Transcript of the 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts presentation at Ashkal Alwan

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Ill read to you the texts about the project So I will do my thing which is read you a statement about the documenta 13 to give you a context of how is all this inscribed (3:48) And then read to you some texts The notebooks themselves are a publication project which is somehow choreographed or unchoreographed to be more honest 4:28 I would like to tell you that documenta 13 is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment and active living in connection with yet not subordinated to theory These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic and worldly alliance between current research in various fields: artistic, scientific, and other knowledges both ancient and contemporary dOCUMENTA 13 is driven by a holistic and non-logo centric vision that is skeptical of the persisting belief in economic growth; this vision is shared with and recognizes the shapes and practices of knowing of all animate and inanimate makers of the world including people So today is dedicated to a subcategory of that which is people Now in December 2010 when Chus Martinez and I began to publicly speak about the notebook projects this what we said We said that a note is a trace, a word, a drawing, that all of a sudden becomes part of thinking, and is transformed into an idea This publication project follows that path presenting the mind in a prologue state, in a pre-public arena, a space for intimacy, and not yet of criticism dOCUMENTA 13 is publishing the unpublishable; the voice, and the reader is our alibi, and our ally Note-taking and compasses witnessing, drawing, writing, and diagrammatic thinking. It is speculative, manifests a preliminary moment, a passage in acts of memory aid.

With contributions by authors from a range of disciplines such as art, science, philosophy, and psychology anthropology, economics, and political theory, language and literature studies as well as poetry, which is not everything; there are many fields that have not been particularly touched upon A 100 notes, a 100 thoughts constitutes a space of dOCUMENTA 13 to explore how thinking emerges and lies at the heart of reimagining the world In its cumulative nature this publication project is a continuous articulation of the emphasis on the propositional, underlying the flexible mental moves to generate space from the impossible 8:18 Thoughts unlike statements are always variations, and this is the spirit in which these notebooks are proposed,

and in April 2011, in Cairo, we said: A notebook is a rehearsal space; it allows the words, the lines, the drawings to be there, before being actually there before anybody else than oneself; thinking is not yet there, writing is not yet there, method is not yet there, and slowly, all of them fall into place The notebook is a receiver since it is used to quickly capture our thoughts as well as the thoughts of others, and the images too To reimagine public space requires the reclaiming of critical privacy first of all; a space where we can prepare ourselves for a comprehension of what a new foundation of the public realm may entail The notebooks are an attempt to get closer to the point of confluence between an artistic and intellectual life inside and outside ones own world; the inside is pure potential, the outside: the possibility of its own actualization. Both are needed more than ever, and are articulated in a state of hope How to connect the minds in order to see how promises can be fulfilled? How can challenges be transformed into methods? And how can the transformations in thinking translate into a social field that is by necessity also normative?

And in New York, on May 10th 2011 we added:

A notebook is a venture, it is pure speculation. Can one effectively transform thinking, while thinking at the same time? The notebooks show us the hand trying to trace other logics, trying to travel a bit further away from the already known in order to cover a distance between () in the near future. The whole series is an exercise in choreography that creates movement between sense and understanding. To be visible a movement requires a dramatization and that is why these image texts do not explain, presenting instead with affect reality time matter text thought space and doubt we apprehend a situation; it is a new situation that involves the new status of text, and art 10:45 but also that of readership Of thought but also that of the limits of critical thinking, Of life, but also of the precarious conditions of the personal and the political of image, but also of its potential for retreat and of singularities who decide to share their life in the form of notes The New York presentation took its cue from all these questions; the status of the text, the interplay between raw material and finished work between spontaneous gesture and the production of culture between the unregulated world and regulated normative systems They address the existence of a Third space that appears between the polarity of the creative and the constrained; a space that defies the commonsensical logic of the double versus the idealistic, possibly even the natural laws of market versus the practice that can remain in a permanent state of surplus

And then, a week later in Argentina we said: 12:03 In the active writing, it is natural to begin with a subject close to ones interests; through writing one also becomes aware of the fact that it is possible to compartmentalize oneself in many different ways. The problem then is not such much of how to integrate the fragments, but of how to understand how the migration of thoughts into forms, images into words, and intuitions into notions. It is this continuous movement from the precision and the concreteness of one form of life, transmuted or imported into another that a notebook registers.

