…or “where the art was better than the parties.”
The 13th Documenta in Kassel, “the world’s most important exhibition for contemporary art”, was a challenging affair on many levels – mentally and physically. An artist list of some 300 names encompassing about 8 decades, a host of locations and off-sites, and a non-themed curatorial concern with, essentially, a re-imagination of the world were joined by rainy weather and mud or, alternatively, too much sun and the unfriendliness of Kassel to make for a long weekend of serious engagement with art.
A lot has been said and written about curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s public persona and her confusing and maybe even conflicting ideas about thought, philosophy and knowledge. However, when looking at the art at this mammoth show (mammoth not only in terms of number of artists or locations, but also all-encompassing world views), her statement that the non-thematic curation “is driven by a holistic and non-logocentric vision that is sceptical of the persisting belief in economic growth” becomes not only clear, but also poignant and even self-evident. In other words, as a colleague put it, the art at documenta 13 was better than the parties.
Spread across the nicer looking parts of Kassel, like the Friedrichplatz, the Hugenottenhaus or everyone’s favourite, the Karlsaue park – though the horrible post WWII architecture of Kassel was a constant element in getting from A to B – the show suggested a new vision of the world by way of non-thematic linking of works and networks. The art, shown alongside literary works, scientific research and social experiments, was meant to act by itself, to aggregate with endless interrelations, not unlike the “connectedness” of the Information Age, amounting to an alternative rethinking of social, economic and political structures.
Another aspect of this interconnectedness of everything was the simultaneity of events. With a booklet listing all events, performances and screening as thick as an airline schedule, there is no chance in the world to see everything, even if one were to spend the entire 100 days of documenta in Kassel. Did I mention there are 3 further locations in 3 other continents? Kabul, Alexandria and Banff will be host to more events, seminars, lectures and an artist retreat throughout the summer.
As soon as I came to terms with the fact that I was not going to see everything, I could start engaging with the art I actually got to see. But the same way one has to make decisions and select according to myriad variants like time, weather vicinity and, often, chance and happenstance, so will this article only mention a handful of works that I decide to discuss, mainly because this article is already too long, but also because this is probably not the first documenta review you are reading.
The Fridericianum was maybe the most problematic of all sites, where the art was shown a little too close together, though it started very well with a breeze by Ryan Gander that literally carried the viewer into the exhibition. I did find suitable showing the charts and diagrams of Mark Lombardi close together to those of Bavarian pastor Korbinian Aigner, who died in Dachau for his criticism of the Nazi Regime. In the unlikeliest location of a concentration camp, Aigner succedded in creating four new strains of apples, name KZ-1, 2 3, and 4. (KZ stands for concentration camp). KZ-3 is the only genre still grown, and was renamed in 1980 to Korbinian Apple.
American artist Amy Balkin’s research based work documented her attempt to list the world’s atmosphere as a protected World Heritage Site. The agreement of at least 5 UNESCO member countries was necessary, but wasn’t reached.
Off to the Ottoneum – Kassel’s little museum of Natural History, full of neat dioramas, where Mark Dion installed a library for Carl Schildbach’s “books” documenting 441 local tree and shrub pieces, collected between 1771 and 1799. Encyclopaedic thought and Kassel’s rich culture during Enlightenment were further investigated with the art installed in the Orangerie, another neat museum holding Kassel’s Cabinet of Astronomy and Physics. Alongside paintings by computer pioneer Konrad Zuse and nuclear physicist Erkki Krenniemi, there were also works and performances by young artists like Tarek Atoui and, my personal favourite at the Orangerie, Jeronimo Voss, whose projection was installed in the planetarium, where I could sit back and watch his interpretation of French Revolutionist Louis Auguste Blanqui’s 1872 “L’éternité par les asters – hypothèse astronomique.”
It was easy to miss the work of Anri Sala, actually installed in the Karlsaue park. All telescopes on the Orangerie’s second floor mezzanine were pointed at Anri Sala’s slanted clock, set across the park’s long pond. To the right of the telescopes, an old work of kitsch by an anonymous painter hangs in a room full of clocks. A real clock is embedded in the painting, but while the landscape (castle, forest, some people, a horse) goes into the central perspective of a vanishing point, the clock faces to the front. Anri Sala’s clock, installed roughly 2 Kilometres away, corrects the perspective of the clock in the painting, with clockwork made by a specialist, which allows it to be accurate while slanted.
This notion of maybe missing the point of certain works accompanied me for the rest of my visit, as no one of the colleagues I’ve spoken to was aware of the conenction between Sala’s clock and the Orangerie. This was later confirmed when I heard that Ryan Gander’s installation, which I was searching for in the muddy park in the rain, actually involved a man, possibly an actor, who was sitting on the Orangerie’s deck drinking coffee and working on a script.
More to come in Part II and maybe III: The Haupbahnhof, Hugenottenhaus, Tacita Dean at the former Finanzamt, Neue Galerie, Bunker im Weinberg, Brüder Grimm-Museum and the documenta’s amazing highlight – the Karlsaue park.
