The box is an intellectually challenging form. It stands close to the book, gathering words, images, objects, and fragments within a finite space. Its contents remain loose, their relations mobile. A whole takes shape without settling into a final articulation.
Duchamp discovered in the box a form unusually suited to his artistic thought. The Green Box gathers notes, diagrams, photographs, and facsimiles around the Large Glass, which he called “definitively unfinished.” The box gives this unfinishedness coherence, holding the work together while keeping its articulation in motion.
The way out of the box may lead through the box itself.
Together, we will follow the box through four encounters. With Jean-François Lyotard and Octavio Paz, we approach the Green Box and the Large Glass. With the Boîte-en-valise, we encounter the box as a portable exhibition. Finally, with Johannes Cladders, Joseph Beuys, and the Kassettenkataloge, the box enters the museum as an artistic and institutional proposition, changing the terms of both catalogue and exhibition.
This progression reveals another order for art. Thinking the box changes the way we think.
Thursdays
03, 10, 17, 24 September
18:30–20:30
Galerie Linger – Art, Books & Press
Four sessions: €120
Session 1 – Transformations
With Jean-François Lyotard, we enter the machinery of the Green Box and the Large Glass. Words, diagrams, images, and mechanisms pass into one another, allowing thought to become part of the work’s operation. The question is how an unfinished work can continue to generate its own articulations.
Session 2 – Appearance
With Octavio Paz, we approach Duchamp through erotic machinery, delay, chance, and appearance. The Green Box opens a field in which fragments gather and acquire meaning through changing constellations. Artistic thought begins to assume a material form.
Session 3 – The Valise
With Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, an oeuvre becomes portable. Miniatures and reproductions gather into a suitcase that travels, unfolds, and becomes an exhibition. The box holds together artwork, reproduction, archive, collection, and display, proposing another way for an oeuvre to exist as a whole. The gesture travels further with George Maciunas and the Fluxus Fluxkits, where the box becomes collective – gathering of works, objects, scores, and actions by different artists into a single constellation.
Session 4 – Box Catalogues
With Johannes Cladders and Joseph Beuys, the box enters museum practice. Beginning with their first box catalogue in 1967, the Kassettenkataloge gather objects, images, texts, multiples, and documents into a new kind of publication. The catalogue becomes an artistic form, changing the terms of the exhibition itself.
The history of the box remains unfinished.
SESSION HOST
Pawel Jankiewicz is a writer, curator, and researcher based in Berlin. He is the founder of Galerie Linger – Art, Books & Press, a gallery, bookshop, and discursive space devoted to pictorial logic and the unfinished questions of the avant-garde.
A graduate of the University of Łódź's Faculty of Law, his early research explored artistic freedom, censorship, and art scandals. His work moves between writing, curatorial practice, and artistic research, with a particular interest in the forms through which art produces thought. Together with Pablo Arboleda, he initiated the call for Ruin Studies in The Munich Social Science Review (MSSR), making the case for ruination as a field of inquiry in its own right.
*To sign up for this workshop, inquire at galerielinger@gmail.com
**All materials are included and will be provided upon registration.
