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THE WORLD IS FULL OF EXHIBITIONS, MORE OR LESS INTERESTING; TILO SCHULZ DOES NOT WISH TO ADD ANY MORE.
Inspired by the acknowledged decline during the past two decades of the exhibition as a means of presenting art objects, and by the exponential increase in locations devoted to art - and by extension - in the growing significance of the exhibition catalogue to document and communicate art, "e.w.e." ("exhibition without exhibition"), initiated in 1997 and based on these sociological premises, is a project with two essential aims: to establish a critical system reflecting the conditions of art exhibitions in general, while also offering an appropriate means of exhibiting the works of artists - including Nathan Coley, Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Jens Haaning, Sandra Hastenteufel, Olaf Nicolai - that implicitly demand a redefinition of the exhibition medium.
The non-thematic exhibition "e.w.e." seeks to reunify all the "external" signifiers of an exhibition such as the catalogue, the press releases, invitations and interviews, i.e. the "packaging" accompanying a contemporary art show. Such insistence on the exhibition's constitutive advertising component is further emphasised by a consistent graphic image, as well as by the very form of the catalogue, which resembles more of an advertising pamphlet than a book.
However, it must be mentioned that these PR efforts remained unrecompensed; they incited neither a press response nor an exhibition review. And probably because "e.w.e.", apart from communicating the (actual or potential) work(s) of different artists, offered a distanced commentary on a very specific cultural mechanism: "e.w.e." looks like an exhibition, yet at the same time deconstructs established codes and functions. Its inversion of the conventional order of priorities - by presenting the communication processes at work around an exhibition, in order to render subsidiary the notion of the works' execution - succeeds in redirecting our attention, at least partially, from the individual artworks (the exhibition) to their contextual frame. And this is indeed a context within which exhibition catalogues have attained a status almost entirely independent from the exhibition itself; catalogues have started to possess an intrinsic value (as a sales argument), the gallery gradually turning into a sales office, at the core of which the actual exhibition has become increasingly secondary, observes Tilo Schulz.
Such analyses as well as the implicit artistic strategy of "e.w.e." are somewhat comparable to those adopted, in their time, by Dan Graham (the role of magazines to constitute and enhance the value of the artist's work), or by Seth Siegelaub (to present the work of artists he was promoting). In 'My Works for Magazine Pages - "A History of Conceptual Art"', Dan Graham describes how - based on his experiences as a gallery owner - he had learnt that a work of art attains its status solely by virtue of critical response and publication in magazines - a lesson that inspired a work conceived directly for such magazines: "Conventionally, art magazines reproduce second-hand art which exists first, as phenomenological presence, in galleries. Turning this upside down, Schema (March 1966) only exists by its presence in the functional structure of the magazine and can only be exhibited in a gallery second-hand." (1) Graham's magazine works exist simultaneously unto themselves and through their surrounding context, also relating to other news in the magazines in which they figure.
By employing a similar inversion, "e.w.e." functions both as an exhibition in its own right and as a critical improvement of the general conditions enabling its own realisation. In the same way, given that the communication of art necessarily implies art reviews - especially considering that the exhibition catalogue is of paramount importance in the glutted context of events and publishing - one might conceivably choose to make art to be included in such a magazine. Yet Tilo Schulz takes the shortest route, turning the catalogue itself into an exhibition. Conceptual artists in general, as Jack Burnham (2) has put it, have succeeded in objectifying the dissemination of information on art by seeking to redefine the artist's role in relation to the media, museums and collectors. This is the result not only of a novel interest in subject matter but rather, as disclosed by information theory, in the very nature of information itself. At least at a preliminary level, Tilo Schulz seeks to reconsider these processes.
