Wolfgang Scheppe

The Arsenale Institute in Venice mission is the preservation of an extensive archive of documents from the early avant-garde of the 20th century, whose essential epistemological interest was always directed at the figures of thought of negation. The political and artistic traces of the international Situationist movement and its environment are one of the focal points in this collection. Established with an initial donation of documents and works of art from Guy Debord’s widow, the Situationist archive and has grown to become the most extensive and exhaustive collection in Europe. Excerpts from the collection have been presented in several exhibitions, most recently in a large show entitled The Most Dangerous Game at the HKW in Berlin in 2018. For the accompanying volumes, Scheppe worked with Roberto Ohrt and other contributors to reconstruct Guy Debord’s never-realized concept of a “Bibliotheque Situationniste de Silkeborg” in its entirety for the first time.

The four-year research project on the scientific history of racism since the 18th century, focusing on the influential but unknown ethnologist and race theorist Bernhard Struck, resulted in a 2016 exhibition at the Lipsiusbau in Dresden and an extensive catalog distributed as a newspaper. It bore the subtitle On the Aesthetics of Racism. The presentation centered on Struck’s obsessive image card index, which sought to prove racial alterity from the empiricism of perceptual evidence with a taxonomy of supposed phenotypes and their quantitative recording through metrical survey data. The ideological rationality of this practice still is the reason for the unaltered popular conceptions of the foreign other who is to be excluded, even in the present. The ever-political demarcations constituting them in the first place congeal with the evidence of perception to yield a quasi-natural rationale for the exclusion of alterity.

In April 2014, the exhibition of the same name opened on the reception floor of the Residenzschloss (Royal Palace) in Dresden, which had not yet been renovated and restored following damage during the war. It was accompanied by a three-part book object, the core of which was dedicated to George Kubler’s dissident art theory as a point of departure for intellectual intuition as the basis of all exhibiting activities. To this end, it juxtaposed the central block of works by the conceptual artist Franco Vimercati with a sequence of forms conceived according to Kubler’s theories, consisting of 99 bowls from all geographical provenances and eras. The exercise addressed museological questions about the cognitively appropriate form of display in an imagined museum of the future. This programmatic exhibition opened a series of exhibitions entitled Propositions after the place where it was held – in its baroque designation the Proposition Hall.

Supermarket of the Dead and Sacred Goods are implementations of a long-term project initiated in 2014 on the representational magic of brand consumption as reflected in more recent forms of the archaic Chinese fire ritual of burning paper simulacra to transfer goods and valuables to the realm of the dead. Although this popular custom known as Joss paper in the designation of the western world or more accurately Zhǐzā has been politically opposed for most of its history, based only on oral tradition outside of any ecclesiastically codified religion, it is thoroughly integrated in daily life and has existed as an unbroken practice for 2,000 years – and today primarily represents the current hegemonic form of commodity fetishism. The research project was encapsulated in a three-volume book published in multiple languages and exhibited in Prague, Dresden and Zurich among other locations.

Done Book. is the publication accompanying a project for the British Pavilion at the 2010 Architecture Biennial in Venice. It compares John Ruskin’s visual episteme of urban analysis with the lifelong photographic survey of a Venetian vaporetto conductor begun in the 1960s. The book relates the form of intellectual intuition (Intellektuelle Anschauung) practiced by both to the iconic fictionalization of the touristically economized place of longing. As mirrored in other world cities, this dynamic has ​exemplary transformed Venice into a consolidated pictorial perception.

Wolfgang Scheppe (born 23 May 1955 in Munich, Germany) is a German philosopher, author and curator who since 1996 has lived and taught in the USA, Switzerland and Italy. His work as a theorist frequently includes the medium of exhibitions taking a form described as “theory installations”. Since 2009, he has directed the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice, which emerged from the Università Iuav di Venezia and was founded with Lewis Baltz.