She’s off on her daily routine of sacrificing! every day a sacrifice of some sort for her! This god one day, that god the next, god only knows to what god she’s sacrificing today. – Sostratos in Menander’s Dyskolos It is the start of a typical day for our three Athenians in their tiny house […]
Do you see that little door and that small house over there? – Strepsiades in Aristophanes’ Clouds Three Athenians (let us call them Bia, Alexis and Nina) live together in a tiny house on the outskirts of Kassel. They are here to work at Documenta, the exhibition that this small German city hosts every five […]
07:11 Wake up in my room at the Hessenland Days Inn, the same hotel where Enrique Vila-Matas stayed during dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 (when it was called the Grand City Hotel, Hessenland), and where Gerald Byrne’s film A man and a woman make love was shown in the ballroom. 07:16 Look out window at the […]
There was no way that documenta 14 was ever going to compete with its predecessor on the scale of its intervention in the expansive terrain of Karlsaue Park. Some fifty plus artworks were scattered across the park during dOCUMENTA (13), which made this the most densely populated space for works as well as of visitors, turning a quiet stroll in the park into a mass treasure hunt for art lovers.
The morning I spent at Karlsaue Park today, however, was a mixture of frustration and excitement as I combined my visits to the 4 works of documenta 14 (by Cuidad Abierta, Olaf Holzapfel, Benjamin Patterson and Lois Weinberger – pictured) with a foolhardy quest for remnants of works from five years ago.
But what this combined search for traces of past works and this year’s four pieces taught me was that one of the major strengths of documenta 14, as generated by its split between Athens and Kassel, is that it allows the artworks of one site to forge a contingent relationship with other works elsewhere, either in Athens, Kassel or both. Furthermore, each of the four works shared the form of some kind of structure which had the effect of contingency in a different way: they all demanded some form of mediation from the visitor to be activated, understood and appreciated. In other words, each work caused visitors to triangulate between what they encountered in the park and works on other sites. Of course, this is not to say that certain networks and connections between objects and artists were not deployed at dOCUMENTA (13) – there were artists, for example Susan Hiller, who had works in Karlsaue and elsewhere in Kassel. That said, the spectacle of sheer number of works to be discovered dispersed across the part, makes it harder to believe that they were meant to be encountered in this contingent, mediated way.
I will write about this in more detail tomorrow as I am experiencing some technical difficulties (in addition to extreme exhaustion from my day’s adventures) so I will continue this post on my return to Malaga tomorrow.
In the meantime, here is a video of a ten minute bike ride through the park from 2012 and dOCUMENTA (13) that you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home.
Five years ago, in the rotunda of the Fridericianum, where I sat with the other participants in The Parliament of Bodies for last night’s talk by Georges Didi-Huberman, there stood what artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev called ‘the brain’ of dOCUMENTA (13). A few posts ago I mentioned this area as encountered by Enrique Vila-Matas in […]
Today I left behind the sun of the South in Malaga, and traveled North, to the rain of Kassel. At the same time, I also felt like I was leaving behind that other city of the South, with which this German city has (so generously) shared this year’s documenta exhibition, and it would be part […]
When I take students to Rome, I try to get them to to visualize the immense scale of what the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus must have looked like on the Capitoline Hill by asking them to imagine a ‘Pantheon in the sky’. According to our typical itinerary, we would have seen the Pantheon the […]
How much time did you spend in Athens with your face up against a window, peering into a closed building, trying to get a glimpse of a work of art or at least the space in which it was made? Did this happen to you at Archimidous 15 and Nikhil Chopra’s Drawing a Line through […]
Did you know when you took the photograph of this quiet performance piece, with its rustle of aligning sunlight, that its creator’s name, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, was some form of collective pseudonym? Did you read about ‘them’ in an interview article called ‘The Politicization of Anatomy’, in which ‘they’ respond to a question about […]
On your last day in Athens you booked into a tour of the Odeion, lead by a member of the documenta chorus, Denise Araouzou. You wanted to see and hear the art of this space that you had repeatedly returned to through the eyes and ears of another. You were drawn to the description of […]