#documenta 11

[kopystianskybooks]

"Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky". The Lithuanian National Museum of Art. 2023. Foreword: Arūnas Gelūnas. Texts by Michel Gauthier, John G. Hahnhardt. Quotations from texts about Kopystiansky’s by Kai-Uwe Hemken, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anthony Spira, Adam D. Weinberg.(Lithuanian, English, French) ISBN 9786094261824

[tsunamiinet]

TITLE: Documentation of alpha 3.4

NAME: tsunamii.net

COLLECTION: tsunamii.net (2001-2005)

DATE: c.2002

PUBLISHER: tsunamii.net

TOPICS: tsunamii.net; Net Art; Documenta 11; Internet Infrastructure; Performance

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: digital image documentation of alpha 3.4, sourced through Google search

NOTES: Not much else is known about this image. It is also published along with the entry on alpha 3.4 as part of Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology included in the same collection (link here). 

[tsunamiinet]

TITLE: “Documenta 11_Spot: tsunamii.net mit ‘alpha 3.4’”

NAME: Tilman Baumgärtel

COLLECTION: tsunamii.net (2001-2005)

DATE: June 29, 2002

PUBLISHER: taz.de, Germany

TOPICS: tsunamii.net; Net Art; Documenta 11; Internet Infrastructure; Performance; Global Positioning System

NOTES: Click on screenshot to go to link of actual item. However, actual item is originally written in German. A translation of the article’s content is available through Google. The use of the internet browser Google Chrome for this item is therefore highly recommended. 

[tsunamiinet]

TITLE: “tsunamii.net: interview” 

NAMES: Pat Binder; Gerhard Haupt

COLLECTION: tsunamii.net (2001-2005)

DATE: June 7, 2002

PUBLISHER: Universes in Universe

TOPICS: tsunamii.net; Net Art; Documenta 11; Internet Infrastructure

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Online article

NOTES: Click on screenshot to go to link of actual item. 

[s-hodne]

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall: Artists need material limitations  I have never read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, but I have for a very long time been in love with Jeff Wall’s appropriation of it.    Jeff Wall: After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Preface, (1999-2001) * First shown at Documenta 11, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Preface, (1999-2001), represents a well-known scene from Ellison’s…

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[drs-rdt]

A plan for escape - Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

2002

via

[blackcontemporaryart]

Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems, Renée Green, 2001

Kassel Auerpark, Germany, Documenta 11, 2001.

[viralradio]

Constant criticism: the horror of New Babylon

Constant, New Babylon (film still Victor Nieuwenhuijs & Maartje Seyferth)

For an exhibition proposal I am researching existing documentation of Constant's New Babylon, a work I first saw in real life at Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002, in relationship  with the concept of dread (I briefly introduced this fascination a little while ago).

It is an anticipation I have always had that New Babylon isn't only optimistic, and not knowing the work better than having seen many images, descriptions and positive references from urban futurists and spatial optimists, I decided to search for answers.

On the ever excellent BLDGBLOG site I discovered an interview with Mark Wigley, co-founder of Volume magazine with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman, and author of Constant's New Babylon. In this interview, Wigley talks about Constant's criticism of his own work:

So you’re absolutely right to stress the extent to which a supposed society of liberation is actually a control society. But it’s interesting to look at Constant’s own criticism of the project.

He does New Babylon for about twenty years – till he becomes convinced that he’s made a terrible mistake. He realizes that, if you give everybody a playground in which they can unleash their desires, then it won’t be a 60s paradise of love and solidarity and all that – people will actually kill each other, because we’re dark, miserable creatures. He was very affected by the failure of May ’68 in Paris, and by the Vietnam War, and by the death of a child of a close friend of his – so he really started to see people as their own enemy.

He spent the last four years of the project showing the horror of what it would be like to live in New Babylon. He’s the only architect – or let’s say quasi-architect – I’ve ever known that spent not just one image but four years’ worth of images to show how horrible life would be in his own city.

The architect of the utopia came to realise the reality of his ideal city would not live up to the intentions.

Something else extremely interesting I found was this 15 minute documentary on Constant from 2005, the year he died, made by his son Victor Nieuwenhuijs with Maartje Seyferth. Here you see a buoyed Constant in 1962, very convinced of the idea of having created a utopian solution for improving society in the future. It greatly shows amazing footage of the tentacles of his autogrowing network city.