Continuous Projet #8

The Centre national de l'estampe et de l'art imprimé (Cneai) invited us, as Continuous Project, to spend a month in Paris in the spring of 2006 in order to realize a publication and an exhibition.
The art world tends to celebrate the image. Art magazines and books are packed with photographs, advertisements, glossy colors. This book, we decided, would be black and white, and focused on the word, on texts. We were at the time thinking a lot about critical theory and how it relates to art. Loosely speaking, the relationship between art and politics. More specifically, art and spectatorship. We invited writers and artists to contribute pieces along these lines. We didn't want to ask what kind of theory is appropriate for art, but how art reacts to theory. The pieces in the book approach this intersection of interests from very different angles. They include a lecture by philosopher Jacques Rancière, never before printed in English; text pieces by artists, including Allen Ruppersberg, Mai-Thu Perret, Matthew Brannon, Claire Fontaine, Dan Graham, and Melanie Gilligan; essays by writers such as Johanna Burton, Maria Muhle, Warren Niesluchowski, Bettina Funcke, Pablo Lafuente, and Simon Baier; reprints and new translations of work by Alexander Kluge, Charles Fourier, and Serge Daney; a couple of poems; and a symposium we held in which we invited American religious scholar Joshua Dubler to present contemporary Evangelical Christianity and its uses of mass or popular culture. Texts by Claire Fontaine and August Bebel appear in both English and the original French.
The exhibition was directly linked to the book and its questions. Because Continuous Project is a collaborative group that often works with others, we invited several artists and writers to make interventions in the Cneai space. Japanese performance artist Ei Arakawa and German critic Simon Baier staged a private performance in Cneai's attic archive room, revolving around a Donald Judd essay on art and internationalism that until now had been available only in a rare Japanese exhibition catalogue. Photodocumentation of the performance highlights the process of "installing" Judd's text over the course of a day. Swedish artist Fia Backström, who often engages with artists and printed materials while reflecting the form of exhibitions per se, responded to Cneai's archive of printed matter by highlighting, through posters and a video, a 1982 issue of the artist's magazine Intervention, which critiqued that year's Documenta and ultimately questioned the notion of engaged art. Artist Claire Fontaine and curator Eva Svennung, both Paris-based, were invited to collaborate on a selection of French-language books to be sold during the exhibition in a makeshift bookstore, where they were presented on Backström's custom-made tablecloths.
With the publication of Continuous Project #8, the final "issue," Continuous Project becomes Consultants.
August 2006