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Post-War Germany and Objective Chance

This book was written in English and German for Tacita Dean’s exhibition at Villa Oppenheim, Berlin, December 2008, and published by Steidl, one of the foremost international publishers of art books. It followed in its design a slip-case of seven books published for Dean’s Paris exhibition, 2003, which has been considered as a mile-stone of art publishing. The decision for Dean’s 2011 Vienna (Museum of Modern Art MuMoK) exhibition was, however, to let the second slip case be grey. Lerm Hayes book was thus reprinted in 2011 as part of Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey (Steidl, MuMoK), and there stands alongside writings by Dean herself, Peter Bürger, Douglas Crimp, Marina Warner and others, who on occasion refer to it.

The book lets a dense and previously unacknowledged web of references emerge in Dean’s work through direct and indirect reference to Beuys and Sebald. Her An Aside exhibition, which had been praised as an “arbitrary”, concept-less exhibition, is established as following immensely stringent and fruitful lines of enquiry.

In evidencing through example how the protagonists, representatives of three generations and two art forms, relate their works to their field of enquiry and to one another, Lerm Hayes built on her on Joseph Beuys research (co-edited Beuysian Legacies 2011). To describe and theorize how artists relate their rigorously researched works to their sources, Lerm Hayes used André Breton’s term “objective chance”.