Publication date: October 2014
European School of Visual Art (EESI)
134 rue de Bordeaux – 16000 Angoulême
26 rue Jean Alexandre – 86000 Poitiers
Each year, the postgraduate platform Document and Contemporary Art (launched in October 2010 at the initiative of the European School of Visual Arts) publishes a set of documents linked to the program’s different lines of research in the form of a journal. Contributors include the program’s researchers and artists as well as guests it hosted over the course of the year (artists, producers, curators, theorists). Editorial formats include working documents, collective conversations, theoretical texts and visual essays. The journal publishes texts in their original language (French, English, Italian).
Volume 4, forthcoming in October, focuses on issues of “Methodological Slippage.” Geology provides a rich metaphorical vocabulary that has been widely taken up by practitioners in fields often far removed from the earth sciences. From Aby Warburg to Jacques Derrida via Gilles Deleuze’s “geology of morals,” the evocative precision of the geological lexicon has made it possible to develop a seismic image of the deep-seated shifts underway in different fields of knowledge. But it is perhaps with respect to art that the slippage on the previously familiar terrain is most striking, for not only has art sundered itself from everything that previously ensured its substance and self-evidence—wresting itself from its specific field—but seems to have undergone a veritable methodological landslip, as it finds itself relishing a voluntary loss of control even as it lays claim to new-found investigative function as a mode of knowledge production. Whereas method is often seen as a pre-established guideline set out in order to verify a hypothesis, art seems to have made methodological slippage and deliberate—if not entirely controlled—drift into its modus operandi. What are the conditions of possibility of slippery methodology? What results does it yield? To address such questions, and perhaps better understand the new heuristic function to which art is increasingly laying claim, the metaphor needs to be taken at face value, which begs a very empirical and pragmatic question: How exactly does one slide?
This issue will include texts and contributions by Joan Ayrton, Can Altay, Angélique Buisson, Érik Bullot, Gaëlle Cintré, Louis Henderson, Jérôme Laniau, Lucretius, Paul Taylor, João Vieira Torres, and Stephen Wright.
Volume 1, published in October 2011, included a dossier on experimental Italian film and the device of the screen, conceived and written by Lucia Aspesi (Paolo Gioli, Giovanni Martedì, Marinella Pirelli), a study by Zoé Baraton on smooth-talkers and pitchmen in the history of cinema, and an interview with Michel Siffre by Sophie Valero. Texts and contributions by Sabrina Grassi-Fossier, Érik Bullot, Alejandra Riera, Arne De Boever, Nora Martirosyan, Till Roeskens, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, and Rebecca Baron.
Volume 2, published in October 2012, included a dossier on “performative documents,” with contributions from Franck Leibovici, Riccardo Giacconi and Andrea Morbio, Sabrina Grassi-Fossier, Érik Bullot, Jurga Zabukaite, Joan Ayrton, an interview with François Bovier and Adeena Mey conducted by Lucia Aspesi, and a “paper-film” by Eliane Esther Bots.
Volume 3, published in October 2013, featured a dossier on “paper film” with contributions from Sabrina Grassi-Fossier, Érik Bullot, Stephen Wright, Gaëlle Cintré, Laura Huertas Millán, Jonathan Rubin, and Nataliya Tchermalykh, along with working notes by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni, and essays by Alexei Yourchak, Arne De Boever and Olivia C. Harrison.
Purchase copies of the Cahiers du post-diplôme online here.
The European School of Visual Art is a fine art academy, granting degrees at the Bachelor, Masters and Doctoral levels, supported by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council and the cities of Angoulême and Poitiers.
