I am sitting in front of the shelves in the library, looking at the spines of the books. Some present themselves to me flamboyantly, others I do not acknowledge. I stare back at them indifferently. I don’t get up; I spitefully leave them there to collect dust. What do I want? I want to consume finished portions of knowledge served to me on a silver platter. Because I don’t know where to start. If I started, I’d have too little time to really get anywhere anyway. And I can’t even say which direction I’d like to head. I know that if I started looking, I’d find some treasures. And I nevertheless don’t start. I look at the books already laid out on the table, pick one up, flick through it.
Between 2013 and 2018, I curated a series of exhibitions on the importance of books in artistic practice in cooperation with Christoph Schifferli. He owns an extensive and wonderful collection of artists’ books, a major share of which dates from the 1960s and 1970s—the period often considered to be the golden age of the medium—and includes books by artists such as Alighiero Boetti, John Baldessari, or Fred Sandback. The collection also includes books on specific topics, Radical Architecture for example, as well as many recent, contemporary books by the likes of Christopher Williams, Julie Ault, Josef Strau, and Barbara Bloom, to name just a few. Schifferli’s collection comprises books ranging from works by artists that one can probably only see in a handful of other places to quirky objects originally not thought of as artists’ books at all—a collection of Playboys in Braille, say.
For the exhibition series, which took place at a space called ARCHIV in Zurich, we invited artists to work with this collection, to discover books that might inspire, or to introduce links between their practice and others. The artistic approaches to this format were different and always specific in that they mirrored the particular practices of the artists exhibiting. Whereas some artists showed their work quite independently from Schifferli’s collection, and others were inspired by randomly looking through books, many of the projects were also dependent on Schifferli’s extensive knowledge and passion for these objects. Ideas will bounce off of him to the artist and back again: “this book might fit,” “do you have that one,” “yes, of course,” “let me check.” The books selected might then function as a poetic comment on the artist’s work, give rise to one overarching narrative, or represent important references from which a work drew. The meaning that arose in constellations might remain loose and associative, and the books could be placed into different contexts in a more playful manner than would perhaps be the case in a more scholarly approach. Rather than introducing factual material as evidence for, often historical, research, as is usually found in displays in archival exhibitions, the books could, for instance, be assembled solely based on their cover images, the tone in their titles, or a single page, and thus evoke a particular style, illustrate influences, or form a critique.
In one of the first exhibitions in 2013, the artist Jochen Lempert (who we incidentally invited after seeing his work at an open artist’s studio in the Sitterwerk) placed his photographs and photograms inside, next to, and on top of the books he had picked from the collection intuitively. Lempert’s selection reflected his interest in animals and their environment as well as his poetic approach to these subjects. Some of the combinations were based on similarities—the book Cyanotypes by Christian Marclay, for instance, lay underneath a photo by Lempert of someone sporting a sun-burnt watch-mark. Others sparked dialogue—a strange photo of a plant or animal-like form next to the sentence: “I wonder where I have seen a photograph like that before”. The analogies between Lempert’s works and the books from the collection made for humorous narrative moments and associative continuations as well as typological equations, and highlighted the material as both scholarly sources and aesthetic expressions. Where a combination of book and artwork might clash visually, they were exhibited alone or next to one another. Lempert’s approach was somehow respectful, careful, and conscious of the loaded meanings engendered by the constellations. We presented the sets of books and photos on wide tables that could be accessed from both sides with a strip of felt down the middle. On either side lay single volumes or piles of books that visitors could page through while the felt, a little too far away to want to reach out intuitively, acted as protection for rare books. Lempert’s photos lay loose or, if in a specific sequence, were fixed to the table. In preparation for the exhibition, the artist brought a large collection of his photographs and photograms with him to Zurich. Drawing inspiration from books Christoph Schifferli suggested he might like, Lempert picked which works to show. And, the other way around: Lempert asked Christoph for books he had thought of when going through the collection of books and linked them with his own collection of works. The exhibition resulted from a fusion of both collections and, as a whole, presented different aspects of Lempert’s work, thus functioning a bit like a retrospective solo show, with series of works grouped together.
