution","Grazer Kunstverein",{"meta":3508},[3509,3511,3512,3513,3515,3517],{"name":467,"content":3510},"Public Project, 1991, Clegg & Guttmann, open public library, Graz, Austria",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":1351},{"name":476,"content":3514},"© 1991 Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":479,"content":3516},"This is a project documentation text for a specific installation of \"The Open Library\" project in Graz, Austria, „Knowledge: Aspects of Contemporary Conceptual Art”  Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California 1992",{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":46,"description":3403},"cmCieSYxmskq8aYaRnFRGOjNIBajOMVTVpIt9kccTNM",{"id":3521,"title":58,"author":81,"body":3522,"caption":81,"date":3732,"description":3733,"extension":461,"image":3734,"meta":3735,"minRead":584,"navigation":85,"path":59,"seo":3747,"stem":60,"toc":777,"__hash__":3748},"blog/blog/The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco Q&A.md",{"type":92,"value":3523},[3524,3526,3533,3536,3543,3546,3553,3556,3563,3566,3573,3576,3583,3586,3589,3596,3599,3604,3607,3614,3617,3624,3627,3634,3637,3644,3647,3654,3657,3664,3667,3674,3677,3684,3687,3694,3697,3704,3707,3714,3716,3727],[170,3525],{},[95,3527,3528],{},[156,3529,3530],{},[98,3531,3532],{},"So what possessed you to transport a group show of Armaly, Bonin, Krebber and Mueller and reinstall it under a highway bridge outside San-Francisco?",[95,3534,3535],{},"Let's get the facts straight. The group shows you are referring to was one of the first shows at Kunstraum Daxer. It was an important event for all parties concerned and it was accompanied by a catalogue. It became an integral part of the identity of the space, part of the 'historical memory' so to speak. Therefore every subsequent show in Kunstraum Daxer is installed 'on top' of this group show. Our idea was that if we could look at the same group show installed in a very different location, it would become possible to evaluate how the context of Kunstraum Daxer influence the way we see art there, what is the 'systematic distortion' the Kunstraum Daxer exerts on the art shown there.",[95,3537,3538],{},[156,3539,3540],{},[98,3541,3542],{},"And then you will show photographs of the re-installed group show, in the Kunstraum Daxer?",[95,3544,3545],{},"Yes, that will close the circle. Assuming that the photographs convey the relevant information, the show will demonstrate a technique of self-reflection. It is a show which reintroduces its own context by examining the systematic 'distortion effect' of the context.",[95,3547,3548],{},[156,3549,3550],{},[98,3551,3552],{},"What about taking your Photographs and installing them somewhere else?",[95,3554,3555],{},"The show intends to introduce a process of self-reflection which should continue after the show is over.",[95,3557,3558],{},[156,3559,3560],{},[98,3561,3562],{},"But isn't this process a way of looking at art as means and not as an end?",[95,3564,3565],{},"Every process of analysis involves a certain amount of objectification. so when you analyze yourself you become the object, at least temporarily. We conceive of the project as a collaboration with all the artists involved, because of that we see it as a collective self-analysis of a group of artists who are involved with each other professionally and personally. In that sense we are all the beneficiaries of the project.",[95,3567,3568],{},[156,3569,3570],{},[98,3571,3572],{},"What kind of insight do you expect to gain with such a project?",[95,3574,3575],{},"There are various aspects to the work which cannot be all summed-up schematically, but one thing seems clear - seeing the work installed outside, makes a tremendous difference.",[95,3577,3578],{},[156,3579,3580],{},[98,3581,3582],{},"In that sense this project is connected to the three bookshelves or libraries as you call them which you installed in outdoor locations in the outskirts of Graz.",[95,3584,3585],{},"Absolutely, in both cases the outdoor location intends to have a liberating effect.",[95,3587,3588],{},"In conjunction with the placement of the bookshelves, there was an installation in the Grazer Kunstverein. On the bookshelves there was a plague with the address and phone-number of the Kunstverein. People were directed to the installation in order to gain information about the project",[95,3590,3591],{},[156,3592,3593,361],{},[98,3594,3595],{},"In other words, the museum installation had a 'use-value'",[95,3597,3598],{},"That aspect of the project was very important for us. We imagined two possible scenarios. In the first a person who sees the outdoor library comes to the museum and every things she sees there is subordinated to interest in the