Produced on the occasion of Jutta Koether’s exhibition Fantasia Colonia at the Kölnischer Kunsteverin, Köln 26 May–13 August, 2006 and Kunsthalle Bern, 19 January–11 March, 2007.

Texts by Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Martin Prinzhorn, Michael Kerkmann and a conversation with Jutta Koether, Sam Lewitt and Eileen Quinlan.

Bob Nickas’ review of the Kölnischer Kunsteverin exhibition can be found here.

In his catalogue essay, curator Anthony Huberman explains that the works in this exhibition ‘reflect on what it could mean to contest the regime of the machine’. That is, they question the worship of usefulness in modern scientific civilisation, which is refused or even ridiculed by each piece on show. It’s a strong concept, and potentially extends to how the works are placed in the labyrinthine space of the Secession. If the point is to produce friction, then the disorganisation of Other Mechanisms—the inability of its parts to add up to a coherent whole—is a paradoxical form of success.

Concept: Anthony Huberman. Texts: Jennifer Alexander, Franco Berardi, Benjamin H. Bratton, Gilles Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze, Keller Easterling, Vilém Flusser, Sigfried Gideon, Martin Heidegger, Anthony Huberman, K.G. Hultén, Maurizio Lazzarato, Pamela Lee, Les Levine, Jean-François Lyotard, Robert King Merton, Meredith Meredith, Lewis Mumford, Gerald Raunig, Nishant Shah, Robert Snowden, Joseph Vogl. Images: Zarouhie Abdalian, Lutz Bacher, Nairy Baghramian, Eva Barto, Patricia L. Boyd, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Harun Farocki, Howard Fried, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Frederick Kiesler, Pope.L, Louise Lawler, Sam Lewitt, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, Cameron Rowland, Sturtevant, Danh Vo.

Stranded Assets–Modulo 2: Protezione Ambientale is a modified reproduction of a regulations and emissions handbook retrieved from the recently decommissioned coal-fired Giuseppe Volpi power station in Porto Marghera, Venice. Lewitt retrieved this handbook in the course of research for his work Stranded Assets at the 57th Biennale d’Arte Venezia.

The general set of operational standards presented and explained in this handbook are paired against fragments and images taken from the Volpi plant, inserting particular fragments from this defunct energy infrastructure against the legislative context that prescribed its operation. Most conspicuously, transparency pages depicting four lamps featured in the central stairwell of the power station are evenly dispersed throughout the book. The lamps’ form resembles an open book whose ‘pages’ are populated with vertical rows of glass rods, through which light is refracted into the building’s stairwell.

Lewitt’s contribution to the Biennale consists in temporarily displacing these lamps into the Venetian Arsenale—the former site of the turbines that powered Venice, which was taken over by the Volpi plant. In his installation in the Arsenale, the original lamps illuminate his designated exhibition area. As an updated facsimile of an ENEL technical manual detailing emissions standards, the book pursues the gap that persists between the experience of a well-lit space of representation, and control of the energy commodity that lights it.

Artists on Hanne Darboven is the first instalment in a series culled from Dia Art Foundation’s ‘Artists on Artists’ lectures, focused on German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven. Established in 2001, the lecture series highlights the work of modern and contemporary artists from the perspective of their colleagues and peers. The inaugural ‘Artists on Artists’ title is published in conjunction with the opening of Darboven’s 1980–83 installation “Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983” (“Cultural History 1880–1983”) at Dia:Chelsea in New York City.