For his exhibition Alienation and Charisma of 2015, Martin Beck installed a collection of his own: American books on communal living published between 1968 and 1980. The collection represented an almost complete record of book publishing activity on the subject during the heyday of the countercultural commune movement. In combination, the books wove an overlying narrative dealing with the influences these movements had on economic and political structures in place today. Fascination with as well as critique of counterculture structured this narrative: The installation lay open contradictory and complex thoughts on how practices and ideologies stemming from these movements were adapted to become some of the fundamental principles of neoliberal strategies as well as how these movements still inspire relations of communion and consciousness-raising today. The installation, in contrast to Lempert’s, was static: The books’ precisely selected pages were fastened with elastic bands or single pages were torn from their books and exhibited individually. They were positioned on two large tables wrapped in denim. Placement was important in that it too gave meaning to clusters: Depending on which way up or how close to another book or page it lay, a book could guide a reading. Visitors could not pick up or page through the books, so the conceived narrative thus remained legible. Nonetheless, the connections between the books and pages remained more associative than in more conventional research exhibitions. Beck’s fragmentary approach became an installation, a work in its own right, and connected to his artistic practice, which is often based on extensive research, as well his interest in the role of displays in exhibitions.
Similarly, Marianne Wex’s exhibition Let’s Take Back Our Space did not include any books from Christoph Schifferli’s collection in the actual installation. Wex showed a small portion of her vast photographic work: Wex took thousands of photos of men and women standing up, sitting or lying down in public spaces in Hamburg in the 1970s, complemented them with images from contemporary Western media and art history, and arranged them on panels in categories such as “Männerhände” (men’s hands) or “Besitzergreifende Griffe” (possessive grips). In the exhibition space, the panels hung from the ceiling in specific sequences and contrasted with smaller panels hanging in the corners, which showed staged “experiments” of women in typically male poses, or vice versa. In the context of feminist movements of the 1970s, the photographs and found material were an eye-opener, since they documented established patriarchal socialization. The work was first shown in 1977 in the exhibition Women Artists International 1877–1977 at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Künste in Berlin. The conceptual artists’ book “Weibliche” und “männliche” Körpersprache als Folge patriarchalischer Machtverhältnisse then followed in 1979, and was later translated into French in 1983 (Langage féminin et masculin du corps. Reflet de l’ordre patriarchal) and then into English in 1984 (“Let’s Take Back Our Space”: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures). These editions were laid out on the office table and accompanied by several books from Christoph’s collection that are connected to Wex’s practice in some way—books by artists interested in encyclopedic approaches, for instance, or whose practice also focuses on everyday human postures and body language—and functioned as a side note to the show.
In Delphine Chapuis Schmitz’s exhibition (she too has written an essay for the Journal), by contrast, the books in Christoph’s collection formed the starting point for the artist’s work. From individual books, she appropriated words and sentences that she then combined anew as verses to create the poetic text arrangement The Quest, which was also the title of the show. The source books were covered in white paper jackets and exhibited in a display case, a conceptual gesture that turned them into minimalist sculptural objects, their contents unrecognizable, and inaccessible. On two tables lay an edition of Stephan Mallarmé’s famous Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard along with books inspired by and/or mimicking it by artists like Marcel Broodthaers and Ceryth Wyn Evans. Schmitz’s work The Quest also took Mallarmé’s Un coup as a model, arranging words freely on a page and without linear sequence, with the form—the font size, the space between words—influencing meaning just as much as the individual words themselves. Two years later, in 2019, Schmitz printed a book based on the text piece she had composed and arranged as a slide show for the exhibition, and thus returned to what she had started with—the book as medium. The exhibition as a whole revolved around unconventional methods of writing, opening up linear narrative structures so as to facilitate multiple readings. Moreover, by masking the books as objects, Schmitz simultaneously highlighted and frustrated a desire these exhibitions often fed on—the desire for the book as an object, whether its haptic qualities, the gesture of paging through it, or simply our understanding of books as markers for knowledge and culture. The exhibition was, in this sense, also a play with form: Schmitz’s choice to project the text rather than have it printed for the show gave it the most immaterial form that text can assume: the sources from which the content had come were transformed into pure form and the influence of Mallarmé’s form of poetry on the artist emphasized.