outdoor libraries, or more generally, the interest in utopian thinking about institutions. The second scenario concerns a person who first sees the museum installation and then sees the outdoor libraries. For him, the outdoor libraries become ready-mades, functional objects which are incorporated into the art context.",[95,3600,3601],{},[156,3602,3603],{},"Can you elaborate more on the Duchampian aspect of the project?",[95,3605,3606],{},"There are many different interpretations of the ready-mades which generalize different aspect of Duchump's thinking. For us, though the central point of the ready-mades was of alienating objects at its function. Looking at something that was made for a particular person, as if its purpose was not an integral aspect of it.**",[95,3608,3609],{},[156,3610,3611],{},[98,3612,3613],{},"Could you say - liberating an object from its purpose?",[95,3615,3616],{},"Well, partially. On one hand, there is the point about the liberative effect of de-familiarization. as the surrealists would say. In that sense the whole project of the ready-made can be seen in surrealist terms. On the other hand, the ready-made is an alienated object which receives 'too much attention', and is 'uncomfortable with this attention'.**",[95,3618,3619],{},[156,3620,3621],{},[98,3622,3623],{},"How do these categories apply to the libraries and to the outdoor exhibition space?",[95,3625,3626],{},"On the one hand both projects are located in the surrealist / situationist tradition. The idea is to make art that may liberate our imagination that gives a concrete and realistic form to the idea that the world could be different and better. On the other hand art works are born into a world which will necessarily alienate them, shown in contexts that will necessarily distort the original intentions of their producers. In such a world the idea of anticipating the effect of the context is a form of self-defense guided by a desire for autonomy.**",[95,3628,3629],{},[156,3630,3631],{},[98,3632,3633],{},"Let's go back to your point about 'use-value'.",[95,3635,3636],{},"The libraries in Graz were intended to be used as lending libraries. But more importantly we wanted to use the Graz project as means for collecting very vital data on the local community. We asked a question: What happens when you leave books unprotected by guards or librarians? How will people react to such a utopian proposition? People are very opinionated about questions like that, But they have no data to rely on. we wanted to check there preconceived ideas. We saw it as a way of providing a portrait of the community.**",[95,3638,3639],{},[156,3640,3641],{},[98,3642,3643],{},"Do you take the term portrait seriously? Do you see a connection between these projects and the corporate portraits you made in the 80's?",[95,3645,3646],{},"Very much so. One of the most important aspects of portraiture is that portraits answer a demand for representation which exist independently of any particular art institution. The demand of portraits executed later (?) then such museums or commercial galleries. In that sense, portraits have a use-value. People use portraits to construct their identity**",[95,3648,3649],{},[156,3650,3651],{},[98,3652,3653],{},"Is that use-value limited to portraits?",[95,3655,3656],{},"Of course every work of art or consumer object is made to construct the identity of its owner, but portraits make this point sharper and clearer.**",[95,3658,3659],{},[156,3660,3661],{},[98,3662,3663],{},"So how do you see the connection between the portraits and the outdoor projects?",[95,3665,3666],{},"When you make objects which have a use-value, you operate outside the art world or at least in the margins of the art world. We operate like 'commercial' artists when we are doing portraits, and 'social engineers' in the case of the outdoor libraries. But in both cases the point is to stretch the concept of art by pointing to its arbitrary borders.**",[95,3668,3669],{},[156,3670,3671],{},[98,3672,3673],{},"Do I detect an allusion to 'Art after Philosophy'?",[95,3675,3676],{},"Yes, the idea of art whose content is the attempt to re-define art is a very powerful and inspiring idea. Especially of the re-definition addresses questions about the art institutions.**",[95,3678,3679],{},[156,3680,3681],{},[98,3682,3683],{},"That brings us back to the issue of this show.",[95,3685,3686],{},"That's right - one of the questions we are asking is why do we need to see art indoors? or rather what is the systematic effect of that seeing art indoors has on the meaning of art?