The present catalogue Measuring the World. Heterotopias and Knowledge Spaces in Art casts light on the human desire for order and systematization, and man’s urge to measure his world. In his essay, Hans Dieter Huber discusses the structure of order and knowledge in museums. Elke Krasny’s paper is about cartography and navigation in a world increasingly obsessed with location. Martin Guttmann approaches the issue in terms of linguistic philosophy, and discovers an ontological obligation for the understanding of art. Bettina Habsburg-Lothringen discusses with curator Peter Pakesch and Katrin Bucher Trantow the concept of the exhibition, artistic strategies of systematization and the links between the sciences and contemporary art. These articles are supplemented by work texts arranged alphabetically as in a lexicon, highlighting the system of the exhibition as a sum of the individual parts selected.

German/English
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
Publication date: 10th June 2011

Museums systematize, collect, group, ratiocinate and exclude. They draw up reference systems, build maps out of them and arrange themselves into miniature portrayals of the world. On the occasion of the bicentenary of the Universalmuseum Joanneum, the Kunsthaus Graz explores the subject of museums as heterotopias, ‘other spaces’ where local rules apply, and accumulating and contrasting can become a critical strategy outside time.