Memoirs of a Hypnotist

Book excerpt: When Marcos Lutyens arrived in Kassel in the summer of 2012, he didn't know he would end up staying for the entire 100 days of documenta 13 to perform 340 hypnotic sessions with the audience. Unfolding in the Reflection Room in Kassel's Karlsaue Park, it was the most involved installment of the Hypnotic Show to date--"an exhibition that exists only in the mind of the audience," according to Lutyens's collaborator Raimundas Malasauskas. Lutyens also didn't know that he would write a book about it: Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, an intimate and hardly qualifiable document. Here, the artist chronicles the Hypnotic Show and puts together all kinds of improbable experiences for his readers: research of cognition and neurological activity, deep exploration of varying states of consciousness, and, at the center, the possibility for contingency and embodied dematerialization within the current thinking of art. Copublished with Kunstverein Toronto and CAC Vilnius / XII Baltic Triennial