On 2 February 2012, Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker presented the fourth iteration of their performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at (NGBK) New Society for Fine Arts, Berlin. Previous iterations of the lecture took place at (Part 1) M HKA, Antwerp; (Part 2) KNAW and (Part 3) Kunsthalle Project Space, Vienna. The performance lecture was in conjunction with a book launch of Drawing a Hypothesis : Figures of Thought (ed. Nikolaus Gansterer, Springer, 2011) and also On the Materiality of Diagrams (Materialität der Diagramme) by Berlin based scholar, Susanne Leeb (see below).
Images: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, documentation from a performance-lecture at NGBK, Berlin,
Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker. Photography: Simona Koch.
About Materialität der Diagramme. Kunst und Theorie
The promise of diagrams to put via their abstract form an order to thinking is often subverted in the arts. Not only is the rationalism of diagrams directed towards its opposite or obsolescence. Furthermore, the materiality of relations is addressed within seemingly pure abstract connections. This concerns the erotics of the machine in the work of Duchamp or Picabia as well as the thinking of lines of flight in Deleuze and Guattari, the co-emergence of a »severality« in Bracha L. Ettinger, the infrastructure of money flows as an expression of power relations in the work of Bureau d’études. The book presents contributions which underline the ambivalence of diagrams as concrete abstractions throughout modern and contemporary art in a theoretical and artistic perspective.
With contributions by Ricardo Basbaum, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Bureau d’études, Bracha L. Ettinger with Birgit M. Kaiser & Kathrin Thiele, Susanne Leeb, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Amy Sillman. ed. by Susanne Leeb, b_books: Berlin, PoLYpeN series (ed. by Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, Susanne Leeb), Berlin 2012.
