AUTHOR’S NOTE

 

In July of 1997, I took a break from my research in the United States and my work on this dissertation to visit the summer exhibitions in Europe. It was a particularly fruitful time to view contemporary art because Documenta X, The Venice Biennale and Münster Projects all coincided that year. At the Venice Biennale, in the Austrian Pavilion, I stumbled upon a rather unusual exhibition that left me with an impression more lasting than anything else I was to see.
Stacked floor to ceiling in an empty gallery room were thick paperback catalogues chronicling the activities of the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group), self-named in 1959. This ‘artwork’, which was described as “50,000 books with 800 pages each” was offered for the viewer’s taking and presented with this question:

How can we show today what avant-garde was then? How can we reconstruct events that are now lost in space and time?

That the exhibitors had chosen to print and distribute a book documenting the work of the Wiener Gruppe rather than mounting a conventional display of paintings and sculptures seemed appropriate to the spirit of the multi-faceted artistic production of the group. It affirmed for me my own commitment to create a document that would chronicle and contextualize the loose group of artists that came together in Durban from 1993 to 1995 at the FLAT. I was struck with the realization that to document history is to unavoidably invent history, but with that humbling thought returned to my task with a renewed sense of purpose.