DOCUMENTA 13
With the realization of Documenta 13, the practice of directing
large-scale exhibitions—what is commonly called “curating,” though this word is
far too modest for an event of this size and scope, five years in the
making—achieved a decisively baroque apogee. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13, consisting of more than
300 “participants,” 200 artists’ projects and 100 days of events in Kassel, and
various workshops, seminars, retreats, publications and programs in Kabul,
Cairo–Alexandria, Banff and other locations, was far beyond the ability of any
one spectator to behold. In fact, one suspects that only the artistic director
herself and perhaps a few of her closest curatorial “agents” were able to
experience Documenta 13 in anything close to its entirety. So then how does one
analyze and critique such a massive, temporally and geographically dispersed
event, the entirety of which we, the people, were not invited or able to
attend?
Rather than
feeling daunted or excluded, one could have followed Christov-Bakargiev’s own
suggestion to think of Documenta as “a
state of mind,” as if it were more comparable to the desert art-festival
Burning Man than an art-world biennial. But the reality is that Documenta 13
was no DIY, populist affair, despite the crowd-sourcing curatorial
approach of naming 20 consulting “agents.” Instead it was plainly reflective of
a prolific, hyperactive consciousness, whose reach extended from the structural
level of the festival down to specific artworks. This mind eschewed a single
all-encompassing theme, instead opting for “four main positions”—“under siege,”
“on retreat,” “in a state of hope, or optimism,” and “on stage”—and, following
Documenta’s 20th-century origins in post-World War II and Cold War politics,
was fixated on, “moments of trauma, at turning points, accidents, catastrophes,
crises—events that mark moments when the world changes.”
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| Michael Rakowitz’s carved books at the Fridericianum all have their fascinating stories of destruction written in front of them. |
The Rotunda
of the Fridericianum (Documenta’s main venue), dubbed “the Brain,” was brimming
with artistic arcana reflecting these concerns. Included in the densely packed
room were carved stone Central Asian sculptures from 2000 BCE (the
“Bactrian Princesses”), a landscape canvas by Mohammad Yusef Asefi, who in the
1990s and 2000s saved more than 80 figurative paintings from the National
Gallery of Kabul by covering portions of them in watercolors, a video by slain
Egyptian artist-activist Ahmed Basiony, bathroom articles that Lee Miller stole
from Hitler’s apartment when on a journalist photographic assignment, Charlotte
Salomon gouaches from 1941 before her murder at Auschwitz two years later, a single
photograph by Vandy Rattana of the craters (so-called “bomb ponds”) left behind
by the United States’ covert military campaigns in Cambodia in the 1970s,
and artifacts from the National Museum of Beirut that were damaged in the
country’s sectarian fighting from 1975–90.
Beyond the
jumbled Brain, one of Documenta 13’s greatest appeals continued to be the
wide-ranging selection of objects, artworks and practices of all kind, rather
than those exclusively plucked from the international contemporary gallery
scene. Among the incredible, if occasionally esoteric, sights were Anton
Zeilinger’s quantum physics experiments, a demonstration of epigenetics
(changes in genetic expression that do not reflect changes in the genetic code
of an organism) by Alexander Tarakhovsy, and the 900 drawings of apples and
pears by village pastor Korbinian Aigner (1885–1963), who bred fruit trees
while he was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for refusing to
recognize National Socialism. Stunning abstractions from two members of the
Papunya Tula Artists collective filled an entire gallery: Warlimpirrnga
Tjapaltjarri’s patterned canvases on the walls and Doreen Reid Nakamarra’s
(1950–2009) works displayed horizontally on a wooden dais. Upstairs, Sopheap
Pich’s wall-mounted grids of rattan and burlap, smeared with soil from
Cambodia, looked wondrously out of time and place, like modernist relics
dredged up from a polluted post-industrial lake. Particularly in the
Fridericianum, art and science, the ancient and the futuristic, were put on the
same level—as analytical models, of history, of nature, of colonialism, of
mortality, of experience writ large.
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| Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris --fragile Palestinian texts, photographed on a cell phone. |
Another of
Documenta’s consistent strengths was the careful consideration of a venue’s
history. In the Zwehrentrum, a tower that survived Kassel’s bombing during
World War II, were several pieces about objects that did or did not survive
destruction. Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris (2010–12) consists of
photographs taken with a cell phone of Palestinian books (an estimated 6,000)
that were looted by Israel in 1948, and are now kept in the National Library in
West Jerusalem in the “abandoned property” section. Downstairs, Michael
Rakowitz displayed stone books created with restorer Bert Praxenthaler and
student stone-carvers from the Bamiyan area of Afghanistan who recreated
volumes from the Fridericianum library that were lost during the war.