**",[95,3688,3689],{},[156,3690,3691],{},[98,3692,3693],{},"Are you seriously thinking about showing art outdoors?",[95,3695,3696],{},"Why not? outdoor locations like the spaces created under bridges virtually solve the problems of whether conditions. It is a rather profound fact that the main reason why we see art indoors is because people believe that art has to be protected against the violence of the discontent.**",[95,3698,3699],{},[156,3700,3701],{},[98,3702,3703],{},"What about 'public art'?",[95,3705,3706],{},"Public projects usually look at questions of a vandalism as if they are technical issues. They think that violence and alienation are part of nature like rain and snow and try to address them as part of the technical specifications. In that respect the success of a public art depends on its ability to anticipate and to suppress the anger and frustration of the local community. This is certainly not our intention. We would like to be able to reflect local frustration and alienation as part of our preoccupation with the context. We are getting nearer and nearer to a world where the rich live inside fortresses and the poor try to get in. These processes exist on many levels, as the west protects itself from the third world - \"Fortress Europa\" blocking itself from the east and south. Most European countries adept tighter immigration control policies in response to right-wing xenophobia, and within the cities, especially in the big American cities there are more and more guards, more private security forces protecting against the outsiders who try to push in. Artists have to redefine art and make it possible to conceive of it as something else but escapist entertainment for the analysis of these fortresses.**",[95,3708,3709],{},[156,3710,3711],{},[98,3712,3713],{},"That's a hefty job indeed.",[170,3715],{},[221,3717],{"src":3718,"alt":3719,"className":3720},"/blog/The OES Munich - SF interior.webp","The OES Munich - SF interior",[3721,3722,3723,3724,3725,3726],"rounded-sm","w-full","max-h-[60vh]","object-contain","mx-auto","my-8",[95,3728,3729],{},[98,3730,3731],{},"Installatiion at the K-Raum Daxer, Munich - 1992","1992-05-05T00:00:00.000Z","An Interview with Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann for the exhibition at the K-Raum Daxer, Munich - The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco, May 1992","/blog/The Outdoor Exhibition Space Munich - SF II.jpg",{"head":3736},{"meta":3737},[3738,3740,3741,3742,3744,3746],{"name":467,"content":3739},"field of forces, K-Raum Daxer, contextual displacement, institutional setting, theatricality, Duchamp, readymades, surplus aggression, homeless art, Fareed Armaly, Cosima Bonin, Michael Krebber, Christian Philipp Müller, Marcel Duchamp, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, C.D. Friedrich, Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":3743},"institutional critique, field theory, public art, romanticism, outdoor exhibition, readymades, minimalism, context",{"name":479,"content":3745},"The text first appeared in a catalogue for the exhibition at the Kunstraum Daxer, Munich - The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco, May 1992",{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":58,"description":3733},"z9FPpfL5XeYwWVOC0l40ksEa9yGKUnEzI2wDdvc1zw8",{"id":3750,"title":54,"author":81,"body":3751,"caption":81,"date":3732,"description":3856,"extension":461,"image":3857,"meta":3858,"minRead":584,"navigation":85,"path":55,"seo":3867,"stem":56,"toc":486,"__hash__":3868},"blog/blog/The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco.md",{"type":92,"value":3752,"toc":3843},[3753,3755,3757,3762,3764,3768,3771,3775,3778,3782,3785,3789,3792,3796,3799,3803,3806,3810,3813,3817,3820,3824,3827,3831,3834,3836,3839],[170,3754],{},[103,3756,3407],{"id":3406},[95,3758,3759],{},[98,3760,3761],{},"The artworks from the 'Armaly, Bonin, Krebber, Müller' show, (exhibited during May 1991 in K-Raum Daxer, Munich) were shipped to San Francisco. There the pieces were installed under a highway Bridge. The installation was photographed by us and the installation shots were displayed back in Munich in the K-Raum Daxer",[170,3763],{},[103,3765,3767],{"id":3766},"_1-field-of-forces","1. Field of Forces",[95,3769,3770],{},"When a particle enters a field of forces the field makes its presence known, so to speak, by the effect it has on the particle. When the field is constant, each point in the field has a fixed disposition to produce a well defined effect on an incoming particle. The assumption, though, is that even if no particle ever entered the field, the dispositions of the field are completely real. An evidence to the independent reality of fields can be found in the fact that fields can interact with one another. Such interactions may change the dispositions of the interacting fields. The concept of a field emerged from the study of electricity