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"The Office in the Studio. The Administration of Modernism" Symposium at the Universität Jena (January 23-24, 2009). This interdisciplinary conference is devoted to the way the office and its administrative practices figure in 20th-century art. A space for the production, administration, and display of knowledge, the modern office "which may redouble as an artist's studio" is, we contend, one of the crucibles of 20th-century modernism. An instance of the outmoded and on the cusp of disappearing into the virtuality of a computer interface, the office and its media--from the card index to the telephone, from the typewriter to the filing cabinet--has provided a vital impulse for modernism's ambition to generate and reproduce order and to administrate representation. In its devotion to what occurs, early 20th-century avant-garde art--whose anti-bureaucratic rhetoric is decidedly overdetermined--reflects the office as a space where the production of symbols can be experienced as unfolding outside of signification (l’écriture automatique). In postwar modernist practice, from pop art to situationism and, especially, conceptualism, the archival, office-like deployment and administration of symbols, particularly words and numbers, recalls both the avant-garde's anti-bureaucratic reflexes and its ambition to produce ordered registrations that dispense with narrative and meaning (Hanne Darboven: "I write, but I describe nothing").
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