But, Chus went back to Greece, and in Thessaloniki, in September 2011, we added: A notebook was a revolutionary device for the care of the self in Ancient Greece the hypomnemata. A note is not a text, it is positioned outside discourse. A note lacks the ideological dimension that is characterized by intention, unlike the statement, or the manifesto, or even the essay of critical theory. Unmarked by the will to convey a message, notes are generating impulses having a compositional function. A note begins with an affect, and the sense that something is of importance; lets say the laden state and taste collapse. Text and image, thought and text, text and reality, reality and a note; these oppositions insist on differences, and that is not necessary, nor useful. The note gleams with contradictory aspects, a note does not represent not even thought, however it is charged with representational effect, with realistic indications. 13:47 In times of pre-collapse, like in Greece, and elsewhere today, the right to dissent from rules may be called for, as well as the needs for the instruments for the construction of a relationship with oneself. As a governor manages the governed , as a head of household manages the household () the hypomnemata, the notes, the notebooks are personal but not intimate; a collection of what one could hear, see or read the writing on the walls of a demonstration for example, and this to an end which is the care and constitution of the self, able to recover as part of the objective world participating in its invention, and then to skip a few the Oslo, and the Paris in London, we added: A notebook is a picture in history; notes are the fictions of ideas. A note is an idea that occurs in the mind as a shape and does not exist yet in the world, when it does it changes everything, and nothing is ever the same again; true, only a small part of the world is affected first by a note, but since the note embodies the art of the possible the whole world could change due to a note due to fiction. 15:03 A collection of notes is written outside the realm of style and at the same time it constitutes and anthology or an atlas of primary sources, a necessary companion to understand the relationship between experiences images and thought. Notes are mild; they always start in the middle, a result of day dreaming and semi consciousness instead of starting at the beginning, like the conscious writing of history or the exercise of reasoning out of an argument. A note is instead a multitudinous middle

The notebook project is a reflection of the state of art history as well; it shows the forming of thinking in an unassuming way, the waking of a readiness in writing for propositions whose contour and arguments are still in a state of becoming; it is getting ready for a transformation of the text that involves matters, objects, life and art And there was a few more, so

we wanted to add: The note is a way to eventuate writing; when a function such as writing is liberated from an old duty, it invents, and when language is transformed all is transformed. One does not read a note, one sees the note as one sees any other living creature, like grass or a tree or birds or fish but one may also see a note, as sees a stone, sediments, or a rock, or a desert, or a mountain, or little plants that grow through the tiny cracks of broken pieces or mortar or concrete in houses in some cities. Notes can test the monotonous nature of written text of the constructed discourse, introducing syncopations into the text because they constitute a polyphony of rhythms inextricably jumbled together allowing tone cadences to proliferate 17:20 How far can a note or a 100 thoughts in the form of notes push this drift of theory and practices (17:30) away from the classical rules of analysis in text composition? The notes can test the jurisprudent effort made by written forms, the tendency of writing forms to repress the pleasure of an idea resonating, the audacious gestures of loops of multiple storytellers, the audacious thoughts of Mahgoub for example in reinventing and imagining something, a new society, decolonizing, participating in that process. The question all these notes have in common or common to the works present in dOCUMENTA 13 could be formulated thus: What and how do we think when we know? rather than What do we know when we think?

So I would like to end on that note, and that question, and allow us to think together a little bit with Chus on the general framework, the motivations, the thoughts behind this process

Chus Martinez

How can one create a writing from art history? How can history actually write?

