Where’s a catalogue, where there will be the work?

The catalogue/guide serves to find the work, to access it, to inform a reader about it, through representation. While 99% of my offline, or hard copy, or material work – objects – is not in the public domain (if at all I know myself where to find it), catalogue information will tell one where and when it has been. The exhaustive catalogue raisonné describes all of the above and more.

A guide also directs our attention to hidden paths and connections. One mimicking example of a guide-as-catalogue is Hermann Pitz's ‘this is not a Michelin guide’ Panorama introduction to his works, published in 1991, or MCMXCI. Catalogues have contextualized the work of artists in many different ways, connecting it to biographical data and imagery, intuitively sometimes, like Imi Knoebel's publications with exhibitions for example, also from the 1990s. I do not have them close at hand but will follow up.

The artist as a wanderer, whose works drift in and out of (also his or her own) attention and in and out of media and events. Maybe the catalogue is the work's true foothold?