{"id":53870,"date":"2017-07-03T15:27:46","date_gmt":"2017-07-03T13:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/?p=53870"},"modified":"2017-07-03T15:27:46","modified_gmt":"2017-07-03T13:27:46","slug":"documenta-14-kassel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/documenta-14-kassel\/","title":{"rendered":"Wie die documenta 14 alle au\u00dfer ihren Kuratoren entt\u00e4uscht hat"},"content":{"rendered":"

On day two of the press preview of this year\u2019s edition of documenta in Kassel I lost my temper. It was cold, intermittent showers pelted Kassel\u2019s already unedifying city centre, and I was sick of being lectured to. I was standing in front of an installation consisting of two bookcases with dance titles in the Neue Wache. The piece, I learned from one of the few wall texts I encountered during my three day visit, was called \u201cLibrary\u201d, by the artists Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (les gens d\u2019Uterpan). What these titles had in common, the text told me, was that they, since 2005, had \u201cfailed to mention the work of the artists\u201d. Apparently \u201cby putting on display the conventions that critics and connoisseurs establish, Library questions the relationship between history and art. Library also highlights the limits of text in describing living practices of dance and performance, which are inevitably subject to distortions, gaps, and compromises when committed to written language.”<\/p>\n

\n

documenta 14’s curatorial strategy is a meaningless pair of tautologies akin to Ludwig Wittgenstein\u2019s famous phrase \u201cIt is either raining or it is not raining.\u201d<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Annie Annie Vigier, “Library”, 2017<\/p>\n

Ordinarily I would have bypassed this egregious art speak with nothing more than an eye roll. (Quick analysis: Connoisseurs are not academics per definition, and these were academic texts. Critics no longer establish anything aside from the death of criticism, and of course dance isn\u2019t reducible to language, but this is hardly controversial. What is the point of this work, then? Nothing. How does it add to the discourse in any meaningful way? Not at all, especially since Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson effectively unpicked canon formation back in 1977. So does that mean that my Ikea Billy bookcases and their contents could be said to perform a similar action on art reception since 1770? Probably.)
\nBut this time, something inside me snapped. Was it the four hour press conference we\u2019d been subject to on the opening day, with the total absence of any information provided by any of the curators on either artists, sense, or orientation for the exhibition, but with a 40 minute atonal piece for solo violin? Or was it the meaningless curatorial statement \u201cDocumenta 14: learning from Athens\u201d?
\nWhat does this learning consist of, one may legitimately enquire, given that the Athens arm of the exhibition has been on display for 8 weeks at that point? According to the curators, \u201clearning is unlearning\u201d. Furthermore \u201cAthens could be anywhere,\u201d as curator Adam Szymczyk elaborated. This is a fine curatorial strategy to avoid standing for anything, refusing any claim or argument: a meaningless pair of tautologies akin to Ludwig Wittgenstein\u2019s famous phrase \u201cIt is either raining or it is not raining.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Beau Beau Dick, Twenty-two masks from the series \u201dAtlakim\u201d, 1990\u20132012<\/p>\n

This non-statement was hammered home at every single juncture encountered: the guide (\u201cDaybook\u201d) which refuses anything so banal as a contents page, or any discernible order \u2013 artists are assigned \u201cdays\u201d in a non-alphabetic sequence, so any attempt to find an explanation of well, anything, is met by a pained flick-through search. Similarly the exhibition organisation – wall texts were absent or hastily written in biro, there was no sense, no orientation as to why which artworks were ordered, artists names were missing, the graphic design of the map misleading\u2026 I could go on. There was a near total lack of useful information \u2013 the post-truth art exhibition indeed.
\nVery little could be established as a fact, very little ascertained about art or artists, the curators eschewing such banal things as artists\u2019 biographies. The procession of artworks, spaces and arguments was as jumbled as a child\u2019s toy box. The exhibition seems to have been conceived in celebratory maximalist gusto: \u201coh yes, lets have five curators! And 199 artists!! And 70 venues in two cities! And an \u201cencounter point\u201d for lunch with Athenian normies! And a radio station! And a Parthenon made of books wrapped in cling film!\u201d with very little consideration of how these languages, spaces, mediums or narratives might fit together, or illuminate each other, beyond chocolate box identitarianism.<\/p>\n

\"Guillermo Guillermo Galindo, “Fluchtzieleuropahavarieschallk\u00f6rper”, 2017<\/p>\n

