“Artist archives are models of artistic intention, of artistic thinking. They can comprise everything: Findings of certain contents, letters, correspondence, items or objects, various illustrations of different objects or processes, drawings, newspapers, magazines, collections, etc. These are templates, sources of inspiration or materials for their own artistic work.
This collection or pool of materials forms an inexhaustible reservoir for new ideas. In this respect, archives of artists contain many sources of their artistic work. Archives materialize a model of the world. They document research areas that are open like an experimental laboratory. While the archive represents the pool of inspiration, artistic work can be understood as a process of accessing the archive, selecting and arranging individual parts or individual aspects from this archive. The objects of the archives are openly available for access by the artists, for thinking and appropriation. The artwork is then the result of this process, the finished arrangement of individual parts from the archive. Artist archives are thus geared towards use by the artists and users.
Archives enable participation in the work of the artist, as a work-in-progress they are constantly changing and expanding. They are the work in itself, an unfinished work of art, a so-called meta-artwork. A path through the archives is like a walk through the artist’s thinking and his oeuvre. To see how the artist arranges his archive, how he conveys it, how he researches and designs it, enables a deeper understanding of the artistic context, offers new possibilities to perceive things. The archive conveys the artist’s technique or way of thinking, how he copes with and understands reality. In this respect, artist archives are charged with multi-layered meanings. But loading also means inviting things that have accumulated in a shop, as in an archive. Guests or visitors are invited to look at these things.” – Wolfgang Hainke
An event to the exhibition “The Geometry of Things”.
Presentation and actions for the Magazine on Archives of Artistic Thought
by A. Bitter, T. Brajnović, M. Crtalić, T. Gotovac, W. Hainke, informbureau, I. Loock, H. Müller, J. Olbrich and S. Vuijičić.
Some of the artists are present