The notes can be seen not only as manner to relate to the history of art but also with an event, which is the exhibition called dOCUMENTA 13, but also with the political dimension that such an exercise in writing and such a project which on the one hand entails commissions of specific texts, to be written in the spirit of notes, notes that are already existing and that were printed as a facsimile with introductions of some authors and this collaboration between artists and writers poets theoreticians that decided to actually enact this kind of spirit in the form of a note and a notebook 23:03 So that kind of make us think as well into what is this kind of writing doing? How is this writing reflected not only in the event, in the situation of the art world, in a context a specific as an exhibition as dOCUMENTA but also in the history of relating the back and forth relationships in between the object and the writing. 23:37 Michel Serres in the end of an impressive book that is very strange, which is called The Five Senses, at the very end of the book where hes like talking about very abstract things that are very difficult to define, talking about the role of the senses in knowledge, and he comes to the last two pages of the book where hes saying that what we need really to understand is that we have been addicted to language and that we need to reconsider that addiction going back to different relationships between knowledge that we can perceive through the senses and our understanding of what theory is so where is distance, where is the analytical position of the writer vs the writing and also where are all the knowledges or all the forms of creating ideas that can create thinking but perhaps not pointing towards a program. So the notebook project is actually a non-programmatic project, its a project that in the very manner that tries to describe the relationship between historian and history, between the writing and the event, between the event that has a potential of being part of a bigger writing that we call history, and the event perceived as pure presence, as pure immanence, a present that we are inside we can also think that the notes create a substance that is able to think inside itself or lets say that you initiate a force that actually contradicts the idea that we should actually start with theory, and um, kind of proposes the possibility of starting with thinking or with a text that is actually not yet an argument

that is not yet even a text but only an in-between space between a drawing, a note, and an idea, or perhaps not yet even an idea, an intuition, and therefore the idea of the very notion of theory in relation with the art practice is in suspension. 25:55 Why would you want to suspend the notion of theory? I would say, you would only like to suspend the notion of theory in order to actually like recreate or rehearse the possibility of theory appearing again or having a relationship with thinking that actually could be able to like um connect us differently with the notion of practice itself. 26:25 So imagine a writing project that has two very simple ambitions; one is the notion of finding a tone in the very same manner that when you are exhibiting an artwork you really desire that when the artwork and the viewer encounter they will find a tone, and this is how we define actually perception or reception of an artwork, by finding a tone in which the communication is possible (communication being a strange word to use in that framework). The second thing would be actually to situate ideas in the same manner that we situate works and to create in the notebook, in the process of incorporating words, a place for works, a place for ideas, a place then for text inside the exhibition in the same manner that when you are creating an exhibition you try to actually find the right place for the artworks to live, to find the right situation for the encounter in between the viewer and matter. 27:26 So one can simply think that such a project constituted by 100 exercises in thinking and speculation are actually only an effort to find a place for language again inside the exhibition, and therefore the exhibition, and the 100 notebooks, in the very moment that they are together; in summer there are going to be completely together, then they exist in a complete situation of simultaneity; they are both in place, and then the tone is for you to discover in the manner that you are gonna go back and forth in between what you perceive or perhaps what () encounter through the media, and read through the different text So I think I could stop here with this kind of discussion

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

1:02:00 what we were trying to describe as the method in these notebooks; there are some far-fetched leaps which are made, and they are often those juxtaposing materials that would not normally be juxtaposed in an academic publication 1:07:10 So, I would just like to ask Chus, and Salah perhaps, how you feel that this notebook fits in the totality of the notebooks, and then perhaps after that we can open up the conversation to the people who have kindly come to listen to us for so long.

Chus Martinez

1:13:50 No, I think that Salah put it really well, in what he said about passionate address that can be applied to all the notebooks, and this what actually makes them similar to what But then going back to the quote of Derrida, I think also that it kind of creates a specter, that notebook, of another notebook that is not existing, and probably would never exist of another person that we have been discussing, and that actually connects to this idea of writing about political thinking, and actually writing simultaneously, in the case of Salah Hassan, about art practice, and art history, which is the case of , so () was a German historian that actually started in 1906 a very very strange novel that in 1926 he declared not anymore a novel but a tractatus of history, and he at some point in that text he says, the only way he could imagine being political in the 20th Century is being an art historian, and then he that was an anarchist who actually committed suicide a few months later than Walter Benjamin was producing two types of texts: fictional political novel that could be read as both, avant-garde writing but also kind of political manifestos, and then monographies, possibly the most important monography of Picasso at that time, and then he was saying that he could, you know, and I think that 1:17:01

So I think the context, not the notebook in itself, is actually bringing the two texts together, because the context is actually an art context, and its an art way of thinking about these notions of political So I think that this kind of strange Moebius paradigm that the notebooks are creating the relationship to the real and art history is quite interesting. 1:17:56 So, itll be our pleasure to hear what you would like to know

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

1:18:27 I mean its difficult because you havent read the notebooks

Stephen Wright

1:18:40 Just a critical interrogation regarding the repositioning of theory in regard of what you said practice