The publication investigates forms of authorship that are unstable, digressive, self-reflexive, and open to interruption. Sterne’s novel is relevant here because it famously turns narration itself into a medium:

through typographic experiments, blank and marbled pages, inserted diagrams, missing chapters, and deliberate deviations from linear storytelling. The catalogue transfers this logic into modern and contemporary art, where authorship becomes less a fixed position than a genre, a method, and a field of negotiation.

Rather than presenting Shandyism as a purely literary category, the book traces its effects across art, literature, film, theory, and popular culture. It brings together exhibition documentation with texts and artistic contributions, opening an intermedial debate on digression, parody, quotation, self-commentary, and the construction of both authorship and readership. In this sense, Shandyismus is not only an exhibition catalogue, but a theoretical and artistic reader on narrative instability and the productive disorder of form.

Shandyismus. Autorschaft als Genre was published in 2007 in connection with the exhibition of the same name at the Vienna Secession and the Kunsthaus Dresden. Edited by Helmut Draxler, the volume takes Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as its point of departure and examines “Shandyism” as an artistic, literary, and cultural strategy. The exhibition at the Secession ran from 22 February to 15 April 2007.