Curators of exhibitions of so-called Conceptual art, such as Seth Siegelaub, have redefined the role of the "art merchant" as a distributor. Siegelaub's strategy strives to consciously skirt the art world by means of exhibitions put on beyond the bounds of gallery spaces, unified through publications which function more as artworks than informing on art. One of Siegelaub's projects, notably the exhibition known as the "January Show" (3), comes to mind in relation to "e.w.e." The exhibition was publicised in the New York Times: "0 Objects, 0 Painters, 0 Sculptures, 4 Artists (...), 32 Works, 1 Exhibition, 2000 Catalogues ...". As its organizer, Seth Siegelaub explains in the leaflet accompanying the catalogue that " the exhibition consists of (the ideas communicated in) the catalogue; the physical presence (of the work) is supplementary to the catalogue." However, for Siegelaub, the catalogue was the exhibition, comprising a total of 32 works, whose tangible existence was intended to function to purely illustrative ends, to invert the common relationship of exhibition and catalogue. Before the close of the January Show, Siegelaub began work on two new projects that comprised not a single tangible piece, save the catalogue: "March 1-31, 1969" (31 international artists who were each assigned one day during which to realise a work of art) and "July, August, September 1969".
All Siegelaub in fact did was to adapt the medium of the exhibition to the intrinsic quality of the exhibited works. In the catalogue, Douglas Huebler writes: "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." Siegelaub's approach serves to describe a form of art with an overt predilection toward "dematerialisation" (4):
'(...) when art concerns itself with things not germane to physical presence its intrinsic (communicative) value is not altered by its presentation in printed media. The use of catalogues and books to communicate (and disseminate) art is the most neutral means to present the new art. The catalogue can now act as primary information for the exhibition, as opposed to secondary information about art in magazines, catalogues, etc., and in some cases the "exhibition" can be the " catalogue." I might add that presentation - "how you are made aware of the art" - is common property, the same way that paint colors or bronze are common property to all painters or sculptors. Whether the artist chooses to present the work as a book or magazine or through an interview or with sticker labels or on billboards, it is not to be mistaken for the "art " ("subject matter ") (5).'
In other words, according to Siegelaub, if a catalogue may conceivably function as an exhibition, then it must also be "clear that the presentation of the work is not to be confused with the work itself (...)" (6). Both the exhibition and the catalogue each remain a vehicle, a medium; they are not art. However, for Tilo Schulz, the generic notion of the exhibition represents, at a second level, subject matter or content. An exhibition is both an exhibition as well as a form of "art" in its own right. "e.w.e." is an allegorical exhibition - in much the same way as Broodthaers's fictitious museums were allegorical - a work of art dealing with the predicament of the exhibition whilst also actually distributing the work of artists.
However, by adapting existing methods of communication instigated by Conceptual art, "e.w.e." also seeks to establish a certain critical distance to precisely these models: paradoxically, it seems, "e.w.e." achieves this by adhering to the basic conviction of such an approach. Just as the developments in the art of his contemporaries inspired Siegelaub to adopt his own approach, "e.w.e." is also informed by the work of Tilo Schulz's friends and colleagues. Schulz states that 'projects such as "e.w.e." do not go beyond the art context. (...) It is more a question of pushing to extremes existing methods, and of reconciling contemporary artistic strategies with optimal tools of communication. "e.w.e." is based on creating artworks that are not necessarily dependent on being exhibited, and not the other way round.'
Artists invited to the exhibition contributed works reflecting their respective working strategies that are also based on a means of distributing information that no longer necessarily relates to the exhibition itself or to artistic production as such. In "The Author as Producer ", Walter Benjamin redefines the writer's task, not in terms of the final output, but rather of the transformation of the "production apparatus" itself. The strategy applied by Tilo Schulz, as well as by the artists invited to take part in "e.w.e.", is not preoccupied with production: the January Show did not seek to define itself in opposition to the imperative of artistic output. The world is full of objects, more or less interesting, and the very necessity to produce more new objects was thus being questioned. This reveals an approach endeavouring to replace - in a broadened context - contemporary art with the critique of a specific economic system geared entirely towards production. The capitalist economy no longer promotes production, but rather the final product.
