Tom Holert: „ca. 1972”
Gewalt – Umwelt – Identität – Methode
Tom Holert

Awarded the Leipzig Book Fair 2024 prize !

Not another annual monograph. No grand theses about caesura and new beginnings. No attempt to approach the present by way of a selected past. Instead: Digressions, drifting and excursions on the fringes of history. Understood in this way, "ca. 1972" is the name of a chronotopos in the shadow of the political processes and cultural upheavals of the long 1960s. Decolonization, the black civil rights movement, May 1968, the sexual revolution and other emancipatory projects seemed to have failed "ca. 1972" because of their contradictions. But is that the whole truth? As exhausted as the technocratic ideology of progress and the radical euphoria of post-war modernity may have seemed, some contemporaries experienced a present in which they could once again "connect everything". In order to do justice to the complexities of this constellation of exhaustion and emphasis, this book refrains from completeness or balance. Images and people, texts and sounds point the way through a nervous space-time constellation. But they do not support the illusion of any orientation. And that is already one of the components of the "method" called "ca. 1972". 

Tom Holert studied art history, worked for magazines (Texte zur Kunst, Spex), taught at universities (e.g. Merz Akademie Stuttgart; Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien; Freie Universität Berlin; HFBK Hamburg) and organized exhibitions (e.g. Neolithische Kindheit. Kunst einer falschen Gegenwart, ca. 1930 and Bildungsschock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, both at HKW, Berlin). In 2015 he founded the Harun Farocki Institute (harun-farocki-institut.org). Recent book publications include: Knowledge Beside Itself. Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics (2020) and Politics of Learning, Politics of Space. Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s (2021).