n the cover a dated image at once moving and cruel, that of a chimpanzee manipulated by men in white jackets getting ready for several experiments. At the end of the book a sentence without head or tail, «Give me orange, eat orange… », closes this collection of images. 9+1=10?, the last book by the artist Mircea Cantor, starts with a question and ends with a command. 9+1=10? is a transitional book, a stage in the work of Mircea Cantor between his previous research and his exhibition at the Gulbenki an Foundation, « If you walk faster it will rain less hard ». There the artist exhibits the video entitled NIM where an apeseeks to answer addition problems in a kind of amusement park in Thailand. The commands refer to NimChimsky, a chimpanzee trained by Herb Terrace, a researcher at Columbia University in New York, who has taught Nim Chimsky to communicate in American sign language such elementary sentences as Apple me eat, Banana Nim eat, Banana me eat, Drink me, Nim eat. 9+1=10? is also and first of all a collection of historical archived images from the recent history of man and space, of man in space. Spatial architecture, satellites, rockets, radar, archival images, an iconographic ensemble from the 1970s brought together by the artist are at the heart if this book. Between documentary and science fi ction, Mircea Cantor unveils his own imagination in relation to space travel and the glorious epoch of bygone utopias mixed up with the image of man and prisoner/guinea-pig and his own foolishness. 9+1=10? shows without commentary the traces of a fantastic epoch when everything was still possible.
Claire Staebler, Paris.

Mircea Cantor
9+1=10?
Published April 2005

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