In September 2001, the artist Jochen Gerz invited six artists and six writers to respond with either an image or an essay to the question: “What could a hitherto unknown Art be like, corresponding to your view of art today?” Each participant also proposed a successor, whose contribution was to replace his own comment after fourteen days. For the period of one year, or more exactly, 52 weeks, one ‘generation’ of twelve contributions each was placed onto a webpage, thus forming 26 ‘generations’ totalling 312 contributions (from 37 countries): 156 images and 156 texts = 1 Anthology of Art.

Almost all contributions have been created especially for this project, and regardless of their initial appearance, they all became part of the anthology in digital form. Yet it is this process of alienation through photographing, scanning, digitalizing, publishing and printing – for the purpose of this exhibition, each contribution was printed on a sheet of fabric measuring 1 x 1 meter – which reflects most clearly on the question of the role of art.

The question for the future, and for art as a sign of a hitherto unknown world was posed by artists, theoreticians and institutions even before the beginning of the Modern era.

The exhibition “Anthology of Art” shows how radical the answers to these basic questions have changed towards the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries: it presents art and its discourse, the entanglement of image and text not as a collection of individual comments but as a pluralistic piece, a constituted network that appeals to rethink aesthetic processes as well as theory and practice in our global society.