The
modernist ethos of industrial-machine production and its relationship to tropes
of abstraction (repetition, precision, automation) was explored at the
Documenta Halle, most dramatically in Thomas Bayrle’s machines made from car
engines and his enormous photomontage of an airplane. At the far end of the
venue was Nalini Malani’s mechanistic theater created from video projections
and rotating drums with reverse-paintings, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012),
which creates an immersive, haunting shadow-play that linked acts of political
violence to mythology and modernist avant-garde theater. Seen in this context,
the 38 small canvases depicting Mount Tamalpais in California by Lebanese poet
and painter Etel Adnan (made between 1959–2010) suggested a parallel between
the reduction painterly style and the streamlining of industrial production.
Unfortunately, this parallel between painting and industrial fabrication
devolved into hackneyed, cynical tropes in Yan Lei’s hands. For his Limited
Art Project (2011–12), he had a painting based on aimless internet
image searches made each day for one year of the Chinese calendar (360 days)
and then displayed them on the walls, in ersatz museum storage racks and
hanging from the ceiling. Each day during Documenta, one of them was covered
over with car paint at a nearby Volkswagen factory, which seemed more like a
crass sponsorship ploy for a regional industry than a compelling gesture.
At the
neo-classical Neue Galerie, several galleries were given over to Documenta
artists whose work joins a strong, lyrical formalism to political content.
Füsun Onur’s Dance of the Crows (2012) is an embroidered
screen that covers a large window and showing birds circling over a village; in
the next room was her iconic, untitled chair from 1993, draped in chains, with
a placard bearing her name. Lining the walls of an adjacent room were canvases
from Gordon Bennett’s “Home Decor” series, (2010) which are enlarged versions
of gouaches based on Aboriginal designs painted by Margaret Preston from the
1920s, also on view. The dialogue between a European and an Aboriginal
Australian in those works had its therapeutic corollary, or corrective, in the
center of this space, where a carpeted pavilion hosted Stuart Ringholt’s “anger
workshops,” which featured blaring house music, screaming sessions and then
hugging and reconciliation. Postcolonial social conflicts aren’t likely to be
solved so easily, but the gesture of pairing these Australian artists’ projects
as a kind of site for “truth and reconciliation” was plainly understood.
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| these are the actual bottles Giorgio Morandi used to paint. |
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| Mysterious and rare Bactrian princesses, over 4,000 years old. |
Documenta
13’s connection to Kabul, which was forged out of Christov-Bakargiev’s interest
in Alighiero Boetti’s oeuvre (the Italian artist lived there in the 1970s and
had his famous map works produced by Afghani weavers), as well as the ongoing
military occupation of Afghanistan since 2001 by a US military-led coalition,
had seemed somewhat contrived, even politically opportunistic, in the years
before the exhibition, but it did yield interesting results in Kassel.
Sequestered in the former Elisabeth Hospital building were works by Afghani
artists, either living in Kabul or abroad. Mohsen Tarasha, born in 1991 and a
graduate of the Kabul Faculty of Fine Arts, displayed neo-miniature style
drawings in vitrines as well as around the top of the wall. Lida Abdul’s
two-channel video What We Have Overlooked (2011) depicts a man
carrying a red flag as he walks into the middle of a lake outside of Kabul
until he is under water, half-swimming, half-stumbling—an evident allegory for
the country’s failing aspirations for national unity. More affective was
Berlin-based Jeanno Gaussi’s series “Family Stories” (2012), for which she
hired a professional sign painter to create family portraits based on old
photographs. The ten canvases were accompanied by metal plaques explaining the
painter’s own speculations about the identity of the figures depicted in the
canvases. Why most of the artists of Afghani descent—even those who live in
Europe or the Americas, with the exception of Mariam Ghani, whose video about
Kabul’s Dar ul-Amam Palace was screened in the Fridericianum—were quarantined
together (in a former hospital, of all venues) was unclear on any other
conceptual level. The decision gave the impression that these artists’ works
were a special case, and not yet ready to stand alongside their international
peers—the same kind of inherent patronization found in international development
projects.
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| Tacita Dean’s Documenta installation. |
If there
was a tendency throughout Documenta toward gratuitous over-production and the
realization of projects that didn’t seem to merit what must have required
substantial funding (no less, in the year when Germany was lecturing Europe
about the virtues of fiscal austerity), this was most evident in the sprawling
Karlsaue park. Among the many middling, anodyne park projects was Song Dong’s
six-meter-tall “bonsai mountain,” Doing Nothing Garden (2010–12),
made from rubble and covered in grasses, which was nothing more than what
various municipalities have already done in converting their landfills into
recreation areas. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Village and Elsewhere: In
This Circumstance the Sole Object of Attention Should Be the Treachery of the
Moon(2012), is a walled compound with video monitors on the house’s
exterior showing Bangkok street dogs; there, the artist lived (on retreat) for
three weeks with dogs, a project that perhaps will lead to other more viewable
works in the future. Shinro Otake’s Mon Cheri: A Self-Portrait as a
Scrapped Shed (2012), a custom-decorated hut based on a snack bar in
Uwajima, was filled with a large scrapbook of the artist’s paintings, bicycle
wheels and a collage-covered guitar and amp, intriguingly displaced to this
German park but physically inaccessible except through the glass windows.
