Thinking about it takes a reprint of Alfred North Whitehead’s “Objects & Subjects” as the point of departure for five essays and an artist contribution by Audrey Cottin. It is a delicate, pocket-sized book that travels easily and is meant to stimulate free-form contemplation over hard analysis. There are two main questions the readers can bring to the book: they can wonder about new potentials and needs for thinking about subject-object relations in art, or they can ask what it is that sets artistic thinking apart from other types of cognitive engagements with the world.
Seven contributors bring six perspectives: Janine Armin pauses on how thinking in art may transpose the self; Brian G. Henning analyzes Whitehead’s proposition; Larissa Harris and Ajay Kurian talk about ontological turns; Jonas Zakaitis tries out a spam stream of consciousness; and Sarah Demeuse & Manuela Moscoso envision contemporary artistic thinking as a shifting, untimely grid; Audrey Cottin shares visual research materials from her ongoing project, O.perating T.heatre.
This book project is edited by the curatorial office Rivet and is the fourth iteration of Quarter System an exhibition organized at the University Museum in Pamplona, Spain in spring 2013.