Manual
Catalogue
Andreas Schett, Moussa Kone (ed.): Manual. Kerber Artbooks, Berlin/Bielefeld/Leipzig, 2011
32.4 x 24.3 cm, 188 pages, 106 illustrations, softcover with flaps, thread-bound. German and English language. Graphic design by Klaus Mayr for Circus, Büro für Kommunikation und Gestaltung, Innsbruck.
ISBN 978-3-86678-547-2
The main section of this handbook contains seven series of drawings; an appendix contains a number of further art works (including those completed in collaboration with other artists) and an interview with Moussa Kone.
Each chapter begins with a text and one of the colours of the rainbow. Exhibition views are frequently provided between the individual drawings, yielding surprising associations. The finely dissected works lose much of their wealth of detail when reduced in size, which is why full-size details of the drawings are inserted bleeding off the page - and revealing the drawer's gaze to the reader.
FOR USE
An artist’s first major catalogue is either an encyclopedic compilation of their works to date enriched with symbolic capital, i.e. more or less discrete allusions to prestigious museums, galleries, prizes and awards, stipends, curators and authors, or it is an artist’s book, that – extraordinarily airy-fairy and deliberately unclassifiable for a specialist audience – celebrates itself as an apparently self-satisfying work, and so is surreptitiously geared all the more hopefully to generating value on the art market.
A reputation-making gambit or noncompliance-chic – this book is neither of the above. It is the manual of an artist who has long reflected the mechanisms of art production and reception in his work. It is a friendly and openhearted invitation to viewers to permit themselves to be guided by a kind of instruction book through different, incompletely illustrated blocks of works and through a range of texts – polyphony instead of a monograph. […]
Andreas Schett, Manual, p.6, 2011
Manual contains texts by Christa Benzer, Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, Kurt Kladler, Fiona Liewehr, Oona Lochner, Karin Pernegger, Ursula Maria Probst, Nina Schedlmayer, Andreas Schett, Monika Schwärzler, Ulli Seegers, Erwin Uhrmann and Rolf Wienkötter.
