Issa Samb E-Book

Issa Samb

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 44

Beschreibung

 Issa Samb (*1945) ist ein senegalesischer Bildhauer, Maler, Schauspieler, Philosoph, Performancekünstler, Schriftsteller, Kritiker und Mitbegründer der interdisziplinären Initiative Laboratoire Agit-Art, die den Kunstdiskurs des Landes entscheidend beeinflusst hat. Das Notizbuch enthält Zeichnungen, faksimilierte Notizen und einen charakteristischen, kryptisch-elliptischen Text des Künstlers, der lose aneinandergereihte Zitate, u. a. von Politikern wie Aimé Césaire, mit assoziativen Gedankengängen zum Zustand der Welt und besonders Afrikas verbindet.  Als eine Ansammlung realer Ereignisse und der Gedanken und Empfindungen, die diese auslösen, überschreitet der Text  die  Grenzen zwischen Dichtung, Pamphlet, Roman und Tagebuch und zeugt von der Verpflichtung des Künstlers gegenüber seiner unmittelbaren Umwelt.   Mit einer Einführung von Koyo Kouoh (*1967), Künstlerische Leiterin der von ihr gegründeten RAW MATERIAL COMPANY in Dakar und Agentin der dOCUMENTA (13).  

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº095: Issa Samb

Introduction / Einführung: Koyo Kouoh

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Member of Core Agent Group, Head of Department / Mitglied der Agenten-Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

Editorial Assistant / Redaktionsassistentin: Cordelia Marten

Proofreading / Korrektorat: Stefanie Drobnik, Sam Frank

Translations / Übersetzungen: Sandra Reid;

Introduction / Einführung: Clemens Krümmel

Graphic Design / Grafische Gestaltung: Leftloft

Junior Graphic Designer: Daniela Weirich

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Monika Reinhardt

E-Book Implementation / E-Book-Produktion: LVD GmbH, Berlin

© 2012 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Koyo Kouoh; Issa Samb

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: View of / Ansicht des Monte Verità, ca. 1906(detail / Detail), Fondo Harald Szeemann. Archivio Fondazione Monte Verità inArchivio di Stato del Cantone Ticino; all other illustrations / alle anderen Abbildungen: © Issa Samb

documenta und Museum Fridericianum

Veranstaltungs-GmbH

Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Kassel

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.documenta.de

Chief Executive Officer / Geschäftsführer: Bernd Leifeld

Published by / Erschienen im

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Zeppelinstrasse 32, 73760 Ostfildern

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.hatjecantz.com

ISBN 978-3-7757-3124-9 (E-Book)

ISBN 978-3-7757-2944-4 (Print)

Gefördert durch die

funded by the German Federal

Cultural Foundation

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Introduction

Koyo Kouoh

Issa Samb is a Senegalese sculptor, painter, actor, philosopher, performance artist, writer, and critic. For decades, he has been creating a galaxy of interconnected universes in which the signs of everyday life are transformed into altars to personal obsessions.

One of those obsessions is politics and politicians, in particular Senegalese politicians, whom he has frequently described as mindless people. In keeping with his readings of Marxist philosophy and aesthetics, many of his sculptural assemblages take the paradigmof revolutionaries—Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Lech Wałe˛sa, the Black Panthers—as their subject matter, suggesting the possibility of harnessing the energy of the visual arts to support the struggle of the weak and disadvantaged.

In 1974, along with filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty andan interdisciplinary group of artists, writers, musicians, actors, and filmmakers, Samb founded the Laboratoire Agit-Art. Its multi-disciplinary actions were directed against the formalism of the École de Dakar, a style of art practice developed at the National Art School of Dakar and drenched in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s philosophy of Négritude, which promotes the difference between African and European in the same way that it strictly respects the separation of forms and disciplines in the use of African symbolism. Aiming to transform the nature of artistic practice from a formalist, object-bound fixation to a process that is based on experimentation and agitation, ephemerality rather than permanence, political and social ideas rather than aesthetic notions, Agit-Art developed a distinct “aesthetic of the social.” Audience participation was paramount to the group’s work, which privileged communicative acts over the embodied object. Neither utopian nor self-referential, it grounded its actions in the immediate sociopolitical situation. Today, many of the founding members have passed away, but the group’s spirit persists and continues to be materialized in all of Samb’s work.

The following text by Samb is written in the cryptic, elliptical, elusive, evanescent, and erratic style that he has developed throughout his career. It begins with quotations in no particular order. The first one refers to an imaginary HE who is nevertheless a HE whom everyone is supposed to know: the African politician, and precisely the Senegalese politician. The quotations continue with a story that took place in Dakar in the mid-1980s, when the mayor had all stray dogs slaughtered because one of them had bitten his daughter. Samb reads this event as a process of the manipulation and brutalization of society, juxtaposing it with the actions of Hitler. Far-fetched? Exaggerated? Perhaps not. One can see it as a perfect example of associative thinking and writing: the line of thought begins with the slaughter of dogs, goes on to the German shepherd, an animal that for Samb has the same value as a human being, and leads to Hitler, the personification of cruelty and manipulation.

The text ends with the death of Steve Jobs and the Internet’s incapacity to solve emotional problems or to cure diseases, cancer in particular. Samb has neither an e-mail account, a bank account, nor a cell phone, does not watch TV or indulge in the modern frenzy of life and the constant pursuit of wealth and recognition. And yet one cannot fail to recognize the incisive character of his observations on the course of the world: how systems develop, how people develop, how they behave, how they relate, how they feel. Le sentir(“to feel,” not the feeling itself), as he often states, is the most important human activity. Themes such as affection, commitment, faith and beliefs, sorrows and joys, failures and success, are continually