This volume presents the first comprehensive collection of writings by expatriate Czech artist, Pavel B chler alongside extensive contextual material. As a teacher, critic and occasional curator B chler has made significant interventions into debates about the history of photography, theories of media, the paradoxes of art education and artistic research, the peculiarities of art as a form of work, and the politics and poetics of 'making nothing happen'. Spanning three decades, the selections are pooled in three parent sections that together cover seven thematic areas:
Section One - includes a sample of B chler's exhibitions, book reviews and a spread of his more systematic writings on analogue media and their afterlives in our digital age.
Section Two - gathers articles and lecture scripts on the topic of teaching art and design and interventions into cultural theory with a small 't'.
Section Three - presents a selection of more discursive, formally playful contributions to catalogues and artists' pages as well as an extensive new interview prepared during winter 2014-15 for this book.
Between each of these sections are Editor's Notes, which focus on the poetic status of language in the foreground of B chler's gallery works, to loop attention back to the interplay between what he writes about art and what he writes in his art.