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OLIVER KIELMAYER

Oliver Kielmayer is the director of the Kunsthalle Winterthur since 2006. He teaches art history at F+F School for Art and Media Design in Zurich. In 2005, he was co-curator of the IBCA - International Biennial of Contemporary Art- in Prague. In 2004, he founded WeAreTheArtists, a network project that focuses on open discourse and authentic communication about art by means of a homepage and a free newspaper. Some of his recent books include Meeting Köken Ergun (2011), The Telephone Book Special Edition (2010) and Aggression (2008), all published by Kunsthalle Winterthur.

Niklas Luhmann. Art as a Social System. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

In the preface, Luhmann states that he didn’t write this book because of his love for art, but because his theory about social systems couldn’t ignore the existence of art. I always liked this approach; primarily because it’s far away from the usual self-centred attitude of contemporary art protagonists, and secondly, because it unmistakably states the reality and necessity of art. Being part of a comprehensive social theory, it is not easy to understand Luhmann; but contrary to the writings of Kant, whose holistic ambition was similar, the language is at least contemporary. At art schools, students still tend to read a lot of Rancière, Derrida or Bourriaud. Their writings are not easier to understand and very often dwell on the specific little details of aesthetic discourse. Instead of being lost in theoretical particularities, it’s definitely worth the effort to understand the big questions about structure and function of aesthetic discourse first. Reading Luhmann made me understand the basics; and it made me realise that a lot of the current theoretical writings about art are totally superfluous.

Bret Easton Ellis. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

I had always admired people telling me how they could not stop reading a book. I have read many books, but be it Proust or Joyce, I never had problems with laying it aside. With American Psycho it changed; it was the first book that I just wanted to go on reading. Of course it has to do with my weakness for power, glamour and the abyss of human perfection, but at the same time the book is a masterpiece of language: the dialogues are just hilarious and the descriptions of fashion and stupid pop songs are as thorough as the descriptions of the brutal murders. The latter made me experience what empathy actually means. And it revealed something that is crucial when it comes to art in general: No picture can be so brutal as the ones we have inside of us.

Volker Harlan, What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys. East Sussex: Clairview Books, 2004.

With the end of Modernism, the heyday of artists’ writings seemed to be over; artists were no longer artists and art theorists at the same time. Beuys, however, was the big exception. His concept of ‘Social Sculpture’ was revolutionary, even if it wasn’t a completely new invention but based on the philosophical tradition of German Idealism. He understood the human society as a sculpture which is shaped by all human beings and concluded: “Everyone is an artist.” This saying is of course one of the most misunderstood, because Beuys was not so much referring to reality but to an ideal. Beuys never puts all of his thoughts into one book, but communicated them in numerous interviews and performative lectures. The dialogues are simple to understand but substantial at the same time and sometimes truly amusing. The book, originally published in German in 1986, definitely taught me to see things in a wider context and to appreciate creative performance outside the arts.