and the magnetic properties of particles by Faraday and Maxwell. It produced, however, profound effects in other areas. Towards the end of the 19th century, concepts like 'semantic fields' and 'social fields' were introduced in order to facilitate the description of the way a large number of parameters are related to one another and the way the net sum of these relations produces systematic effects. The urban environment can also be seen as a field of forces. The systematic effects by the environment can be detected by aimlessly moving through the city - the flaneur is a 'test particle' which registers the effects of the urban environment. It is also tempting to think about the art object as a test particle, through which the systematic effect of the context can be detected.",[103,3772,3774],{"id":3773},"_2-the-first-salon","2. The First Salon",[95,3776,3777],{},"The sight of a painting which is exhibited outdoors, is relatively unfamiliar. There are many examples of images painted directly on the walls of buildings, from mosaic images on churches to paintings on open-air chapels in Austria, decorative paintings on small cottages in Germany and murals in American Ghettos. These examples are of paintings which are inseparable from their support and are site specific. But some notable examples where interior, studio paintings made in various artists studios, were shown outside, in a location which had no particular connection to the paintings themselves, are relatively unfamiliar. In the first Salon which took place in Place de Vogue, the paintings hung on the walls of the buildings in the square. At the time there were no public museums, in fact there were very few instances of public institutions so called proper. That is why it is often claimed that hanging the paintings outside of the private sphere in the first salon, constituted one of the first examples of public life, predating the French revolution and to some extent, giving some of its democratic ideals a concrete from.",[103,3779,3781],{"id":3780},"_3-the-industrial-landscape-and-the-planned-garden","3. The Industrial Landscape and the Planned Garden",[95,3783,3784],{},"The Romantic idea that artists and poets can make an experience of the sublime possible, reached its mature phase during the industrial revolution, when new technologies were introduced, the landscape was transformed and the populations mobilized. Perhaps it was the harsh and unsettling reality of that time which introduced the need to escape inwards, to look for a new type of religious experience introduced by art and poetry. Romantic painters like C.D.Friedrich did not regard their work as an expression of their emotions of personality. Friedrich, for example attempted to 'empty' himself so that he could be a faithful conduit to the sublime. He tried to paint with his \"mind's eye\", to give voice to the immense external forces which shook and disturbed his Person. This romantic conception put art on a high pedestal. But at the same time it was easy for romantic art to transform into escapism pure and simple. When giving concrete form to new alternatives art served as a motivating force. But when it lowered the desire for change by fostering peaceful and reconciling images, it becomes a regressive force.",[103,3786,3788],{"id":3787},"_4-engaged-romanticism","4. Engaged Romanticism",[95,3790,3791],{},"At least in England, the poetic style and attitude associated with Romanticism were originally developed by artists who parted way with revolutionary ideals of the Jacobins. In particular the romantics were unhappy with the radical atheism of the French republicans. However, even in his disillusioned phase, Coleridge, for one, continued to be preoccupied with questions of social Utopia. He established with few of his friends a commune in the south of England. The communards shared their earnings from their publications and their speeches. In fact, the original plan of Colridge was to immigrate to America, buy a parcel of land in Pennsylvania and establish a permanent commune. At the time, and perhaps ever since, America presented a possibility of religious or spiritual communitrianism in contrast to the European atheist Socialism.",[103,3793,3795],{"id":3794},"_5-the-legacy-of-emile","5. The Legacy of Emile",[95,3797,3798],{},"Perhaps the most important and far reaching body of ideas concerning social justice, education and the need for a liberation is contained in J.J. Rousseau's Emile. Where he presented his view that education should strive to restore what is natural and resist the unnecessary constraints imposed by social morals and conventions. Some of these ideas have became the pillar-stones of progressive education. The sense of empirical