Bettina Funcke
I am dedicated to careful thought and to making spaces for open discussion, and this guides my writing, teaching, and editing. Speaking generally, our task today is to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway has it. I seek to catch future thought, thought dislodged by the radical changes to the social fabric over the past few years.
I am currently working on a book about art’s place within what has been an increasingly inflamed cultural and political moment as well as a shift from analog to digital over the last two decades. I recently edited Kerstin Brätsch: Para Psychics, an artist book that gathers thinking from mystical traditions, both poetic, theoretical, and visual (Ludwigforum Aachen, 2022). In 2020, my translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s little-known Wörterbuch (Word Book) was published by Badlands Unlimited. In 2019, I conceived and edited an oral history of PS1, MoMA PS1: A History. From 2012–17 I was on the faculty of the Masters Program in Critical Theory and the Arts at the School of Visual Arts, New York. From 2015–16, I conducted a series of Artists Space Dialogues with artists and visual thinkers including Laura Poitras, Douglas Crimp, Sarah Morris, and John Knight. Between 2009 and 2012 I was Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13), for which I edited the book series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. In 2008, I founded Leopard Press with Wade Guyton; this small press evolved from the publishing collective Continuous Project (myself, Guyton, Joseph Logan, and Seth Price), which, beginning in 2003, released 13 issues.
In my writing, teaching, dialogues, and editorial projects, I situate artists and thinkers in the context of a rapidly changing public sphere in which art’s increasing popularity is proportional to its growing political impotence. My essays address topics ranging from facing our troubles to seeking better ways to live, our transformation from an analogue to a largely digital world, our current relationship to classic art ideas such as appropriation, the role of the readymade, institutional critique, and the cultural logic of the museum, as well as in-depth considerations of the work of Sarah Morris, Jeanette Mundt, Marlo Pascual, Jana Euler, Wade Guyton, and Gerard Byrne. I have reflected on the relationship of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology to art, and the reception of Jacques Rancière in the US, as well as conducting conversations with Robert Hullot-Kentor, Kelley Walker, Andrew Weiner, Carol Bove, Johanna Burton, and Peter Sloterdijk. My book Pop or Populus: Art between High and Low was published first in Germany and has been translated into English (Sternberg Press, 2009).
Supervisors: Peter Sloterdijk, Boris Groys
I am currently working on a book about art’s place within what has been an increasingly inflamed cultural and political moment as well as a shift from analog to digital over the last two decades. I recently edited Kerstin Brätsch: Para Psychics, an artist book that gathers thinking from mystical traditions, both poetic, theoretical, and visual (Ludwigforum Aachen, 2022). In 2020, my translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s little-known Wörterbuch (Word Book) was published by Badlands Unlimited. In 2019, I conceived and edited an oral history of PS1, MoMA PS1: A History. From 2012–17 I was on the faculty of the Masters Program in Critical Theory and the Arts at the School of Visual Arts, New York. From 2015–16, I conducted a series of Artists Space Dialogues with artists and visual thinkers including Laura Poitras, Douglas Crimp, Sarah Morris, and John Knight. Between 2009 and 2012 I was Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13), for which I edited the book series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. In 2008, I founded Leopard Press with Wade Guyton; this small press evolved from the publishing collective Continuous Project (myself, Guyton, Joseph Logan, and Seth Price), which, beginning in 2003, released 13 issues.
In my writing, teaching, dialogues, and editorial projects, I situate artists and thinkers in the context of a rapidly changing public sphere in which art’s increasing popularity is proportional to its growing political impotence. My essays address topics ranging from facing our troubles to seeking better ways to live, our transformation from an analogue to a largely digital world, our current relationship to classic art ideas such as appropriation, the role of the readymade, institutional critique, and the cultural logic of the museum, as well as in-depth considerations of the work of Sarah Morris, Jeanette Mundt, Marlo Pascual, Jana Euler, Wade Guyton, and Gerard Byrne. I have reflected on the relationship of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology to art, and the reception of Jacques Rancière in the US, as well as conducting conversations with Robert Hullot-Kentor, Kelley Walker, Andrew Weiner, Carol Bove, Johanna Burton, and Peter Sloterdijk. My book Pop or Populus: Art between High and Low was published first in Germany and has been translated into English (Sternberg Press, 2009).
Supervisors: Peter Sloterdijk, Boris Groys
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