++++ At first glance into a small side room in one of the upper storeys of the Kunstverein, it does not look as though this were still a part of the exhibition, Manifesta 4, but rather a museum shop or a reading corner. Revolver, the Archive for Present-day Art, simply exhibits various publications. Books, catalogues, journals, sound recording of the most diverse origin, but always, at least tangentially, all from the area of art, lie around on the tables where they can be read or browsed through.
A table of books for sale as a contribution to an exhibition? The Manifesta curators have invited Christoph Keller, who founded Revolver in 1999, as a participant. And participants do not automatically have to be artists. The Manifesta team puts emphasis on this term for all those exhibiting because many of them move in a grey area between art and art education, organization and distribution.
Like the work of Christoph Keller. He has devoted himself to the genre of the artist’s book which he reinterprets with young and international artists. With the series Revolver blanco, he regularly presents theoretical and literary texts on present-day art by artists, critics, curators and other authors.
Revolver thus itself publishes books on art, on the one hand. On the other hand, Christoph Keller collects and archives all kinds of publications and makes them available to the public. "The selection of projects presented is not representative," he describes in his Kiosk project with which he is represented at Manifesta, "but rather it has grown out of various international relationships among colleagues".
His offering includes international art magazines which otherwise are obtainable only in one or two art bookshops nationwide, such as Butt Magazine from the Netherlands. But also more well-known publishers such as the Martin Schmitz Verlag, which publishes books in the area of art and subculture, are to be found in Keller's kiosk.
Christoph Keller and Revolver thus function like a catalyst. Their creative activity consists in picking up and selecting, a principle familiar from the music industry where, for example, well-known disc jockeys or producers select pieces of music and sell the album which comes about in this way under their own name.
In the case of such musicians too, the achievement does not consist in making music but in knowing pieces of music and being able to associate them with each other. A good and important function especially for the dissemination of publications which are situated far from the mainstream, in the music industry as well as in the realm of art. For who is in a position to maintain that they have an overview of the entire art scene and know their way around it completely? Perhaps only Christoph Keller. hoh
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Steinernes Haus am Römerberg, until 25 August