Documenta 13.
Fisher, Michelle Millar
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Documenta 13
The Fridericianum
Kassel, Germany
June 9-September 16, 2012
A review of an event as monumental as Documenta can only ever
gather a series of collected impressions, especially since in this
latest iteration the expansive curatorial gesture was spread over four
cities. The exhibition nucleus was in its traditional home in the
Fridericianum (Fig. 1) in Kassel (and many other secondary venues across
the city), with further satellites in Alexandria (Egypt), Kabul
(Afghanistan), and Banff (Canada). Documenta, the museum of 100 days is,
in practice, now made up of many museums, temporary sites, performances,
screenings, tours, and conversations that require sustained time, and
physical and mental stamina to digest. Major international biennials and
triennials have become a relentlessly banal part of contemporary art
production, often directionless despite their international breadth. The
five year wait between each Documenta seems to make a difference. This
exhibition-and its current incarnation-is a powerful breath of fresh
air, with a cogent and magnetic curatorial program that sets the agenda
for the way we look at and engage with contemporary art today.
For the thirteenth Documenta, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
presented her organizing statement under the weighty title "On the
Destruction of Art--or Conflict and Art, or Trauma and the Art of
Healing." Her curatorial umbrella sheltered a range of artists,
works, and sites that opened dialogue on the position of art in relation
to conflict and its aftermath: reparations, dislocations, memory,
trauma, and experience. This somber backdrop spoke to both contemporary
strife and the impetus for the event's inception in 1955 by
curatorial founder Arthur Bode (1900-77). Bode's inaugural
exhibition was conceived as a response to one of the major Western
traumas of the twentieth century, World War II, and the associated
banishing of the contemporary avant-garde under National Socialism in
Germany. In 2012, the myriad engagements with the notion of conflict
articulated by the selected artists and their curator might be expected
to jar. There is always friction between these wider reflections on and
connection to individual and collective trauma and the passive state of
consumption the international art pilgrim experiences today. Few who
visited Kassel also made the trip to see the exhibition in Kabul.
Documenta 13 collectively navigated this conundrum for the better
through a range of works that meaningfully approached the
exhibition's pervasive themes of fragmentation, dislocation, and
the un-monumental. It boldly transported visitors where they could not
actually tread putting them to work mapping rich connections between
history, geography, and memory on their own ever-incomplete pathways
through the exhibition sites. That one left the sprawling event with a
profound sense of how people-not only artists-have responded to recent
global struggles bore testament to the success of
Christov-Bakargiev's vision, built around the four "main
positions" of Siege, Hope, Retreat, and Stage, and the strength of
the works for which it was a platform.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
In the Neue Galerie, located across from the museum dedicated to
Kassel's earlier claim to fame, the Brothers Grimm, another
storyteller, Roman Ondak, played with words and their relation to images
in a piece titled Observations (1995/2011). In seventy-two framed works
arranged around the four walls of the basement gallery, the artist
presented small images of quotidian human interactions clipped from
magazines, matching them with captions that described the behavior on
display, often in humorous or axiomatic terms. Ondak's collection
of "non-events"-human behaviors rescued from the brink of
passing unnoticed by the artist's intervention-presented stories of
miscommunication, intentionality, and language. They foreground
perception and invite us, as so many of the works included here did, to
look at the fleeting everyday as a site where split-seconds tell us the
most about our own being and knowing. Christov-Bakargiev recounts a
similar play on words in her curatorial "letter to a friend,"
recalling the moment that her smartphone auto-corrected
'Kassel' to 'Kabul' and set in motion a chain of
related mediations, resulting in the inclusion of the latter city in her
project and the partial formulation of her thesis.
Upstairs at the Neue, Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic, the recent
subject of an excellent retrospective exhibition at MoMA in New York,
centered her installation, The Disobedient (The Revolutionaries) (2012),
on an archival image of a donkey, caged in Kassel's Opernplatz in
1933. The donkey served as a public warning to "stubborn"
Germans not to patronize Jewish businesses, and as a terrible
foreshadowing of the forced labor to which those of Jewish descent would
be committed in this first year that the concentration camps were
opened. The image is juxtaposed with a case of soft toy donkeys, each
given a name that also appears on a wall of longer biographic texts
telling the stories of individuals who fought political and social
oppression in the twentieth century. Ondak and Ivekovic's
approaches are well-worn. Like many artists at Documenta 13, they mine
archival images-from a book, a newspaper, bureaucratic records, and the
history of Kassel itself. However, their actions successfully
recuperated small slivers of larger histories and offered monuments that
stand in stark contrast to the officially sanctioned denkmal. Their
works highlighted not only histories of conflict, but also capitalist
production (Ondak's in shop windows, Ivekovic's with Disney
toys), implying the cultural tourism that accompanies memorialization,
and an implicit critique of the swapping of one mode of exploitation for
another.
