Here we are at the culmination of this week’s build-up – drum-roll please! There is no place in the book I am communicating to you from – Kunstforum International Bd. 248/249 on documenta 14 – for the works that I have been alluding to located in the basement of the Neue Galerie in Kassel.
There are no videos, sounds or drawings from the installation Journey to Russia by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi
There are no Books of Schemes by Valery Pavlovich Lamakh
There are no works from the series Atlas of Russian History from George Maciunas
This book, while understandably uncomprehensive, neglects this section of the Neue Galerie’s basement completely. This act of erasure may feel insignificant in the scheme of things – with all that is going on in the world from the pandemic to the drums of war beating in Ukraine (will Russia invade today?) – but what makes this book a ‘dangerous supplement’ (to use the idiom for literature proposed by Jacques Derrida) is that the story of this exhibition, its Kassel half and its core in the Neue Galerie, is left incomplete, as a gap, by an archival mechanism – a book – that is meant to offer coverage. It is within this gap that my earnest librarian has situated himself and his work here on this blog these past 5 years. If document 14 belongs to nobody in particular, then who will tell its story? Beyond surveys, reviews, academic articles and passing references, how will the intimacy of an encounter with an exhibition that had a transforming impact on him be communicated and, eventually, turned into a curriculum for the future? It is beyond the scope of these dispatches by a library’s ghost to answer these loft questions, all I know is that he’s in it right now. The project of sifting through his library – from the shelves I haunt to his office back to the Rojo bookshelf at home (where he also bring books in bags – like Lawrence English’s Noise Is Politics Is Noise – to dump on the floor of his office) continues at pace until it is all over this coming May. Perhaps this will mean that the story of documenta 14 needs to include these sites of unlearning as well, in the future; to include both Olu Oguibe’s Monument for Strangers and Refugees (2017) included on the Kunsforum International book’s cover as well as the homage by Adéwálé Adénlé, artist, political cartoonist, educator, and PhD student in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy where my librarian also teaches and learns amid the noise of politics and the politics of noise.
