Pierre Bismuth | Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them

Pierre Bismuth

Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them

Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2017

306 pp., 21.5 x 27 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Subtitled Towards a Catalogue Raisonné, this publication presents a novel and intriguing approach to a career overview. It is comprised of two volumes: a booklet accompanying Bismuth's 2015 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, and a would-be-catalogue raisonné.

Bismuth first came to my attention when the Art Gallery of York University presented his excellent Jungle Book Project in October of 2003. A year later, he won an Academy Award for contributing to the story for Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

A few years later, I invited him to contribute a soundwork to the second of the two Mercersound CDs I compiled for Mercer Union. He told me to find a video of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger and extract the audio. It doesn’t make the cut here, but I could very easily see him vaguely recalling the project, but not why. 

Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them - nine years old this month - is out-of-print, but can still be found for its original price.

"Just like the idiosyncratic mix of conceptualism and appropriation refined by Bismuth throughout his career, Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don't Remember Why I Did Them suggests how easily authorship and intentionality can be undermined, even erased—and Bismuth is not exempt from his own treatment.

For his exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, titled “Der Kurator, der Anwalt und der Psychoanalytiker,” Bismuth invited a different set of authorities to interpret and give order to his works: curator Luca Lo Pinto, lawyer Laurent Caretto, and psychoanalyst Angel Enciso y Bergé. Each has contributed a text to the booklet that focuses on a selection of works and themes according to his own interests and training. Dessislava Dimova's essay provides a general overview of Bismuth's artistic project, discussing the importance of plasticity, iconography, and simulacra in his visual economy. This underlying instability and ambivalence is also reflected in the catalogue raisonné itself: following the example of Honoré de Balzac, who revised his writings on printer's proofs, this publication is released in the process of its own making. It is a work in progress—an incomplete history of the artist's practice that should be supplemented by its readers.”

- publisher’s statement