This inconsistency was most visible in Kassel\u2019s Documenta Halle, which read as a parody of the old ethnographic museums the exhibition purported to be critiquing. A badly photocopied score of British avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew\u2019s piece The Great Learning \u2013 an ironic comment? \u2013 kicked off the exhibition upstairs. Beau Dick\u2019s Kwakwaka’wakw\u00a0masks abutted work by Igo Diarra and La Medina, who\u2019d created a display of records and promotional material of the Malian musician Ali Farka Tour\u00e9. Nearby, Mexican artist and musician Guillermo Galindo had repurposed pieces from two shipwrecked refugee boats that had washed up on the island of Lesbos as musical instruments. Vigier and Apertet reappeared here, constructing a stage with a decline. Rounding off the large hall was a tapestry by Saami artist Britta Marakatt-Labba. Aboubakar Fofana had hung sheets dyed with varieties of the Indigo plant from the ceiling and installed Indigo seedlings below.<\/p>\n

\n

When the political or ethical imperatives override artistic claims, the art itself suffers<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As my father, a former member of Cardew\u2019s Scratch Orchestra, commented: \u201cI don\u2019t understand why a display of musical scores like this appeals to the documenta curators. It\u2019s as if worshipping the score would make it part of you, transcendent and immanent.\u201d It is precisely this auratic worship, however, that the curators demand: affect over an analytical approach to the work. While analysis doesn\u2019t preclude emotion, by not providing sufficient information, the curators bar the visitors from having a reasoned relationship to the artists and their work on display.<\/p>\n

\"Aboubakar Aboubakar Fofana “Fundi (Uprising)”, 2017<\/p>\n

The artworld of today is post-conceptual. It is generally assumed that all artworks have conceptual elements, and therefore rely on chains of explanation that either supervene upon or have equal status to the work itself. Hence, refusing commentary not only disservices the viewer, but the artwork itself, which invariably becomes imbued with whatever narrative the curators wish to impose on it. This leads to a hollowing-out of the artwork, which then serves as a mere decorative footnote to the curatorial claim, rather than an autonomous object in and of itself. In documenta\u2019s case, the narrative amounts to little more than weak versions of post-colonial narratives and identitarian claims, weak theory packaged as Orwell\u2019s fictional language Newspeak. Thus, the exhibition isn\u2019t an exhibition, but an assemblage of objects, where affect and sentimentality is valid over cogent engagement (of course there are artworks that escape this fate by their sheer power, but many don\u2019t).
\nIt has been said that the curators\u2019 disdain for explanatory wall texts and a central theme was a strategy to avoid the narrative being sucked up by the market in the guise of symbolic capital. However, I have yet to see the type of work on display at documenta 14 \u2013 the vitrines, the archive as art, the installations \u2013 taking over at Art Basel, which remains wedded to the media most collectors prefer buying: painting and sculpture. Also, why is it so distasteful to accept that artists might have to make a living from their work?<\/p>\n

\"Annie Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet “les-gens d\u2019Uterpan Imposteurs”, 2013<\/p>\n

In sum, what was there to learn from Athens? That coining neologisms is not the same as generating new ideas \u2013 instead, it is an empty exercise in obfuscation, albeit an obfuscation costing \u20ac37.5 million. Parsing curatorial strategy as a tautology results in an exhibition that does not result in new model or ways of showing art but does a disservice to all whose (underpaid) labour it employs; artists, curators, visitors and critics. When the political or ethical imperatives override artistic claims, the art itself suffers.
\nFinally, it results in an exhibition where\u00a0the art on view is not treated as art, but as footnotes to an assemblage of\u00a0post-colonial narratives. When ethics overrides aesthetics as a matter\u00a0curatorial strategy,\u00a0the works on display cease to function, in many cases, as\u00a0artworks. Documenta 14, therefore, ceases to be an exhibition, it is a\u00a0collection of more or less interesting objects, whose relationship to another\u00a0remains shrouded in nebulous, half-baked statements. The discourse has eaten\u00a0its own children. Come back, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, you and your talking\u00a0strawberries are much missed.
\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We look at how art suffers when the political or ethical imperatives override artistic claims<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[8945,6453,8946,8947,8948,8949,4280,8950,8951,8952],"class_list":["post-53870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-aboubakar-fofana","tag-adam-szymczyk","tag-annie-vigier","tag-beau-dick","tag-britta-marakatt-labba","tag-cornelius-cardew","tag-documenta-14","tag-guillermo-galindo","tag-igo-diarra","tag-la-medina"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\nHow documenta 14 Failed Everyone but its Curators<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We look at how art suffers when the political or ethical imperatives override artistic claims\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/documenta-14-kassel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How documenta 14 Failed Everyone but its Curators\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We look at how art suffers when the political or ethical imperatives override artistic claims\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/documenta-14-kassel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Sleek Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sleekmag\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-07-03T13:27:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@sleekmag\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@sleekmag\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Verfasst von\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"sleek\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Gesch\u00e4tzte Lesezeit\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7\u00a0Minuten\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/\",\"name\":\"Sleek Magazine\",\"description\":\"Sleek is Germany\u2019s leading independent media house\/brand for creativity and innovation located in Berlin the creative capital of the world. 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