To name one last, once again quite different, example from this series of exhibitions: In The Complete, the artist Tobias Kaspar installed his own printed matter as well as that of other artists, along with everyday material he’d collected over many years. Hotel napkins lay beside auction catalogues next to a branded “Tobias Kaspar” toothbrush; business cards next to artists’ books by colleagues and by Kaspar himself. All the objects were arranged on six tables wrapped in paper on which the artist’s name was printed in bold letters, a designed logo Kaspar has used many a time in his artwork, which extends to the fields of fashion and design and includes, for instance, his own jeans line. By equating everyday objects with artworks, the exhibition commented on how value is assigned to form what we understand as art as well as how value accumulates through brands and their connection to certain lifestyles. The show represented just as much a mapping of reference points in the artist’s work as it was a fake personal archive of objects that forged the image of a fictional persona cultivating a highly mannered lifestyle.
The following morning, I go back to the books I had my eye on the day before, start to pick them from the shelves. I feel more in tune with this place, the pace and space provided here. I recognize that the selection I have made, not surprisingly perhaps, intuitively reflects my current interest in play—Hanne Darboven’s Kinder dieser Welt, a book on Claes Oldenburg, a thick monograph on Andy Warhol, the catalogue Spiel der Spur, Poetry of Chance, and a plastic box jacket with a mirrored foil on its cover, which reveals a book on caricature inside, all surround me now. If the sheer volume of content triggered exasperation bordering on disinterest the day before, it now sparks a curiosity to stumble upon inspiring content, even releases inspiration for something other than the books, now that my interest has made itself quite clear to me. In this sense, the books could be seen as a tool to bring to the fore what was perhaps only slumbering inside me.
This is my second day at the Sitterwerk, to which I’ve been invited to write an (this) essay for their blog, which was recently set up in connection with the expansion of the dynamic order found in the library. In this text, I want to draw from how artists have worked with books to form exhibitions and to approach questions regarding how artistic narratives form a more sensical understanding of knowledge.
What intrigues me here at the Sitterwerk is its close proximity to the Kunstgiesserei. Whereas the library is usually quiet and represents a place that hoards knowledge in books and objects, the Kunstgiesserei is full of action, a place of practice, of knowledge that is fluid and constantly being implemented. There is so much energy in this place, and each time I come here I am struck by the dramaturgy of it, from the anticipatory walk down to get here to leaving the vibrant assembly I feel is as if amassing at the bottom of the valley. This place calls for patience. Or, to put it another way, it allows for a slowing down, for a receptivity to what is around me to open up. Much has been written about the possibility of serendipitously coming across content one hasn’t been looking for in this library, and serendipity, in contrast to coincidence, connotes that something fortunate has unexpectedly come about, a continuation that can somehow be made fruitful. The difficulty with this, of course, is that my selection and interpretation, in this case, of books, is extremely subjective. I impose my interest (in play) on them. If someone else looked at the selection, they might draw a completely different conclusion and not see my understanding of it at all. It’s like typing ‘iris’ into a search engine—you’re provided with a certain amount of coincidental content, but it’s always dependent on who and what is being looked for (more and more, in fact). I could have been looking for the flower, or wanted information about my eye, or been wondering about the goddess in Greek mythology. Which means, if a term is to be understood in the same way, it needs to be mediated further.
Transferring practice to theory, translating craft into language means that something is necessarily always lost or changed, that another form is assumed. Preconception is fatal to this process. I encounter the same problem I am confronted with when writing about art, and feel the same pull toward a more intangible understanding that I encounter when curating, for instance, the exhibitions with Christoph Schifferli. Approaching artistic practice by way of writing is, usually, an integral part of curatorial practices so as to mediate art and exhibitions. It can, though, be limiting. It’s not for nothing that the critic, with his art world jargon, experienced times when his was a bad reputation. I am interested in this apparent contradiction: How structuring something (in this case putting it into words) opens up a space for understanding, yet an artwork, perhaps, does not want to speak to everyone explicitly, but rather to retreat and remain associative in certain contexts so as to resist conclusive, and potentially restricted, meaning. Are there forms that allow for a certain gap in understanding whilst still being on point? Perhaps how things escape language as well as how things are determined by language would mean avoiding certain terms, certain debates, certain styles? My commitment is to a writing practice that does not have a predetermined relation to theoretical questions, though it would ideally be open to them at every point. I needed to unlearn certain methods from my years of studying at university, to let go in order to give more space to the poetic. I am interested in expressing sensibilities through writing, in writing that goes against itself, that carries a story between the lines, or that skirts definition rather than determining it point-blank. In an intellectual sense, to acquire and produce knowledge is to look for and want to own truth, to attempt to define and implement structure. We want to get to the bottom of something; it must appear as if all possible gaps have been thought out, that an argument is solid, that there is a clear reading in place. Meaning loses control depending on how it arrives at the receiving end. Perhaps understanding knowledge differently would not only include alternative approaches to how we arrive at knowledge, but also involve a fundamental shift in how we perceive knowledge itself, addressing all the problematic issues that such an understanding entails.