The new capitalist system no longer necessarily serves to maintain excessive production, but rather to administer overproduction; "(...) In the current situation, capitalism is no longer primarily in favour of production, this often being relegated to peripheral Third World countries (...). We now have a capitalism of overproduction. Primary materials are no longer simply bought and finished products sold: finished products are bought, or assembled out of separate parts. One wants to sell services, and wants to buy human action. Capitalism is no longer geared towards production, but rather towards the product, i.e. towards sales and marketing. Furthermore, capitalism has essentially become dispersed, the factory has given way to the corporation", as Gilles Deleuze has summarized (7). This has since become a characteristic of capitalist ideology, Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello (8) have observed, that may also be found in discourse legitimising the museum institution as a seemingly open structure, that is able to adapt to a variety of innovations and demands. The ideal has become not to reach the highest possible levels of production, but rather to attain "zero stock" and a restricted flow of goods. For companies, this implies problems of stock movement, and for art institutions, problems of dissemination - there is a very real parallel between the characteristic dispersion of capitalism and the preoccupation of cultural institutions with communication. Profound knowledge of markets and competition (marketing), of the press and public relations have therefore become the most essential objectives of management. The major strategic concern has shifted from the internal functioning of the enterprise (the Taylor model of rationalisation of production, the hierarchic structure of the chain of command) to the understanding and mastering of the outside world; from the producer to the recipient user. The company of the 1950s-70s that was built on a military model (the archetype of which might be IBM with its uniformed staff), has been followed by a noticeably "open" company structure, oriented towards dialogue and a more "democratic" division of responsibility.
The authors mentioned above stress that this development is due to the dynamic effect of the work of critics, which, without questioning the ends of capitalism, nor indeed its implicit requirement to accumulate unlimited amounts of capital, leads them to incorporate in their discourse some of those values they previously sought to criticise. Such critics have promoted the advent of a new definition of the enterprise and of economic processes, marked by "networking" (i.e. through sub-contracting, supplying, reducing the company's workforce, varying staff numbers according to the project at hand) and by an almost obsessive urge to adaptability, change and "flexibility". "The solutions - forwarded in specialist literature on company management in the 1990s, based on antiauthoritarianism and an obsession for flexibility and reactivation - to two problems that, above all, are conveniently drawn together by the authors beneath the metaphorical term "network", pervading all sorts of contexts (...)." (9) Today, art in general, and its surrounding context, the capitalist economy, have both successfully integrated a certain dematerialisation of production, to heighten the value of audacity, flexibility, and the absence of the product/artefact. Seth Siegelaub has noted that "art has become increasingly integrated in the value systems, methods and aspirations of social life (in capitalist countries)" (10). The avant-garde has not only gained acceptance in the capitalist nations, but has indeed been heightened in value. 'Ideologically speaking, the very notion of an avant-garde has evolved, assuming a positive meaning in terms of culture, akin to "avant-garde" technology.' In the marketing, advertising and technology sectors, predominant values include innovation, audaciousness and novelty.
In projects such as "e.w.e.", the emphasis placed on promotion systems is significant in relation to the overall system's development, which is less focused on the production of a given object-given that the dematerialisation of the artefact may be considered as accomplished-than on shifting public attention. According to Lucy Lippard (11), Conceptual art 'means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or "dematerialized".' This definition discloses the readiness of those pursuing a form of art that consciously evades the fetishistic commodity: Tilo Schulz's starting point is the conviction that this principle has gone astray in a world of burgeoning distribution and editorial activity.
But if Tilo Schulz and the artists participating in "e.w.e." consider the oeuvre as secondary, they mean that it is so in temporal terms: the oeuvre literally comes afterwards. Indeed, "e.w.e." serves to exhibit works in different stages of completion, i.e. projects that are either wholly or partly completed, or still require completion by the reader/spectator, as in Dejanov & Heger's "ready-to-use" object. The invited artists were free to decide at which stage of development or realisation to present their projects. The only common prerequisite was that those projects not yet completed would conceivably reach conclusion; therefore "e.w.e." is incompatible with an approach denying the object in favour of "dematerialisation". Earlier, I argued that "e.w.e." not only simply inverts traditional processes of information dissemination and a particular gesture of Conceptual art - it endeavours to extend and adapt these to a different economic context. Furthermore, it functions in accordance with the intrinsic nature of the works exhibited. For, whereas the Conceptual art "exhibited" by Siegelaub informed his practice as a curator, Tilo Schulz's project is founded on a novel concept, no longer reflecting the works' formal nature (idea vs. object), but rather their temporal quality.