discovery and should be encouraged in children and pre-conceived ideas should not be reinforced. The contemplative and self-sufficient temperament is rewarded and seen as means for resisting the tyranny of the majority. The importance of first-hand knowledge, of experimentation and discovery is recognized and children are encouraged to follow their own leads and to be less dependent on citations from others. The young should be healthy, love the outdoors, discover for themselves the wonders of nature and leave behind the dark prison-like educational institutions of the past. These ideas were developed by many thinkers from Emerson to Rudolf Steiner. Many attempts were made to go one step further and develop communities based on these educational ideals. From the Kibbutz of the 20's where men and women performed gymnastics exercises to the projects of Le Corbusier which intended to give concrete forms to ideals of communication and self-discovery, to the Summerhill school where all curriculum requirement were dispensed with and the students were encouraged to stay outdoors as much as they wanted, to the isolated rural communes of northern California like Belinas which attempted radical self-sufficiency and redistribution of property.",[103,3800,3802],{"id":3801},"_6-theatricality-in-the-open-air","6. Theatricality in the Open Air",[95,3804,3805],{},"In the mid 1960's there has been a shift in the perception of Marcel Duchamp's readymades which made it possible to see them in a more philosophical light. While the surrealists looked at the urinal-in-the-museum as a strange poetic combination on a par with, say a piano on the beach and the pop artists saw in the typewriter cover and snow shovel examples of art which embrace the iconography of the \"real\" world, the minimalists looked at the readymades as works of art which have so little internal content that they force the viewer into looking at the context, at the institutional setting of the work of art. The idea was that the readymade, being an object with prior identity, does not enable the viewer to enter into the work of art through the preoccupation with the technique, the iconography of the workmanship. Hence the attention of the viewer is \"deflected outside\" into the room, the building, the institutional context. Among the first minimalist works done in this spirit are the floors of Andre, the florescent lights of Flavin and the simple metal cubes of Judd which literally reflected the exhibition rooms. These works were called \"theatrical\" by Fried, since they gave rise to a heightened and self-consciousness experience of spectatorship. This type of experience is contrasted by Fried with the loss of self-consciousness which is experienced by those \"absorbed\" into the work of art. The next generation of minimalists tried to expand the notion of an art-work attempting to reflect its institutional setting. In particular Smithson developed in his writing a much broader set of answers to the question - what is a museum? In his trips to Passaic, New Jersey he tried to bring himself to see the large semi-functional industrial structures as readymades placed in an imaginary outdoor museum having the dome of the sky as it's ceiling. The fact that the 'monuments of Passaic' are relics of an earlier industrial era and that they are semi-functional introduces an underlying observation - when we can see objects as useless artifacts framed in their historical period we can begin to see them as works of art which reflect their historical context, or rather objects, the contemplation of which makes it possible to see the shifts from the past to the present.",[103,3807,3809],{"id":3808},"_7-the-outdoor-exhibition-space","7. The Outdoor Exhibition Space",[95,3811,3812],{},"The objective of the 'Outdoor Exhibition Space' was to define the particular context of the K-raum as a 'field of forces' rather than as an object. The shift from objects to fields is intended, as in physics, to be a guard against reification - the context is not to be identified with a particular collection of objects or with the architectural details, but rather with a constellation of forces which inflict a 'systematic distortion' on any work of art which is placed within the 'sphere of effectiveness'. The only way to identify the field of forces is in its effects. The particular effects can be observed when the art objects which were placed once within the field, are transposed outside of the field, to a different location, to another field. The result of these observations, is a measure of the relative difference between the two contexts. By repeating the same procedure, a more refined characterization of the original field can be obtained. This method