Lucie Kolb
Studium, nicht Kritik
Transversal Texts, 2017
Study, Not Critique
Transversal Texts, 2018
Studium, nicht Kritik bezieht sich auf den schmalen Grat zwischen selbstbestimmter Wissensproduktion und einer in Wert gesetzten Form von Kritik. Das Buch befasst sich mit drei Zeitschriften aus den 1970er, 1990er und 2010er Jahren, die für unterschiedliche politische und ästhetische Agenden stehen: The Fox (New York, 1975–76), A.N.Y.P. (München/Berlin, 1989–99) und e-flux journal (New York, seit 2008). Die drei Publikationsprojekte betreiben auf verschiedene Weisen eine Entgrenzung künstlerischer Produktion, verweisen aber gleichzeitig auf die damit verknüpften neuen Formen der Disziplinierung und Verwertung. Lucie Kolb zeigt, wie die Möglichkeit einer gemeinsamen intellektuellen Tätigkeit im Kunstfeld, die in diesem Feld ist, aber nicht von ihm, an die Arbeit an den Produktionsbedingungen geknüpft ist.
Mehr Information
Study, Not Critique considers the fine line between self-determined knowledge production and a commodified form of critique. The book examines three journals from the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s, each of which stands for a different political and aesthetic agenda: The Fox (New York, 1975-1976), A.N.Y.P. (Munich and Berlin, 1989-1999) and e-flux journal (New York, 2008-present). In distinct ways, each publishing project blurs the border separating artistic production and discursive production while simultaneously attending to new forms of discipline and commodification arising in the process. Lucie Kolb demonstrates the connection between common intellectual activity in the art field, which takes place in this field but is not of it, and work on the conditions of production.
More information
IG Rote Fabrik, Lucie Kolb, Eva Weinmayr (Eds.)
Der radikale Katalog
Fabrikzeitung, 2021
Based on the exhibition “Reading the Library” (2021) at Sitterwerk St. Gallen, this issue of Fabrikzeitung focuses on the library catalog as a window to the world. It asks how we can make the constructed-ness of the windows visible and how we can critically look beyond the construction. Lucie Kolb and Eva Weinmayr have developed a study program that questions the library catalog from an intersectional perspective as a central element of the exhibition. With this issue of Fabrikzeitung, we put the syllabus into practice and explore its dimensions further.
Contributions by Emily Drabinski, Nora Schmidt, Shusha Niederberger, Karin K. Bühler, Sibylle Omlin, Roland Früh, Noemie Parisi, Feminist Search Tools, circuit, Eva Weinmayr, Lucie Kolb
More information
Lucie Kolb (Ed.)
Artwork as Institution. Stephen Willats
Brand-New-Life, 2019
For the first time, this publication brings together the Mosaic works by the British artist Stephen Willats, which were created in Great Britain and Finland in the 1990s. In these works, Willats uses the medium of the book to enter into an exchange with people and to create a space in neighborhoods, museums, and bookstores where social bonds can be established. It is a collaborative process through which Willats redefines the web of relationships between artist, artwork, audience and society; a process of instituting in which the artwork becomes its own institution.
Contributions by Jamie Allen, Bernhard Garnicnig, Elsa Himmer, Lucie Kolb and Stephen Willats
More information
Lucie Kolb, Barbara Preisig, Pablo Müller, Judith Welter (Eds.)
Fandom
Brand-New-Life, 2018
This book is for B-N-L members. By becoming a member you support the independent publishing project Brand-New-Life. Our goal is to encourage trenchant analytical writing about art and build a strong art critical voice for Switzerland and beyond.
With contributions published on Brand-New-Life between June 2016 to May 2018 by Mitchell Anderson, Mathis Gasser, Dorota Halina Gawęda, Lucie Kolb and Egle Kulbokaite, Stefan Geene, Eva Kenny, Elena Filipovic, Sarah Owens and Barbara Preisig, Regina Pfister, Ian Wooldridge and a new essay by Hannes Loichinger.
More information
Lucie Kolb, Barbara Preisig, Judith Welter (Eds.)
Paratexte. Zwischen Produktion, Vermittlung und Rezeption
Diaphanes, 2018
In der zeitgenössischen Kunst entstehen Werke, die in der paratextuellen Form von Einladungskarten, Ausstellungskatalogen, Zeitschriften, Webseiten und ähnlichem in Erscheinung treten oder die, scheinbar losgelöst vom Werk, nur noch in Form von Erzählungen weiter bestehen. Heute können Kunstwerke nicht mehr unabhängig von ihrem Rezeptionskontext gelesen werden, und Formen der Vermittlung selbst sind in die künstlerische Produktion eingegangen. An der Schnittstelle von Rezeption, institutioneller Rahmung und künstlerischem Format angesiedelt, verschränken sich in ihrer Gestaltung und Konzeption oftmals künstlerische, kuratorische und theoretische Praktiken. Im vorliegenden Buch werden paratextuelle Phänomene in der Kunst diskutiert; gleichzeitig wird dieser von Gérard Genette entlehnte Begriff auf die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen seiner Verwendbarkeit für die Untersuchung zeitgenössischer künstlerischer Praxis hin untersucht.
Mit Beiträgen von Beatrice von Bismarck, Annette Gilbert, Eva Kernbauer, Lucie Kolb, Antje Krause-Wahl, Rachel Mader, Barbara Preisig und Judith Welter.