Although it was mentioned that "e.w.e." was initiated in 1997, the exhibition's actual duration was never specified. When exactly did the exhibition end? Did it simply end on a given day? The lack of temporal indicators reveals that the project serves as the starting point of something else: the exhibition, contrary to common practice, does not designate a point of completion but rather a beginning. "e.w.e." is primarily a powerful (rather than ambitiously topical) "virtual" exhibition - an exhibition capable of rendering itself topical in a wide range of conceivable realities; it is not so much a "dematerialised" exhibition, but rather one that has yet to materialise. Liam Gillick recently remarked that the most interesting contemporary art - going beyond the heritage of John Cage and other artists who explicitly refer to the moment - seeks to grasp time as an element of visual practice, and is preoccupied with time and space in equal measure, thus successfully nullifying the dichotomy of figure and background, as well as debate on the supposed "dematerialisation" of art (12). In "Time Factor" (13), Philippe Parreno states that institutions in general always determine "the viewing period of works of art: maybe one or two months. Nevertheless, certain artists have integrated the time factor into their work as an operational indicator. Time is no conceptual gadget: it infers a political dimension. Interaction governs relationships at work in the outside world and artists are conscious of this fact." This forms Parreno's fundamental interest in film, an artistic form that - in contrast to exhibitions, in which time is "compressed" into a comparatively static time-space relationship - relates differently to history than the exhibition medium (15): "We know that before the advent of film, exhibitions served a function in relation to history. This is now fulfilled by movies. Cinema has thus taken over this relationship with history and contemporary life, leaving artists the role of making and exhibiting objects. But before this scission, the exhibition was considered as an autonomous medium."
Tilo Schulz's work is based on entirely different premises, ultimately sharing both with Philippe Parreno and other contemporaries an interest - beyond the usual (post-cinematographic) exhibition model - in the temporal. This primarily implies less of a preoccupation with the object as such, and its making, than with the position of the object in relation to history, a specific context, and the related conditions at a given moment in time; i.e. the exhibition itself and the conditions enabling its realisation.
The choice of the artists invited to "e.w.e." already reflects a shift of emphasis from spatial marking (the positioning of an artwork in a specific location and its inclusion in the exhibition context) to temporal processes creating situations that, no longer seeking to confirm completion, may be termed "zones of pending action". The models summoned by these artists are less dependant on notions of the isolated producer or studio artist, more on the artist as a producer of ideas for services. This redefinition of artistic activity by no means indicates that art too has become a "service" - the projects by the "e.w.e." artists, centred around and referring to the art context, all endeavour to reveal the paradigmatic shift from an economy based on production to one oriented toward the product. One may also speak of "post-production" (rather than production) with reference to "e.w.e.": here, an exhibition no longer functions as a point of completion, but rather as a period of time for the visualisation of a process that has yet to commence and that is susceptible to change on account of related developments.
Some artists, such as Sandra Hastenteufel, employ "e.w.e." as an effective means of restoring the conceptual stage of a project; others, such as Jens Haaning make use of it as a springboard for pending realisations. In his work, Nathan Coley employs a similar approach to that of "e.w.e.", establishing a contextual frame of discourse and debate to define possibilities of realisation. And Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger apply certain aspects recurring in their work, such as delegation (locations annexed to institutions, or galleries sublet to external users) and absence (as in the series "On Holiday", whose accompanying booklet presented in "e.w.e." marks such a direct extension).
Addressing the question of where art is actually located, Sandra Hastenteufel's images of golf courses depict locations governed by strict conventions (i.e. the rules of the game) and spaces of ritual activity. By literally installing artworks on the greens, she implicitly assimilates the art context in a game of variable positions. Hastenteufel writes, "A space created exclusively for people to hit little balls around in order to cover distance, offers me, almost in all respects, ideal parameters for the making of art". She makes use of "e.w.e." to return her project to the stage of its conception, albeit already partly completed insofar as actual works were actually exhibited. Hastenteufel thus shifts the observer's attention to the exhibition's underlying concept (to engage in a series of actions defining the exhibition not as the end of a process, but as its starting-point), by turning a partially completed project into a new beginning.
