Henk Slager – The Contemporary Condition: Collateral Concepts

What are the key discussions, presentations, and publications that have shaped the recent discourse of artistic research? In search of some answers, this book departs from twenty research projects developed by the author over the past decade at venues including BAK Utrecht, Bucharest Biennial, Guangzhou Triennial, Havana Biennial, Kuanda Biennial, Nottingham Contemporary, Research Pavilion Venice/Helsinki, and Seoul Media City. The conceptual frameworks of these projects are resituated here, drawing on the critique of the alphabetical order articulated in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. From Diderot’s Encyclopedia to the current form of online lexicons and vocabularies, alphabetical order has long been a conventional mode of organizing knowledge. Barthes, however, shifted the mode entirely when he started to arrange his texts alphabetically based on concepts that emerged while rewriting them. Alphabetical order then functions as a non-chronologizing anti-structure that prevents the different fragments from sliding into a single linear narrative. The twenty concepts developed here adopt a similar, essayistic approach to the heteronomous practices of artistic research: each one is a new point of departure from which to explore this nascent field in a provisional way. Add to Wishlist