The seventh volume in Cabinet’s “24-Hour Book” series, The Death of the Artist represents a break from prior volumes in the series in that it staged an experiment involving six different contributors working simultaneously on a single book. Gathered at Cabinet’s Berlin event space, the participating artists and writers were each asked to consider their own finitude, figurative or literal. The volume includes Sam Durant’s meditation on the death, or transformation, of an artwork as a political idea; Omer Fast’s script in which a woman on an Austrian ski slope becomes the reluctant audience for a retelling of a Yiddish folk tale; Till Gathmann’s aleatory game whose outcome can invoke death; Tom McCarthy’s forensic postulations about fatality and geometry; Susan Ploetz’s outline for a Live Action Role Play (LARP) in which players can learn the art of dying; and Eva Stenram’s modified found photographs that suggest violence-to-come.

This book, a collaboration between Cabinet and Prem Krishnamurthy, was authored between 10:00 am Central European Time, 24 November 2018 and 10:00 am Central European Time, 25 November 2018.

About Cabinet’s “24-Hour Book” series
Inspired by literary precedents such as automatic writing, by the resourcefulness of the bricoleur making do with what is at hand, and by the openness toward chance that all artistic production under severe constraint must necessarily incorporate, this series invites distinguished authors and artists to be incarcerated in an unfamiliar space to complete a project from start to finish within twenty-four hours.

About the authors
Sam Durant is an interdisciplinary artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. He has recently completed public art projects in Philadelphia and in Concord, Massachusetts, and has had museum exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Kunstverein Dusseldorf. His work has been also included in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta, the Yokohama Triennial, and the Venice Biennial. Durant is based in Berlin and Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts in Valencia, California.

Omer Fast is a Berlin-based artist and filmmaker.

Till Gathmann is a typographer, book designer, and artist based in Berlin. His artistic practice intertwines drawing, performance, and bookworks, and he collaborates on a regular basis with others on artistic bookworks. He is a doctoral candidate at the PhD-in-Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and is currently writing a biography of Alfred Kallir, a self-taught scholar who developed an obsession with the letter v.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third novel, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He contributes regularly to publications such as the New York Times, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, and Artforum. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University. He was one of the judges of the 2018 Turner Prize.

Susan Ploetz conducts artistic research through somatic role play as affectual experiences. She has presented work, spoken, or taught at Berliner Festspiele, Universität der Künste Berlin, the Pervasive Media Studio, Sophiensaele, ABC Art Fair, Dutch Art Institute, Documenta, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Performa, among other venues. She lives in Berlin.

Eva Stenram is a Berlin-based artist whose work treats the archive as both a source of inspiration and as a library of raw materials from which to create new work. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Oblique Exhibition,” was on view in November 2018 at Galerie aKonzept, Berlin. In the fall of 2018, her work was also included in “A Handful of Dust” at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside and in “Photography to End All Photography” at Brandts Museum in Odense, Denmark.

Cabinet wishes to thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of this project.