Jens Haaning employs "e.w.e." as a springboard for the potential realisation of projects; "Faserstoffprojekt", developed in collaboration with Vertex, is based on notions of pastime, service and the parameters of action. Exploiting the financial possibilities and information structure of "e.w.e.", the pamphlet by Jens Haaning favourably advertises his project to be realised at a later date in collaboration with architects. "Faserstoffprojekt", a time-share real estate project including a variety of homes converted for use by tourists, responds to specifically local conditions (historic and economic), while also endeavouring to redefine them. Aimed at the redevelopment of an economically disaster-stricken region (Fürstenberg near Ravensbrück), i.e. the extensive reconstruction of a prior arms and synthetic textile factory - that could continue to operate on account of the forced labour of Ravensbrück prisoners - "Faserstoffprojekt", by redefining the site's purpose, consciously avoids to function as a memorial. Jens Haaning's project reflects hitherto problematic definitions of site specificity while also establishing a somewhat uncanny analogy between so-called "public" art and the setting of a leisure park. Toying with the leisure park concept, "Faserstoffprojekt" may be understood as a critical metaphor of public art that serves to distract and entertain the middle class; Benjamin Buchloh perceived the 1997 Skulptur Projekt in Munster (16) as an "advanced form of entertainment", except for those "projects that explicitly reflects on the conditions leisure compensate for, projects that make the structural parallel between the outdoor exhibition and amusement park manifest in their conception". Similarly, the structure of "Faserstoffprojekt" reacts to the specifics of both the public and the (institutionalised modes of) publicising an exhibition. Whilst investigating the nature of the monument, Jens Haaning's project also points out the essential differences - and/or similarities - between the product of artistic action and that of cultural industry; i.e. that art is subordinate to the leisure/entertainment industries.
Insofar as they incorporate a temporal dimension, each work contributed to "e.w.e." is to a degree compatible with current discussion on leisure time by Pierre Huyghe and other members of "Moral Maze". Well before the Freed Time Association (17) was founded, Adorno and Horkheimer had discerned the extent to which, in an advanced stage of capitalism, entertainment constitutes an extension of work, the occupation of "free time" - through its automatisation and standardisation - actually reproducing the process of work itself (18). In relation to free time, which is subjugated to working time, "freed time" represents, according to Pierre Huyghe, "the search for a means of escaping this direct or indirect subjugation to the time spent at work." (19) This is the founding principle of the Freed Time Association, which seeks to generate activities that are not forcibly profitable or product-bound, and to use free time to the ends of reflection and self-understanding. Pierre Huyghe writes,
'The first thing we ask when we meet somebody for the first time is, "What do you do for a living?" We primarily define ourselves through our profession, i.e. in relation to work. Lacking this means of identification, we are governed by feelings of vagueness. Indeed, taking unemployment into consideration, we have grown increasingly aware of another temporal dimension, a period of free time still requiring definition. For a long time, the realm of art functioned as a vehicle to intelligently occupy this time. But, gradually, art itself has started to compete with the demands of a growing leisure industry. Is art not part of this industry, or does it seek to produce something else?' (20)
Furthermore, by emancipating the exhibition medium from the restrictions of "conventional" temporal criteria (i.e. start and finish), "e.w.e." does not primarily promote processes of artistic output, and thus defies being governed by purely economic concerns: "e.w.e." designates a form of reflective art as an integral part of the surrounding economic system by implementing a strictly controlled economy of temporal (and spatial) coordinates, to articulate that free time, which is not subject to the constraints of "social time".
In Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger's highly sensitive contribution to "e.w.e.", neither artist nor curator - but rather the recipient user - is confronted with the question of the work's ultimate realisation. Consisting of a blank-paged booklet with a single image on its cover, this work may function as a magazine, a notebook or a photo album. The photo on the cover of a service station designed by Arne Jacobsen was taken while the artists were on holiday in Denmark in summer 1998, a vacation spent as part of the eponymous project "On Holiday". Invited by the D.C.A. to give a lecture in Denmark, Plamen Dejanov and Swetlana Heger chose to hire Barbara Steiner to lecture on their work instead. The artists themselves fulfilled the part of members of the audience, thus inverting their being invited to work during their holiday visit, with the photograph of the building literally being no more, and no less, than a holiday snapshot. For "e.w.e.", the buyer was invited to fill the catalogue with his/her own images, notes and ideas. The actual "work" is thus completed by its owner, and is therefore not situated within a predetermined temporal context.
