In the last decade of the 20th century, a number of private collections were transferred to sovereign states to be housed in public museums, the institutions that anchor the cultural and tourist infrastructure of the modern state. A familiar story in many ways, and the starting point of Walid Raad’s expedition into the history of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Among the wealth of objects on display in the museum and deep in its archives, Raad finds extremely strange stories, fictional documents, and puzzling artifacts: a 16th-century Persian carpet that is heavier than its weight; paintings of clouds that burst from the backs of Old Master paintings; a large wooden structure known as the “flat corner with its angel attractors”; medieval gold and silver goblets that attract one type of arthropod and repel all others; an American painter who painted two exact copies of each of his 120 swamp and marsh landscapes. Some of these stories came to Raad from this historical world, others from a place called fiction, and others from the realm of undeath. He attributes their supernatural character to the distorted expression of the twisted historical, political, and economic forces unleashed in this world; and/or the conditions surrounding the transfer of great wealth from private to public; and/or the storage, display, and commercialization of technologies created and deployed over the past two centuries in the cultural realm (museums, fairs, auctions, festivals, catalogs, etc.). Essentially, Raad assumes that the strangeness of artifacts must be the manifestation of political, economic, ideological, scientific, cultural, and social events in this world.
Brought to life in a slippery narrative marathon—a performance whose lavishly illustrated script is the core of this book—Raad draws readers into following him through the tunnels of conjuncture he constructed. As he reflects on the potential legacy of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections and their relation to Western and non-Western art history, Raad makes a bold proposition with broad consequences: the urgent task of creating just and transformative cultural institutions also relies on the ability of artists to reframe the imaginative, metaphysical, and fictional horizons of world-making.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition Walid Raad: Cotton Under My Feet. This 174-page illustrated catalogue includes the complete script of Walid Raad's performance and is also provided with a rich selection of archival images and complemented by an extensive research bibliography. The essays by the exhibition's curator Daniela Zyman and art historian Eva Ebersberger unravel Raad's ritual of encounters, which mediates between history, its actualization and the fictional. The writer and thinker Jalal Toufic delves deeper into the labyrinth and the realm of the undead, central concepts of Raad's project.
With introductions by TBA21 President Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza and Guillermo Solana, Artistic Director of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Published and distributed by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.
Introduction: Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza and Guillermo Solana.
Texts: Eva Ebersberger, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic and Daniela Zyman
Language: Texts in English.
Paperback binding.
ISBN: 9783753301037
Dimensions: 26 x 20 cm.
Pages: 174.
Individually shrink-wrapped.