was applied by us in the case of the K-raum Daxer.",[103,3814,3816],{"id":3815},"_8-an-addendum-to-the-characterization-of-institutional-critique","8. An Addendum to the Characterization of Institutional Critique",[95,3818,3819],{},"Many artists who are preoccupied with the critique of the institutional exhibition-space, regard the main objective of their activities to be the detection of a 'field of forces' in a particular location. The measure of the distorting effect is regarded, and rightly so, as a measure of 'surplus aggression' affected by the institution. This measure can also be used as an indication of a presence of an 'hidden agenda', that is, a process by which the content of the exhibited art is used as a way of reforming the image of the institution itself: a high distorting effect is interpreted as a sign for a 'filter' which prepares the art for its role as an image-reforming device. However, institutions can be replaced and new ones can be invented. Therefore, the detection of 'surplus violence' should lead us to inquire into the possibility of alternative institutions and not to convince us that the particular institutions we are familiar with are immanent. Premature fatalism has a paralyzing effect which one should recognize as such. Should we really believe that if the big industrialists who support the existing art exhibition spaces will go bankrupt, art will no longer be possible? The contemplation of such a situation may allow us, to find out whether the preconditions for the possibility of art preclude the idea of a 'homeless art' exhibited in a much looser institutional Setting.",[103,3821,3823],{"id":3822},"_9-a-project-for-the-sociology-of-art","9. A Project for the Sociology of Art",[95,3825,3826],{},"One should ask: What is the minimal institutional setting necessary for the definition of art? This question, of course, is relevant for all those artists who use methods and techniques borrowed from non-artistic practices. But it is absolutely essential for those conceptual artists who define art, as opposed to painting, sculpture etc. as necessarily involving a continual expansion of earlier artistic methods and practices. What are, for example the minimal institutional setting for a 'Duchampian transformation'? that is, the minimal conditions which will make it possible to exhibit a bottle rack as a work of art? Surely, we can put the bottle rack on a pedestal with a proper label, and leave it outdoors. However, what is the proper generalization for a pedestal or a label? As we remarked earlier this question is not only a theoretical one. If the rejection of imperialism and militarism forces upon us the need to reconcile ourselves with images of an impoverished world, we should begin to prepare ourselves for such a world by contemplating radically different conditions for producing or exhibiting art.",[103,3828,3830],{"id":3829},"_10-on-public-art","10. On Public Art",[95,3832,3833],{},"There are, of course, many familiar examples of works of art which are left outdoors without guards. These public sculptures are usually made of very strong and durable materials so as to resist any eventuality, and survive the contact with the violence and frustration of the passers by. Because of their durability, works of public art are often perceived as a triumph of the system of law and order, and when they are vandalized, the violence done to the art should be interpreted as a defiance of law and order. It is very likely that works of art which do not inspire this symbolism with have a totally different reception.",[170,3835],{},[221,3837],{"src":3718,"alt":3719,"className":3838},[3721,3722,3723,3724,3725,3726],[95,3840,3841],{},[98,3842,3731],{},{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":3844},[3845,3846,3847,3848,3849,3850,3851,3852,3853,3854,3855],{"id":3406,"depth":429,"text":3407},{"id":3766,"depth":429,"text":3767},{"id":3773,"depth":429,"text":3774},{"id":3780,"depth":429,"text":3781},{"id":3787,"depth":429,"text":3788},{"id":3794,"depth":429,"text":3795},{"id":3801,"depth":429,"text":3802},{"id":3808,"depth":429,"text":3809},{"id":3815,"depth":429,"text":3816},{"id":3822,"depth":429,"text":3823},{"id":3829,"depth":429,"text":3830},"Essay for the exhibition at the K-Raum Daxer, Munich - The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco, May 1992","/blog/The Outdoor Exhibition Space, Munich - San Francisco 300dpi.jpg",{"head":3859},{"meta":3860},[3861,3862,3863,3864,3865,3866],{"name":467,"content":3739},{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":3743},{"name":479,"content":3745},{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":54,"description":3856},"fTmTto09QYmDGAyQ12K9eo0APIlGlQoDbJR9pXURTI4",{"id":3870,"title":50,"author":81,"body":3871,"caption":81,"date":4205,"description":4206,"extension":461,"image":4207,"meta":4208,"minRead":434,"navigation":85,"path":51,"seo":4219,"stem":52,"toc":486,"__hash__":4220},"blog/blog/The