An Incomplete Organum for Documenting Works of Art

Philipp Schulte

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783753435275
• eBook ISBN:
  9783753436289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

An Incomplete Organum for Documenting Works of Art consists of twenty-six impulses in the form of hypotheses, questions, considerations and falsities. The Organum's purpose is to provoke exchanges about common and uncommon practices for documenting artistic works, and is for artists, scholars, academics and anyone interested.

Prologue
(1)

1

*

Philosopher Hannah Arendt differs between action, which always includes a notion of beginning and renewal based on free decision, and behaviour, which is thoroughly conditioned by causal antecedents, and so is essentially unfree. Cp. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958.

Every work of art has a public. Documentation of any work of art is intended to increase this public.

So any documentation is – as any work of art is – an action that is intended to change the public.

This also means: Any documentation – as any work of art – can potentially be considered political. *

Generalities
(2–10)

2

The documentation is separate from the THING that is being documented (i.e. the 'work').

There is always a loss, or an addition, or a transformation which might be aesthetically interesting or not and which might add surplus value to the work or not.

What, then, is 'good' documentation?

Possible criteria (random list):

• realness
• accuracy
• durability
• readability
• likeability
• distributability
• whatever comes to mind

3

Documentation is a collection of documents. Different kinds of documents can capture different aspects of the work in different ways (and in varying degrees of success). So it's worth considering which kind of documents are collected for which aspects of the work.

4

Documentation has, or will have, a different audience to that of the work. So the way a work is documented and the way the documentation i...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue (1)
• Generalities (2–10)
• Strategies (11–15)
• Mixed Media (16–25)
• Epilogue (26)
• Copyright