One donned a hard hat to enter the Bunker im Weinberg that lay
below gardens terraced into a steep slope overlooking the city. Once
repositories for alcohol and ice, the bunkers held works by
Florida-born, Afghan artist Aman Mojadidi and artistic collaborators
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. The exhibition was constantly
strengthened from within due to the skill with which the histories of
the exhibition sites were, in tension with the notion of loss, brought
to bear productively within the works themselves. Mojadidi's piece,
Resolution (2012), engaged with Kassel's connection to the didactic
and often brutal fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. The work wove
stories from German and Afghan folk traditions together to form a
terrifying and redemptive bedtime tale recounted in the bunker in
German, English, and Dari that traversed the artist's polycultural
childhood experiences, along with an audio narration in English that
reverberated in the underground chamber.
In the adjoining bunker played Raptors Rapture (2012), Allora and
Calzadilla's high definition video of a sleeping vulture slowly
waking, his twitching, surprised head movements almost comical in the
face of the assembled group of viewers. The looped video showed the bird
cleaning its feathers with its razor-sharp beak, making a powerful
rasping sound. The hands of Bernadine Kafer, a musician specializing in
prehistoric instruments, displayed a recently unearthed flute-the oldest
known musical instrument-carved from the wing bone of a griffon vulture
c. 35,000 BCE. Bringing it purposefully to her lips, she elicited a
sharp whistling sound, tying the present-day vulture's threatened
extinction to the memory of the first human music produced from the
bones of the bird's ancestors. Mojadidi and Allora & Calzadilla
presented viewers with compelling questions on how the ephemerality of
oral traditions figures historically.
Mojadidi and two dozen other artists including Walid Raad, Khadim
Ali, and William Kentridge, presented work simultaneously in Kassel and
at the Bagh-e Babur Pavilion in Kabul. Although many of the works at
Documenta 13 successfully wove together the international background of
the artists and their concerns with the main curatorial themes, there
was still often a sense of dislocation between Kassel and its
satellites. The visitor was almost always a voyeur in this sense, having
no real idea how other works by these artists were being received in
Kabul or what had taken place at the seminars and actions carried out in
Banff and Alexandria. The inclusion of Banff was perplexing given the
much more immediately apparent history of conflict in the other three
sites (did it represent the 'retreat' in
Christov-Bakargiev's four positions?). Throughout the exhibition
the viewer-quite deliberately-was put to work to read the connections.
A sense of more imminent dislocation was engendered by Natascha
Sadr Haghihian's work, Trail (2012). Heralded by a simple ladder
bolted to the wall of Kassel's Karlsaue Park, the trail was
situated a stone's throw from the steps traditionally taken to
navigate the steep slope leading to the green lawns and axial waterways
of the park. Her work stood as a metaphor for the visitor's
personal journey through the larger exhibition, encouraging them to
carve out their own idiosyncratic route. The dry mud path was steep and
made slick by the passage of many feet, allowing for a precarious
descent that required grasping at surrounding shrubbery. Recorded sounds
of animals squawking and lowing, voiced in comically human tones,
emerged from the bushes. Here, Haghihian's work deliberately
negates the manicured quality of the pleasure gardens and the monumental
stairway that memorializes the lost German soldiers of the two great
wars, producing another wonderfully contingent anti-monument like many
others at Documenta 13.