A similar principle governs "Stilleben" by Olaf Nicolai, yet in a far more restricting manner. Nicolai's work comprises a booklet horizontally subdivided into three parts, a "sampler book" bringing three categories together: space (architecture), humanity (descriptions of people featured in fashion magazines), and objects (cultural commodities such as books, films and records on the one hand, and design furniture and high-tech tools on the other). Each category consists only of definitions; no images are provided. A modular system enables the user to select a category and combine it with each/both of the others. Recalling both the coincidental array of objects, styles and people in fashion magazines, and the methods pervading certain works of Minimal and Conceptual art, the booklet by Olaf Nicolai does not seek to express identity as such, but rather the conditions of its construction in contemporary society. As an arrangement of objects - as both a still life and a reflection of life style - "Stilleben" alludes to the fact that in contemporary economic systems, experience and life itself have become the ultimate market values - a phenomenon on which the instrumentation of art has certainly had a crucial influence.
In modernism, the artist was forcibly a dissident, a figure doomed to express human feelings and desires repressed by the demands of industrial society. In a world governed by the logic of efficiency, utility, independence and materialism as the accumulation of wealth and property, the artist functions as the embodiment of personal expression, physical beauty, style and the stylised depiction of life. But, as Jeremy Rifkin has noted, in the course of the markets' progressive saturation - and hence in view of the fact that the principal problem has become how to sell rather than produce goods - precisely those anti-establishment values articulated by artists in their attempted critique of capitalism - have themselves gradually become commercialised to the ends of profit. "If the old capitalist system (based on production) suppressed creativity, personal expression, playfulness and hedonist urges, then new capitalism (based on consumerism) will succeed in liberating through artistic expression such latent psychic energy to help forge an omnipresent consumer culture. The new consumer market released art from the realm of culture - in which it essentially fulfilled the purpose of expressing community values - to subordinate it to commerce and to large advertising and marketing agencies, seeking to sell ready-to-use "lifestyles" (21). Creativity, personal fulfilment, spirituality and social interaction - all eminently cultural concerns - have become products readily available on the market, either as actual goods or as services. Capitalism has, according to Rifkin, initiated a transition towards an "extensively cultural economy", simultaneously adapting to both the institutions and opportunities offered by the world of art and culture, as well as - more significantly - to personal experience itself; the transformation of personal experience into a consumer item represents the final stage of the market's reification.
And it is this aporia concerning the specificity of artistic expression, to which the work of Schulz, Nicolai, Haaning and Dejanov & Heger refers, at least obliquely, by integrating the conditions of an emerging cultural economy. The work by Nathan Coley, addressing the (legal) control of space, may be understood as a critical analogy to the growing expansion of normative cultural policy. As a semi-fictional project based on (legal) power and its extent, "By Order of the King..." may be interpreted as a fable about the control of - both physical and cultural - space, suggesting the notion of a creative realm (jurisprudence) beyond the confines established by law. For, just as modern law exhausts the entire expanse of the space it delineates and controls, so too is the art context (both physically/geographically and discursively) exhaustively marked out by the network of art institutions, by the exponential boom of exhibitions within and beyond their boundaries, and by the massive amount of magazines and catalogues available. What Lucy Lippard called the dematerialisation of art is linked to "escape attempts" , i.e. (basically modernist) alternatives to creativity and the role of the artist in society. This model is invalidated by the fact that there is nowhere left to go and nowhere to stay: the map has become as large as the territory it maps out - irrefutably, one is but left with the opportunity of creating locations or things based on imaginary distance.
It is not insignificant that Tilo Schulz has based another of his projects on a text by Michel Butor. Butor once wrote that "the novel naturally strives, and naturally must strive, toward self-elucidation" (22); elucidation as a temporal concern as well as a self-reflective movement, in which the work and its commentary are unified. The art of Tilo Schulz and of those artists collaborating with him in "e.w.e." - by seeking to deploy various methods of self-deconstruction - marks an undeniably idiosyncratic position informed by modern literature and so-called "Conceptual" art. Recently, Jean-Christophe Royoux (23) has stated that perhaps all contemporary artists insisting on their works' self-referentiality - thus foregrounding their intrinsically "post-conceptual" nature - define the absence of a tangible work as integral to an artistic method, which in many ways depends solely on the intrinsic connection between a given object/image and a specific action. The world is full of exhibitions, more or less interesting; Tilo Schulz does not wish to add any more.
