This coming Friday, February 22nd 2019, the Artistic Director for Documenta 15 (scheduled for 2022) will be announced (for more details – in German – go here). In preparation, let us look back to November 22nd 2013, to the moment that Adam Szymczyk was appointed Artistic Director for documenta 14. You can read the official announcement here and below is photograph from the unveiling ceremony.
Szymczyk is standing next to Koyo Kouoh, Artistic Director of Raw Material Company, Dakar, Senegal, who was also a curatorial advisor for Documenta 12 and dOCUMENTA (13), before acting as a member of the documenta 14 selection committee. In a statement included in the press release Kouoh noted:
Adam Szymczyk stands for a close cooperation with artists. His projects are motivated by an insatiable curiosity, interlaced by integrity and research. I am convinced, that his documenta will add another chapter to our appreciation and our experience of contemporary art.
Looking back now and seeing this photograph and reading Kouoh’s statement for the first time, makes me reflect on this decisive moment, not only in the history of the Documenta exhibition and contemporary art, but also in my own life and work as a (now ex-) classicist. In fact, only now do I see the very specific connection between documenta 14’s version of the ‘decolonial turn’ in contemporary art and Kouoh’s brilliant contribution to the 57th Carnegie International Dig Where You Stand (for more info click here).
Yet such decolonial ambitions were lacking from the original announcement (the photograph and Kouoh’s statement) since it omits the crucial detail that Szymczyk proposed to split the exhibition with the European South of Athens, Greece. Here is how Szymczyk describes this moment in the opening essay for The documenta 14 Reader – ’14: Iterability and Otherness – Learning and Working from Athens’:
In November 2013, I was nominated Artistic Director of documenta 14, following a proposal I had formulated in the summer of that year on the invitation of the independent International Search Committee that convenes in Kassel, Germany. My proposition was to unfold documenta 14 in 2017 in two subsequent and partly overlapping iterations, both involving the same artists and other participants, in two cities: Athens and Kassel. After the supervisory board of documenta gGmbH (the nonprofit limited liability company set up in 1959 to organize the documenta exhibition) confirmed my appointment.
It took almost a year before Szymczyk’s Athens idea became public knowledge (here is an article about it from Art News) and I was even slower to react, with the first Minus Plato post that directly refers to documenta 14 written on October 17th, 2015.
Today, on the cusp of the announcement of the Artistic Director of Documenta 15, I want to take you back to this moment when I announced documenta 14 and Szymczyk’s Athenian proposal, without knowing precisely how it would change my life and the blog Minus Plato:
I am writing this Minus Plato post on my phone, while sitting in the car outside MOCA Cleveland, waiting for my son to wake up from a nap. Inside may lie in wait an exhibition, an artist, an artwork, that could be the subject of a future Minus Plato post. But all I can do now is sit here and gaze out the window at the rain rolling off that sleek, angular building, like a child with his face pressed up against a closed toy store window.
It does, however, give me a few moments to reflect on the past 3 and a half years of writing Minus Plato in this my 100th post. Little did I know back in May 2012 that I would be still writing this blog today and how important it would become for my life and work. It has been the place for me to take notes, share thoughts, to record and reflect on the dynamic between Classics and Modern/Contemporary Art via my OSU teaching experiments and collaborations with some incredible artists.
Yet thinking back to the very beginning of Minus Plato today has a very specific resonance that I have to admit I was completely oblivious to at the time. Thanks to a series of fortuitous encounters this past summer, I have become obsessed with the memory and legacy of dOCUMENTA(13).
It all happened when, on the flight back from Cuba for the 12th Havana Biennial, I read an anthology of Frieze reviews of the previous editions of the Kassel extravaganza, released before the unfathomable 13th edition. This experience was further enriched by my reading of the wonderful Enrique Vila-Matas novel The Illogic of Kassel, about his role at dOCUMENTA(13) as a ‘writer in residence’ at the Chinese restaurant on the edge of the town and how he broke free of what he was asked to do to engage with the stimulating and mind-expanding works of art on show elsewhere in Kassel. Since then, I have met, corresponded and even collaborated with artists who took part in dOCUMENTA(13) (Paul Chan, Seth Price), as well as the editor of the brilliantly ambitious 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series, Bettina Funke. I have forked out on and studied the 3 publications from the event, visited the website, watched videos, read reviews, all the time imagining what it would have been like to have actually been there. But until this moment, sitting in the car in rainy Cleveland, this obsession happened without me making the connection between the opening of dOCUMENTA(13) and the beginning of my blog Minus Plato back in the early summer of 2012. What could it mean to here and now register that I was embarking on Minus Plato at the same time as dOCUMENTA(13) was about to be unleashed on the world? Everything? Nothing?In future posts I am sure that I will write explicitly about this obsession I have with dOCUMENTA(13), about a letter to Lacan in ancient Greek, about Foucault’s reading of Seneca, about Lucretius and ancient Skepticism, about volumes, emperors, dogs and other curious things. I will also post about the next Documenta – documenta 14 -, and see if its theme ‘Learning from Athens’ calls for an exploration of antiquity as well as the contemporary question of debt (note the symbol of the new Documenta is the owl of the ancient drachma as much as the symbol for the goddess and her wisdom).
For now, however, for this my 100th post, I merely want to acknowledge this moment of realization of an uncanny coincidence as I look back to 2012 and forward to my imminent visit to MOCA Cleveland, as my son gently snores away.
Thank you all for reading Minus Plato in the past, today and in the future!
[The cover image of this post was posted by Instagram user @okyrhoe: Documenta 15: “Yearning for Athens,” photo via https://www.instagram.com/p/BVfJKHuBqOH/. It also was reprinted in Dating the Chorus Vol. 2 and attributed to Death Vallee/Studio 14]