The rest of the journey through Karlsaue Park was similarly
physical, traversed on one of Kassel's green Konrad bikes. Part of
the highlight of Documenta 13 was the passages in between the
constellations of works embedded within the fabric of the city. The
Worldly House, a small wooden building floating on a pond that was once
home to the park's black swan population, worked on a similar
theme. It played host to a selection of materials-a daily video program,
online and textual archives, and images-curated by sculptor, Tue
Greenfort, in homage to the pioneering co-evolution philosopher and
feminist theorist, Donna Haraway. Haraway has spent her career
investigating the overlapping nature of the complex, genetically bound,
and often brutal relationships between animals and humans, suggesting in
her 2008 text, When Species Meet, that "to be one is always to
become with many," even if always in tension. Song Dong's
Doing Nothing Garden (2010-12) (Fig. 2) echoed this sentiment that was
expressive of the larger spirit of Documenta 13. His piece involved an
overgrown pile of rubble and garden waste that disrupted the tempered
lawns with sprouting weeds, creating a living, growing organism out of
discarded material.
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
These works resonate with Christov-Barkagiev's words on
still-life painter Giorgio Morandi, part of the exhibition
"brain" housed in the Rotunda of the Fridericianum, a
"space of research where artworks, objects, and documents are
brought together in lieu of a [curatorial] concept." Like
Dong's "nothing made something," she describes the
collected objects from Morandi's studio set alongside his paintings
that were made while Fascism raged as rendering the everyday abstract,
"a state of withdrawal that can disturb power relations even though
one feels powerless." The work of Korbinian Aigner, also at the
Fridericianum, drove home this idea powerfully (Fig. 3). Korbinian, a
Bavarian village pastor who, like Ivekovic's heroes, spoke out
publicly against Nazisim, was interned at Dachau and Sachsenhausen and
forced to work on the land while at the concentration camps. From a
place that witnessed the constant extinction of life, Korbinian created
four new varieties of apple during the four years he was interned. Like
Morandi's serenely repetitious and rigorously conceptual approach
to the mundane, Korbinian's 900 color drawings of the apples he
cultivated between 1910 and 1960 are exhibited as his legacy, one of
subversion and resistance through nature.
It was impossible to see everything at Documenta 13 in a short
visit. Many works, such as Kader Attia's moving and complex The
Repair From the Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012), Mario
Garcia Torres' retracing of Alighiero Boetti's One Hotel in
Afghanistan (one of the strongest links between Kassel and Kabul), and
Michael Rakowitz's ruminations on what happens after art is
destroyed during conflict (in his case, the burning of the Fridericianum
during WWII and the 2001 iconoclastic blasting of Afghanistan's
Bamiyan Buddhas), deserved more time and individual reviews. Two of the
strongest pieces at Kassel provided a fitting conclusion. In Tino
Sehgal's "constructed situation," This Variation (2012),
visitors entered a pitch-black room and encountered dancers brushing
past them in the dark singing Beach Boys classics, drumming on the
floor, and then slowing to tell personal stories on the theme of
capitalist production. Sehgal is a master of working from the micro to
the macro, using the contingent subjectivity built between his
performers and the viewer-interlopers to probe the relationship between
the individual and society. At the same site, the severely dilapidated
1826 Huguenot House (Fig. 4), Theaster Gates and his team provided a
dense and satisfying end to the exhibition in Kassel. Once home to a
hotel and, later, military personnel, Gates reawakened the tired space
was with 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (2012). Filled with performances
by musicians from his native Chicago for the first two weeks of
Documenta 13, a crew of inhabitants was left in residence to program
continued activities for the remaining 86 days. The house seemed like it
buzzed and the energy transferred deliciously to the visitor. Video
projections of the earlier performances, the sound of gospel singers,
drums, and a double bass, emanated from doorways and coaxed the space
back to life. As "Good Vibrations" and gospel intertwined
between the walls of the mildewed former hotel, faint glimpses of joy
were made possible in a world still in chaos.
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
The work of Gates and Sehgal, like so many spread across Kassel and
beyond, questioned how we tell history and reengage with the past in the
present and vice versa. In a country so sensitive to reparation, this
overwhelming body of work provoked dialogue on how history might be
repaired, what is at stake when we attempt do so in different places and
for different peoples, and what collective and individual memorials to
the past might look like. These questions preoccupy European history of
the twentieth century, the legacy (if there is one yet) of the more
recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the reverberations of the
Arab Spring in Egypt. Documenta 13 was monumental not only in the scope
of its collected activities but also in the compelling manner that the
exhibition testified to the place of art in understanding, creating, and
subverting such conflicts. The artists who responded to
Christov-Bakargiev's invitation to mark another five-year interval
forced a subjective assessment of the present moment. In 2012, the
anti-monumental response reigned.
Michelle Millar Fisher
The CUNY Graduate Center