Open Public Libray, Graz 1991.md",{"type":92,"value":3872,"toc":4197},[3873,3877,3884,3915,3919,3926,3941,3960,3964,3971,3978,3982,3992,4019,4023,4026,4040,4044,4054,4061,4065,4098,4102,4108,4130,4132,4136,4147,4154,4189,4191],[108,3874,3876],{"id":3875},"structure-and-operation","Structure and Operation",[95,3878,3879,3880,3883],{},"The proposed outdoor library would be constructed in an urban area as a ",[156,3881,3882],{},"free-standing structure","—a functionally designed bookshelf with glass doors.",[412,3885,3886,3896,3906],{},[415,3887,3888,3891,3892,3895],{},[156,3889,3890],{},"Operation:"," It would operate ",[156,3893,3894],{},"without librarians and guards",", imposing no restrictions on its reading material.",[415,3897,3898,3901,3902,3905],{},[156,3899,3900],{},"Content:"," The initial books would be ",[156,3903,3904],{},"collected from the inhabitants"," of the area where the library is placed.",[415,3907,3908,3911,3912,361],{},[156,3909,3910],{},"Change:"," As the library operates, its contents would gradually change, with books replaced or exchanged at the ",[156,3913,3914],{},"discretion of the users",[108,3916,3918],{"id":3917},"social-and-community-reflection","Social and Community Reflection",[95,3920,3921,3922,3925],{},"Such a library is designed to become an institution that helps ",[156,3923,3924],{},"define the community",". It would reflect the community's:",[412,3927,3928,3931,3934],{},[415,3929,3930],{},"Reading habits",[415,3932,3933],{},"Intellectual preoccupation",[415,3935,3936,3937,3940],{},"Investment in its own institutions (serving as its ",[156,3938,3939],{},"portrait",")",[95,3942,3943,3944,3947,3948,3951,3952,3955,3956,3959],{},"The necessity to institute norms for proper use will require a discussion of the community's ",[156,3945,3946],{},"values and goals",". The invention and execution of ",[156,3949,3950],{},"non-violent sanctions"," against violations can become an exercise in ",[156,3953,3954],{},"metaphorical autonomous self-rule",". Furthermore, determining the reading materials may result in new forms of ",[156,3957,3958],{},"communal decision-making"," applicable in other contexts.",[108,3961,3963],{"id":3962},"the-sculpture-and-the-model","The Sculpture and the Model",[95,3965,3966,3967,3970],{},"The displacement of an indoor object (a bookshelf) to the outdoors creates an ",[156,3968,3969],{},"\"eerie\" sculptural effect",". However, the structure will seem familiar, aiming to be a part of the urban landscape rather than an intrusion.",[95,3972,3973,3974,3977],{},"This setup reflects the project’s utopian aspect: the library is not an authoritarian implant but an ",[156,3975,3976],{},"integral part of the community"," readily modified by it.",[966,3979,3981],{"id":3980},"the-counterpart-model","The Counterpart Model",[95,3983,1599,3984,3987,3988,3991],{},[156,3985,3986],{},"photographic full-scale model"," of the outdoor library will be installed ",[156,3989,3990],{},"indoors"," (in a public exhibition space at Graz).",[412,3993,3994,4000,4009],{},[415,3995,3996,3999],{},[156,3997,3998],{},"Function:"," This model serves as a point of reference and the indoor exhibition functions as a documentation center for evaluating the overall project effect.",[415,4001,4002,4005,4006,361],{},[156,4003,4004],{},"Relation:"," The relation of the 'model' to the 'outdoor library' is similar to the relation of the 'outdoor library' to an invisible ",[156,4007,4008],{},"'model of a social interaction'",[415,4010,4011,4014,4015,4018],{},[156,4012,4013],{},"Ultimate Subject:"," The project ultimately addresses ",[156,4016,4017],{},"community relations and formation"," as its subject, rather than the \"service\" of providing a library.",[108,4020,4022],{"id":4021},"defined-trajectories","Defined Trajectories",[95,4024,4025],{},"The Open Library is thus defined by two trajectories:",[3467,4027,4028,4034],{},[415,4029,4030,4033],{},[156,4031,4032],{},"The \"social sculpture\":"," Initializing a process that engages and demonstrates the community’s relation to itself and its definition vis-a-vis the outside.",[415,4035,4036,4039],{},[156,4037,4038],{},"The idea of modeling:"," The work as a cube within a cube, each one modeling the other. This point also marks the return of the Open Library to the 'closed' space, addressing the transformation of the 'real' to an 'art-like representation'.",[108,4041,4043],{"id":4042},"construction-and-pre-installation","Construction and Pre-Installation",[95,4045,4046,4047,4050,4051,361],{},"The