Requisite
curatorial tropes of an “exhibition within the exhibition” and “the artist as
curator” had their appearance in Dinh Q. Lê’s,Light and Belief: Voices and
Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (2012), a mini-pavilion filled
with private drawings made by propaganda artists from the Vietcong. As this and
many other projects revealed, the Karlsaue unfortunately deprived many artists’
works of a connection to place, history or to one another.CAMP’s engaging
video The Boat Modes (2012), about the trade in the Indian Ocean
between the Subcontinent, Arabian Peninsula and eastern Africa, and made from
sailors’ own video footage, was strangely adrift in a hut in the middle of the
garden. The Karlsaue was Documenta’s field of enervation, or place of exile,
for many projects that didn’t quite fit elsewhere, thematically or physically.
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| Geoffrey Farmer’s obsessive collage of Life magazines. |
Left out of
this review so far have been memorable, show-defining works by Ryan Gander,
Mario Garcia-Torres, Ida Applebroog, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller,
Clemens von Wedemeyer, Javier Téllez, Kader Attia, Llyn Foulkes, Geoffrey
Farmer, Pierre Huyghe, Omer Fast, William Kentridge, Trisha Donnelly, Nedko
Solakov and Tarek Atoui, along with: Amar Kanwar’s video installation at the
Ottoneum about agricultural activists in India; the new directions embarked on
by Bani Abidi and Tejal Shah in their respective videos at the Hauptbahnhof; an
installation by Paul Chan of Chinese landscape-esque paintings on the covers of
old books; a mini survey of Walid Raad’s recent project “Scratching on Things I
Could Disavow” about the history of Arab modern art, including new photographs
of the reflections of objects owned by the Qatari royal family; Akram Zaatari’s
16-mm film of two men undressing one another, and his time capsule in the
Karlsaue; Rabih Mroue’s video and performance-lecture about the depiction of
the Syrian revolution on cellphone cameras—all of them engaging works that
deserve proper space and time for viewing and critiquing that the shear
enormity of Documenta does not readily provide.
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| Documenta 13: Etel Adnan |
More
(projects), in this sense, was less (time, energy, attention), and this, in the
end, was what made Documenta maddeningly self-indulgent and inaccessible in
equal measure to its many instances of poignancy, sincerity and brilliance. As
a mega-archive of projects whose number, duration and complexity challenged a
walking-eating-sleeping visitor’s capacity for meaningful interaction,
Documenta 13 was paradoxically both moment-defining and moment-defying. In that
same regard, Documenta was also a genuinely and refreshingly serious
undertaking, rather than the easily consumed mimicry of intellectualism that is
performed and produced post-haste at most mega-exhibitions today. Furthermore,
to its credit, Documenta did not feel subordinate to to the art market (through
its eclecticism, defiance of cost-efficiency, absence of city branding and
urban lifestyle-promotion), though commercial forces undoubtedly influenced its
realization behind the scenes and the market will rapidly assimilate the new
forms, discourse and discoveries it proposed. But everything that made
Documenta 13 distinctive comes with its own risks and faults, ones that are
perhaps presaged in history. While Documenta 12 looked back at the Modern era
to ask, with classicist’s turn of phrase, whether it is “our antiquity”;
Documenta 13 was a baroque festival of sheer immensity rather than
comprehensibility. One fears that what will follow is the exhausted,
picturesque era of the rococo—a mood that was already blooming in the gardens
of the Karlsaue.
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| Wind instruments recur throughout – these are from William Kentridge’s steampunk animation. |
While it
was truly wonderful to partake in an event with a surfeit of aesthetic and
intellectual experiences that couldn’t quickly be reduced to so many slogans or
one-line curatorial gestures, there is a potential hazard, or even lack of
responsibility, in creating something so willfully incomprehensible. As Christov-Bakargiev writes in her Notebook (no.
3/100), “the question [of the contemporary state of the exhibition format] is
difficult and complex, and I really have very little to say, because I am so busy
doing things”—namely, organizing Documenta itself, which, the director believes
“resists the atomized, molecular organization of human transactions in the
digital age, to the degree that this obsolete twentieth-century object, the
exhibition, takes on a new life as it mutates into a noncommercial place to
intensely aggregate.” But then later she does confess, “Truthfully, I am not
sure that the field of art will continue to exist in the twenty-first century.”
So will we then look back at Documenta 13’s chaotic and conflicted contribution
to this conjectured outcome as having heralded a welcome liberation of ideas
from form and the redefinition of intellectual fields? Or will Documenta 13
have augured the submission of the autonomous cultural sphere to a totalizing
information economy?