QUE SAIS-JE ?: ARTIST’S PUBLICATIONS AND BOOKS FROM THE SERRALVES FOUNDATION’S COLLECTION

Bas Jan Ader, Arara, Robert Barry, Lothar Baumgarten, Alighieri e Boetti, Marcel Broodthaers, Stanley Brouwn, Paulo Bruscky, Ernst Caramelle, Isabel Carvalho, Tacita Dean, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ana Jotta, Fernando Lanhas, Charlotte Moth, Bruno Munari, Paulina Olowska, Adrian Piper, Ad Reinhardt, Dieter Roth, Allan Ruppersberg, Batia Suter, Richard Tuttle, Ricardo Valentim, Ben Vautier, Christopher Williams 

Que sais-je?- Is the world's most famous pocket encyclopaedia. Founded in 1941, this collection of books is designed to introduce the general public into a wide variety of different areas. Since it was founded in 1941 it has published 3800 titles by 2500 authors.

Several titles have been dedicated to art issues, but what link exists between this collection and the world of contemporary art?

Atlases, dictionaries, encyclopaedias are all forms of storing and transmitting knowledge, that have been repeatedly replicated (and parodied) by artists since the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. This interest is linked to the desire to reconsider what we classify as knowledge, information, communication and data-sharing.

At a time when schools, academies and lessons are models that are frequently employed by artists and curators, and in which eminently pedagogical formats - such as workshops, seminars, conferences - occupy a prominent place in many exhibitions, this exhibition - that presents artist’s publications and books produced between the 1960s and the present day - allows us to see how these resources always present alternative perspectives concerning what it may mean to impart knowledge. They force us to think about the manner in which the efficiency and amount of information of communication systems place art and the artistic gesture before the risk of being identified, categorized and transformed into information before they have even had the opportunity to begin to be art. This essentially concerns how curiosity can be castrated by information.

Libraries and books are deposits of knowledge. Artist's books refuse to accept the connection between knowledge and the clear authoritarian word that is obedient to the laws of science, in the belief that art is a space where one doesn’t teach or learn, but where one places into circulation the object that has to be produced, the path that has to be followed. The artist's book introduces a new level of complexity to the traditional cataloguing techniques of the library, disorientating its laws.

The artists and publishers invited to participate in this project have questioned the relationship between their activities and different models of knowledge transfer - as shown by their use of parody of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, teaching methods, and also a deliberate destruction of the information conveyed by magazines and newspapers. They are people who go in search of knowledge, people who move in the less practical side of life, people who try to invent a new world. However unlike the traditional association between knowledge and clarity, they try to produce objects that aren’t concerned whether or not they are immediately understood. They are motivated by a form of generating ideas and thinking differently about the intellectual territories with which we are familiar. In these works, an ironic allusion to systems of order reminds us that, in art, confusion may be a truly wonderful fact.

The exhibition is curated by Ricardo Nicolau and organized by the Serralves Museum, Porto, in collaboration with CAPC – the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bordeaux.

Image: Bruno Munari. Aconà Biconbi, 2007. Photo: Bettina Brach