Lucie Kolb, Christoph Lang, Wolfgang Ullrich, Judith Welter (Eds.)
Art Handling. Partituren der Logistik
JRP|Ringier, 2016
The term “art handling” describes aspects of the (professional) art scene that often remain invisible: installation and de-installation, technical and conservation-related documentation, storage, transport, and legal issues. Discussions around materiality reveal that infrastructure and logistics are of constitutive significance to the production and presentation of artworks. Over the course of the professionalization of the global art scene, the requirements relating to installation-based, ephemeral, and performative artworks, and how these are handled by the institutions, have continually become stricter, and issues of documentation have accordingly become more complex. On the one hand, new work concepts or works are changing the requirements for the “infrastructure” of museums. On the other hand, such “infrastructures” that now exist in many places are also directly stimulating the emergence of certain art forms. With contributions by Monika Domman, Peter Schneemann, Tobias Vogt, Beat Wyss, and others. The reader “Art Handling” was initiated as a result of the symposium of the same name held at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in 2014, and covers central aspects of this topic in essays and in a round-table discussion. Published with Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, and Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst, Lucerne.
Gabriel Flückiger, Lucie Kolb (Eds.)
On Curating, Nr. 21, (New) Institution(alism)
2014
The present issue of On Curating contributes to a critical re-engagement with New Institutionalism. This conceptual framework is used to encompass a series of curatorial, artistic and educational practices that, in various places around the turn of the Millennium, developed concrete ideas to change art institutions, their mandates and formats: art institutions were to function as sites of research and socially engaged spaces of debate. The fact that discussions about the function of and demands for change within art institutions have become increasingly topical in the context of the controversial and much criticized revised Swiss cultural policy for 2012-2016, and the European-wide tendency toward budget cuts, emphasizes the importance of a critical reevaluation of these artistic and curatorial practices. Although a majority of the experimentally active art institutions that were gathered under the term New Institutionalism have now been closed down or changed their orientation, thus implying that the phenomenon was bound up with a particular historical situation, its conditions, structures and implications clearly still resonate in the contemporary organization of art. For these reasons, the present issue intends to enable differentiated approaches to the phenomenon of New Institutionalism in its various forms, by including a multiplicity of voices and analytical approaches.
An introductory text by Lucie Kolb and Gabriel Flückiger considers New Institutionalism as a phenomenon of discourse, which is historically situated and evaluated as such. The text is accompanied by a self-reflexive email exchange between the authors. This is followed by a series of interviews, where involved actors such as Maria Lind, Charles Esche and Jonas Ekeberg discuss the forms and dimensions of critical institutional practice around New Institutionalism. They touch on aspects of curatorial networking as well as the problems with the concept and its effect on their various current working practices. Rachel Mader’s contribution introduces two contrasting analytic positions—the institution as an actualization of dominant ideologies on the one hand, and as dynamically constituted balancing act on the other—to discuss fields of movement and agency with/in institutions. Felix Vogel reviews the problem of an explicitly curatorial historiography of the exhibition, with particular attention to the specific qualities of the speaker position of the curator and the resulting structures of discourse. Further contributions by Alex Farquharson as well as Vanessa Joan Müller and Astrid Wege (European Kunsthalle) report on their own curatorial and institutional practices. Farquharson’s text is a reflection on how experimental practices can influence the activities of a larger-scale institution, while the text by Müller and Wege outlines the challenges and opportunities of institutional agency without a permanent space. A concluding conversation with Liesbeth Bik (Bik Van der Pol) deals with the potential agency of artists in art institutions and suggests strategies to activate the viewer.
With these contributions we would like to situate the critical and change-oriented efforts of New Institutionalism in a context that allows us to understand ways of thinking and speaking about the institutional organization of art as part of a fundamental discussion on the potential of contemporary art institutions.
These reflections are a first concrete output resulting from the thematic focus ‘institutional studies’ that has been built up and developed at the Competence Center Art and Public Spheres at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Art and Design, since 2012. Through different annual topics (2013: New Institutionalism; 2014: discursive institutions) and research projects (e.g. on self-organization in art under postfordist conditions) the structural, discursive and ideological context of art production and reception is analyzed and critically reflected.
Online Issue
Corinn Gerber, HIT, Lucie Kolb, Romy Rüegger (Eds.)
We would like to learn and we are working on a book…
Passenger Books, 2012
“…We would like to learn, and we are working on a book. The room it offers is circumscribed and structured by the book’s parameters: format, binding, jacket, title page, layout, preface, postface, table of contents, captions, cross headings, intertitles, annotations, editorial notes, appendix, blurb, names and accessories. This book is a classroom. We invite you to play this classroom together with us–a play to be played indoors or out, I wish to be a school–by a text or picture contribution; as a professor, student, guest, friend, reader, lecturer, listener, assistant, staff, animal, as equipment, materials, furniture, architecture or sound…” (Corinn Gerber, Lucie Kolb, Romy Rüegger)
The book features contributions by Ellen Blumenstein, bolwerK, Vincent Bonin, Irina Dumitrescu, Eva Egermann + Elke Krasny, Dani Gal + Achim Lengerer, Maaike Grouwenberg, Max Jorge Hinderer, Egija Inzule + Maja Wismer, Karl Larsson, Falke Pisano, Kristina Lee Podesva, Simone Schardt, Robin Simpson, Andrea Thal, Danna Vajda, Jacob Wren.