Notes:
(1) Dan Graham " My Works for Magazine Pages - 'A History of Conceptual Art' ", 1985, cit. in: Ma Position, Nouveau Musée/Les Presses du Réel, 1992 ; cit. in: Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power, MIT Press, 1999.
(2) Jack Burnham, in Conceptual Art, MIT Press, ed. Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson, 1999, p. 218.
(3) 44 East 52nd St., NY, 1969, 5-31 January. With Barry, Huebler, Kosuth, Weiner...
(4) Lucy Lippard & John Chandler, "The Dematerialization of Art", in: Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson, op. cit., p. 46 : "The studio has again become a study. The authors basically strive to explain that this development successfully promotes the essential dematerialisation of art, particularly of art in terms of objets d'art, (...)" (B), "a process that itself could also be rendered entirely obsolete. More significantly, it must be clarified that paintings and all other artworks that may readily be assimilated as items for sale, were not fundamentally rejected by Conceptual art on account of their material presence or physical appearance." (cf. Gregory Battcock, "Painting is Obsolete", in the above anthology).
(5) Charles Harrison / Seth Siegelaub, " On Exhibitions and the World at Large ", in Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson, op. cit., 1999, pp. 198-203 ; in Studio International, December 1969, pp 202-203.
(6) Siegelaub, p. 200.
(7) Gilles Deleuze, " Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle ", in Pourparlers, Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1990, p. 245.
(8) in Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme, Gallimard, 1999.
(9) Id., ibid., p. 131.
(10) in Art Press #17, 1996, p. 11
(11) Lucy Lippard, " Escape Attempts ", introduction to 6 Years : the dematerialization of the art object... , p. vii., University of California Press, 1973, 1997.
(12) Liam Gillick, " The Corruption of Time; looking back to future art ", Flash Art, May/June 1996.
(13) Philippe Parreno, "Facteur Temps", Documents sur l'art, #6, 1994, pp. 22-23.
(14) Parreno, in "Facteur Temps": "Film is learning to remain patient. The viewer must wait for the END. In art, one never reaches the END."; Philippe Parreno, interview published in Art Press ......, p.25: "What I was proposing was a reflection of exhibition locations that, strangely, function to the ends of compressing time. You can visit an exhibition on Monday and go there again on Tuesday, it won't have changed. Time and space are brought together in a comparatively static entity."
(15) Philippe Parreno, Interview in Art Press, ......p 23.
(16) Benjamin Buchloh, .......... in Artforum, ....
(17) Association des Temps Libérés.
(18) Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, "The Industrial Production of Cultural Goods", in La Dialectique de la Raison (The Dialectics of Reason): "(...) automatisation has at the same time assumed a very real power over human beings in their leisure time and pursuit of happiness; it profoundly determines the manufacture of products serving recreation, so that all one can engage in is a replica, i.e. the duplicate of the process of work itself. The alleged content is no longer but a faded surface; that which ingrains itself in the human mind is the automatic continuation of standardised processes. The only possible means of withdrawing from what goes on at the factory or in the office is to adapt to similar processes during one's free time. All forms of entertainment are inevitably subject to the effects of this incurable sickness. Recreation ultimately congeals in a state of boredom on account of the fact that, in order to remain pleasurable, it must not demand any effort, thus successfully continuing to propel itself along the worn-out ruts of habitual undertakings."
(19) Pierre Huyghe, interview with J.-C. Royoux, in Ex. Cat. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe et Philippe Parreno, ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1998, p. 81.
(20) ibid.
(21) Jeremy Rifkin, L'Âge de l'Accès, ed. La Découverte, 2000, p. 185. Originally published as The Age of Access, The New Culture of Hypercapitalism where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience, Jeremy P. Tacher/G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 2000.
(22) Michel Butor, "Le Roman comme Recherche", 1960, Les Editions de Minuit, published in Essais sur le roman, Gallimard, p. 13.
(23) Jean-Christophe Royoux, " La Vie dans les Plis de la Représentation chez Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe et Philippe Parreno ", in Ex. Cat. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe et Philippe Parreno, ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1998, pp. 62-63.
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