The Sitterwerk is certainly a place that allows for an unconventional, or, to use their term, dynamic, arrival at knowledge by way of the system of order in the library. What would it mean, though, in this context, to think differently about what knowledge is, that might make clear what can be translated or mediated or categorized, and what not. The Sitterwerk promulgates an organization system based on the idea that part of the knowledge of users can flow back into the system when they conduct research and contextualize books and material. Expertise is often understood as an authorial concept, and this concept quickly brings with it sensitive questions regarding when to share knowledge, and hence perhaps make it accessible to a wider audience, and when this becomes a disadvantage to the expert, since it then benefits someone else or makes the expert’s expertise redundant. This opens up huge discussions on knowledge capital, and though these thoughts seem forced within the context of the Sitterwerk, they are perhaps important when they are connected with the structures of alternative, non-hierarchical systems of knowledge that are tested and intended here. In light of the current idea of expanding the dynamic library to include the whole area, along with the Kunstgiesserei, such thoughts can perhaps act as an extreme marker for what is being made visible and why, and, as is inherent in this thought, what stays, and wants to stay, invisible, unmanaged, unbound. Of course, the practical knowledge being translated from the Kunstgiesserei to the Sitterwerk is always only a mediation, perhaps an elaborating of that knowledge. The question is: What do the systems in place in the Sitterwerk translate the practices to? How could it be made clear that some of these practices are always also tied to a specific form? Or escape form by being linked to subjects? That their translation into a different form always also leaves something behind. How does this benefit the person who shared the knowledge in the first place? And how does this, often subjective, knowledge translate for a wider audience?
I’ve always thought the expression “activate a collection” funny because it implies animating books, when perhaps it could be the other way around, that people are activated by a collection. Shifting the focus away from energy going into the books to books as tools from which to draw inspiration makes more sense to me. This would be not so much the structural approach of making sure that everything becomes productive, perhaps even in the right way, but would instead adhere to the notion of book constellations opening up meaning that is messy and can become richer as well as more confusing at the same time. This goes into questions I experienced when working on the exhibition series at ARCHIV. After several exhibitions, I became frustrated with the format of the series and felt it was restricting artistic practice too much by setting the condition that the artists interact with the book collection. Even though this format kept changing and remained playful as a result of the artists we invited, I wanted to work with even less determining factors, and it took me a while to get back to the format as one of transfer, yes, but one that could also open up readings by setting such terms. Realizing this, I could read the formats as specific and nerdy, but still playful. I felt similar approaching the Werkbank at the Sitterwerk: It does its job nicely in archiving who has used it and why. But I got frustrated with its aim of somehow wanting to mirror new knowledge back to a subsequent visitor by way of such a fixed structure. In both the exhibitions with Christoph Schifferli and when using the Werkbank, I seemed to struggle with the same dilemma: The archival pulling together of material should not be too associative lest it can’t be read anymore and would require another form of mediation; at the same time, it should not be too fixed in form, since possible approaches as well as readings would be restricted and too much sensical knowledge lost.
So, what would it mean to include thoughts about such sensical knowledge? Attending to the motile and perceptual experience of artistic practices and processes and their contexts is a move away from aiming for anti-subjective, anti-expressive, and anti-aesthetic facts and toward an understanding of knowledge that fluctuates, that is in action, that does not have a fixed structure, but is always already happening. This understanding of knowledge might include a waste of time or the possibility to make mistakes, a necessity for experimentation. It might understand knowledge as being collective, that we are always speaking through and with others, that we have internalized references until they become authorship. It might understand physical objects as bearing an intellectuality. Or be a practice of improvisation, of working against master narratives, surrender knowing or fully determining an argument, or propose a complexity closer to reality by being irresolute and contradictory. And it might include all the senses (which, in practice, is most often the case, before being put into a specific form). Rather than confusing itself with structural problems, with the exhausting either/or that is always the result of such questioning, such an understanding would create a poetic or elliptical kind of knowledge, it would understand the senses as a sedimentation of history, meaning, practice, and the fun of losing oneself in art—which might not come with an assurance of return, which might be lost or remain intangible.
