INTERVIEW WITH CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV

Five questions and notes for Ms. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13).

What role do the three catalog books play within the overall framework of dOCUMENTA (13)?

More than ever, books play a key role in the development of the ideas leading up to dOCUMENTA (13), and I would even say that there is a part of dOCUMENTA (13) that exists only in the publications. With the series "100 Notes – 100 Thoughts," Chus Martínez, the head of the curatorial department, and I want to publish works by writers and thinkers from various fields to give them a platform comparable to that of artists.

Volume 1 of the catalog, "The Book of Books," reproduces the entire content of the 3,000 pages of the 100 "Notebooks" and combines it with information about all participants in dOCUMENTA (13) and their exhibited works, with introductory essays, a reading list, and the index for the book. Here, a massive and slow thought process is documented, which is interwoven into the actual exhibition.

Volume 3 of the catalog, "The Companion Book," the short guide to the exhibition, contains illustrations and texts on all 180 artists participating in dOCUMENTA (13), each of whom contributed a page designed by them to this book. The short texts about the artists were written by the agents of dOCUMENTA (13) and other authors. The spatial experience that the visitor has at the exhibition is connected to the spatial concept presented here in printed form, which I developed for dOCUMENTA (13). The book thus offers a tour through the exhibition. It also contains detailed information on the workshops, lectures, and conferences that make up "Maybe Education and Public Programs" of dOCUMENTA (13).

"The Logbook," Volume 2 of the catalog, documents the exhibition not only through hundreds of illustrations but also through interviews and a selection of emails that mark specific turning points in the development of the project. In these interviews, we talk about our commitment, our ideas, and what it means to be involved in the realization of a dOCUMENTA (13). In addition, numerous snapshots from my travels around the world and the encounters and perspectives leading up to the exhibition are reproduced in this book.

How do the individual volumes complement each other?

The three volumes of the catalog complement each other to form a rich, comprehensive representation of dOCUMENTA (13): "The Book of Books" collects the core ideas mainly through the traces of writing and the printed page, "The Companion Book" contains specific information about the individual artworks and the various venues, while "The Logbook" not only offers a visual tour through the exhibition but also a deep insight into the genesis of dOCUMENTA (13) over many years. None of this would have been possible without Bettina Funcke, my wonderful head of the publications department, and her efficient team, and without the dedicated staff of Hatje Cantz, who believed in the project from the very beginning.

Reading the thought-provoking series of "Notebooks," one gets the impression that they represent the sum of a curator's experiences. How did the idea for the Notebook series come about?

More than two years ago, I had the idea to publish notebooks, this strange form of writing that lies between drawing and writing and undoubtedly presents thinking in a preliminary state, almost the secret hidden space of writing before the actual writing. Chus and I had the idea to involve a large circle of radical thinkers from different fields and different backgrounds in the development process of dOCUMENTA (13) to create an important public platform for thinkers that would exist parallel to those for artists. By publishing the notebooks during the 18 months leading up to the opening of the exhibition in Kassel in June 2012, we wanted to give the public the opportunity to get to know the developing ideas for dOCUMENTA (13) and offer the participants of dOCUMENTA (13) the opportunity to be inspired by them for their own contributions and to identify with the exhibition as a whole. Both spatially and temporally, the notebooks exist beyond the exhibition in Kassel, and that is essential to my approach.

By what criteria do you select the topics and texts for the notebooks?

I usually ask a potential author to tell me what the most crucial question, the most intractable problem is for him or her – and that often leads to an essay. Sometimes I ask several authors to address the same question; for example, I asked Judith Butler, Etel Adnan, and Michael Hardt to address the question of love and its possibility, and all three approached this question from a different perspective. Chus and I and other agents such as Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas or Marta Kuzma or Raimundas Malašauskas have asked authors for contributions, and in some cases, I have brought artists and authors together, for example, Emily Jacir and Susan Buck-Morss, who then have free rein within the limitations of the printed page. Often this means that they work with texts of their choice and respond to these texts.

In addition, we have asked scholars and artists to provide "historical" notebook pages with introductions and explanations to contextualize the reprinted/reproduced material. For example, Lars Bang Larsen has written introductory words to pages from the diaries of Erkki Kurenniemi. Everyone who contributed has influenced my thinking on my way to dOCUMENTA (13). The different disciplines and schools of thought express themselves in their own ways and interact in the different formats and modes of speech – a central idea for dOCUMENTA (13). The fields of inquiry and schools of thought range from radical sciences and technologies such as quantum physics and its connections with the oldest traditions to ecology, poetry, and local history. The archive and the artist's book, collapse and revival, here they come together.

What are the main ideas or clusters of ideas underlying the notebooks?

The ambition is high, even if it is important for the notebooks that they appear modest at the same time. There is a general need for a new methodology, but especially with regard to how we talk about art and why we look at art – taken together, the notebooks state that we must go beyond art to get to the core of art, that is, to approach some of the larger questions we face today. We invite authors and artists to share their thinking with us as a process. We do not want ultimate truths or fully elaborated theses. We want to be able to witness how thinking develops, that it is a free process, a chaotic and poetic process that never has a final result.

But the political question – what role art can play in society and how art and thought can react to knowledge capitalism and the financial world and their injustices – is undoubtedly a common thread running through both the notebooks and the exhibition. Another common thread is the question of how we can imagine a less anthropocentric universe, a world of thought and active life that is not so much centered solely on humans and in which the balance of acting forces is given greater consideration, including those of all animate and inanimate makers of the world.

That's why I'm known as the artistic director of dOCUMENTA who is interested in the positions and perspectives of dogs – that's true, and I mean that very seriously, and not just for dogs, but also for meteorites and objects, including artistic objects. For the secret of these things that we call art – for their perspectives, and not ours on them!

05.06.2012