library will measure approximately ",[156,4048,4049],{},"4.5' x 3.5' x 6''"," and will have a cement foundation. The construction will be made of wood, with the open side protected by ",[156,4052,4053],{},"two glass doors",[95,4055,4056,4057,4060],{},"Prior to installation, a ",[156,4058,4059],{},"public presentation"," is proposed for a public space at Graz, featuring photographic/textual material and notebooks for public comments, followed by a public discussion.",[966,4062,4064],{"id":4063},"implementation-steps","Implementation Steps:",[3467,4066,4067,4073],{},[415,4068,4069,4072],{},[156,4070,4071],{},"Book Collection Drive:"," A few months prior to opening, a drive to collect books will begin, advertised through posters, local newspapers, etc.",[415,4074,4075,4078,4079,4082,4083],{},[156,4076,4077],{},"Minimal Intervention Sign:"," A small metal plaque will be placed on the side reading: ",[156,4080,4081],{},"“You can take a limited number of books for a limited amount of time, for further information contact.”"," This \"authoritarian\" sign serves two necessary functions:\n",[412,4084,4085,4091],{},[415,4086,4087,4088,361],{},"To define the object as a ",[156,4089,4090],{},"lending library",[415,4092,4093,4094,4097],{},"To provide an ",[156,4095,4096],{},"index or point of orientation"," for users.",[966,4099,4101],{"id":4100},"documentation-and-installation","Documentation and Installation",[95,4103,4104,4105,4107],{},"An installation in the ",[156,4106,3506],{}," documented the entire process and served as an information center.",[412,4109,4110,4113,4127],{},[415,4111,4112],{},"The installation consisted of three groups of objects.",[415,4114,4115,4116,4119,4120,4123,4124,361],{},"Each group contained a ",[156,4117,4118],{},"landscape",", a ",[156,4121,4122],{},"table",", and a ",[156,4125,4126],{},"free-standing 'library' model",[415,4128,4129],{},"The free-standing model was a tall box featuring two photographs of libraries mounted on two sides, which displayed the initial collection of books and featured a built-in card file.",[170,4131],{},[108,4133,4135],{"id":4134},"the-open-outdoor-library-graz-recontextualized-19932005","The Open Outdoor Library, Graz, recontextualized 1993/2005",[95,4137,4138,4139,4142,4143,4146],{},"This project was exhibited in 2005 in ",[156,4140,4141],{},"'Social Sculptures, Community Portraits and spontaneous Operas 1990-2005","' at Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna as well as in 1993 as ",[156,4144,4145],{},"'Die offene Bibliothek Graz, recontextualized","', at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum, Graz.",[95,4148,4149,4150,4153],{},"The \"Open Outdoor Library, Graz, recontextualized\" installation represented the original ",[156,4151,4152],{},"\"Open Public Library, Graz,\""," project from 1991.",[412,4155,4156,4162,4167,4177,4183],{},[415,4157,4158,4161],{},[156,4159,4160],{},"Execution:"," Three wooden bookcases were built and placed outdoors in different suburbs of Graz.",[415,4163,4164,4166],{},[156,4165,3998],{}," The bookcases operated as lending libraries for a period of three months.",[415,4168,4169,4172,4173,4176],{},[156,4170,4171],{},"Rules:"," A notice on each instructed users that they could ",[156,4174,4175],{},"borrow or exchange any book"," for a limited amount of time.",[415,4178,4179,4182],{},[156,4180,4181],{},"Collection:"," The books were collected from local residents.",[415,4184,4185,4188],{},[156,4186,4187],{},"Film:"," A film documenting the reaction of the local residents in each of the three location of the library was produced in collaboration with Stephan Dillemuth. The film was shown on two display monitors.",[170,4190],{},[221,4192],{"src":4193,"alt":4194,"className":4195},"/blog/OPL_Graz_1991_2005_at_GKFA_1200px.jpg","OPL Graz 1991-2005 at GKFA",[4196,3722,3723,3724,3725,3726],"rounded-lg",{"title":428,"searchDepth":429,"depth":429,"links":4198},[4199,4200,4201,4202,4203,4204],{"id":3875,"depth":434,"text":3876},{"id":3917,"depth":434,"text":3918},{"id":3962,"depth":434,"text":3963},{"id":4021,"depth":434,"text":4022},{"id":4042,"depth":434,"text":4043},{"id":4134,"depth":434,"text":4135},"1991-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","A proposal for a public project in Graz, Austria 1991","/blog/1_Graz_OPL_1200px.jpg",{"venue":4209,"head":4210},"Graz, Austria",{"meta":4211},[4212,4214,4215,4216,4217,4218],{"name":467,"content":4213},"Public Project, Graz Kunstverein, 1997, Open Public Library, Graz, Clegg & Guttmann",{"name":470,"content":471},{"name":473,"content":474},{"name":476,"content":3514},{"name":479,"content":4206},{"name":482,"content":483},{"title":50,"description":4206},"vRhIxCjj6daACMLmX5Wos832BWOyEV-U6zgs-5NKLQA",1772638418652]