Sandra Neugärtner:
Small Formations: Lines and Alternating Knots as Logistic Inversions

The talk examines how, in the first half of the twentieth century, both artistic and literary modernist production formulated specific, hitherto little-discussed practices in relation to industrial systems of organisation and administration within the newly emerging cultural sector. The investigation focuses on similar gestures in literature and art (with an emphasis on textile art). In both cases, so-called small formations (“kleine Formungen,” the obvious link to kleine Formen of “GRK 2190: Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte kleiner Formen” under Ethel Matala de Mazza, Maren Jäger and Joseph Vogl at Humboldt-University of Berlin is quite deliberate, whereby the special approach of my paper consists in the decidedly praxeological discussion) can be identified that asserted and defended manual creation against industrial, bureaucratic systems of production. The paper formulates the small formation as a figure of thought that provides information about the transition from pre-technical ways of thinking and working to new logics and patterns of action that modernity brought with it in the transition to the information and knowledge society. The line is drawn to the large systems of contemporary digital administration under the dominance of language with special consideration of artificial intelligence, e.g. language models. The thesis is that small formations have emerged as a logistical counter-practice to the large forms of bureaucratic hegemony in society, in order to oppose modes of action in which artists and writers can only behave subalternly to the language-based structures and organisation of the culture industry. It is shown how small formations represent a refuge from a social-technical relationship that is perceived as problematic, and that small formations even offer ecologically relevant solutions to the questionable progress principle of growth. 

Sandra Neugärtner is an art historian of modern and contemporary art affiliated with the Chair of Art History at Leuphana University Lüneburg. As a research fellow at the KHI in Florence, Sandra explores new approaches to the history of modern art that go beyond the normative and the narrative of progress. In her DFG/habilitation project on the textile artist and graphic designer Lena Meyer-Bergner, she investigates an alternative path of modernity by means of artistic practices that have been excluded from the mainstream. Her dissertation (University of Erfurt) on Moholy-Nagy’s photogram as a pedagogical medium was published in 2021 by Gebr. Mann. In the academic year 2017/18 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Art and Architectural History at Harvard University. In addition to art history, she has studied cultural studies, economics, and design, all of which inform her art historical research approach, which focuses on the social, political, and institutional contexts of artistic practices, using praxeological and semiological methods, among others.