Published on the occasion of the exhibition Shandyismus, Autorschaft als Genre curated by Helmut Draxler, Secession, Vienna, 22 February–15 April, 2007.

The exhibition Shandyismus. Autorschaft als Genre refers to Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman from the 18th century. It will focus on Shandyism as a phenomenon or position, reflecting the diversity of points of contact with the media. A number of existing art works will be shown that express the methodological idiom of Shandyism. At the same time, artists have been invited to develop a “Shandyesque intervention” for the exhibition.

Artists: Monika Baer, Georg Baselitz, Bernadette Corporation, Max Bill, Marcel Broodthaers, Marcel Duchamp, Jack Goldstein, Gareth James, Sergej Jensen, Chuck Jones, David Jourdan, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Olia Lialina und Dragan Espenschied, Robert Frank, Martin Kippenberger, Michael Krebber, Christian Philipp Müller, Michael Schuster, Josef Strau, Franz West sowie , Diedrich Diederichsen, Michael Dreyer, Clemens Krümmel, Franz Reitinger, Drehli Robnik, André Rottmann, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Tanja Widmann.

Texts: Diedrich Diederichsen, Helmut Draxler, Michael Dreyer, Clemens Krümmel, Shaun Regan, Franz Reitinger, Drehli Robnik, André Rottmann, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Peter de Voogd, Tanja Widmann.

This volume assesses a wonderful body of work that encompasses installations, films, artist’s books and specimens from the artist’s vast archives of ephemera. Like Marcel Broodthaers and Susan Hiller, Bloom has a creative attraction toward taxonomy and museology: the installation “Greed” (1988), for instance, is comprised of a chair, an empty frame and a photograph of a museum gallery with a seated guard. An example of one of her own collections is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov’s writings for which Bloom redesigned all of the book covers, referring both to herself and Nabokov as collectors (he obsessively collected editions of his own books) and in the process interposing herself as artist. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations to add new elements, resisting and upsetting the orderliness of a conventional artistic chronology. The Collections of Barbara Bloom includes essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman and expands a project developed as part of Bloom’s Wexner Art Center Residency Award in 1998.