This was Documenta 14 - Learning from Athens, or about hypocrisy [1/2]

DOCUMENTA 14 IN KASSEL: We need different spaces by  Matteo Binci
 

Fridericianum, Documenta Halle, Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum, Peppermint, Königsplatz, Orangerie, Karlsaue, Palais Bellevue, Neue Galerie, Cinestar, Museum Für Sepulkralkultur, Grimmwelt Kassel, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Torwache, Leder MeidApartment, Friedrichsplatz, Gloria-Kino, Stadtmuseum Kassel, Lutherplatz, ex estación del metro, Bali-Kinos,Neue Neue Galerie, Gottschalk-Halle, Narrowcast house, Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, Nordstadtpark, Weinberg-terrassen, Kunsthochschule Kassel, Filmladen Kassel, Henschel-Allen, Glas-Pavillons and Giesshaus.

These are all the cultural spaces that you can explore in Kassel among seemingly wide-spread freedoms but also chaotic thoughts.

The purpose was to assemble different and multiform conflicts. Tuning a tonality respectful of the independent artistic pluralities, devoid of strong curatorship. In other words, making a “chorality” and not a collectivity, because collectivity sometimes means a forced homog-enization of the cultural content.

Instead, the result is a general flattening of the voices. An undervaluation of the conflicts and of their peculiarity which, after a collage, became mute and secondary. At this point, everybody is for themselves, the list of the artists is long-lasting and confusion is inevita-ble.

Some artists however succeed not to be caged and state powerful questions, without dom-inating the scene and being hegemonic.

For example, Cristopher D’Arcangelo and his archive of anarchic actions:

When you look at a painting,
where do you look at that painting?

What is the difference between a painting on the wall and a painting
on the floor?

When I state that I am an anarchist,
I must also state, that I am not an anarchist,
to be in keeping with the (_ _ _ _) idea of ɯsıɥɔɹɐuɐ.

ɯsıɥɔɹɐuɐ ǝʌıן ƃuoן

8th March 1978, 12:00 p.m., Louvre Museum, Cristopher D’Arcangelo removes the eight-eenth-century painting titled Conversation in a Park from the wall. The painting illustrates an aristocratic couple in a British garden and it is repositioned on the floor with the back facing the wall. The canvas  is replaced by a paper with the text reported above. The ac-tion lasts 30 minutes. After that, the artist leaves the museum and no one knows his/ her identity.  A photographer in the room is questioned and the authority tries to seize the vid-eo, without succeeding.

D’Arcangelo wanted to identify the structure of power, underline its vulnerability and open new possibilities. His questions are “simple” and all of us could respond to them with our capabilities. The reason is that the answers cannot be originated from a single and univo-cal voice. His utopian museum is a place where people can think and stay without im-posed meanings and where they can approach art in a free and personal way. Moreover, the anonymity and the attempt to make meaning, in spite of the ellipsis (_ _ _ _), question the necessity to rethink the viewpoints based on signature and on sense of completeness of the artwork.

Stefanos Tsivopoulos reflects on the practice of archiving. The Precarious Archive is a ten years long project centered around a collection of 900 images. It contains files, photos and documents about the most important historical events that took place in post-war Greece, linked with European and World history (Cold war, the Truman Doctrine, the Greek dicta-torship and the Marxist guerrilla organization 17 November). The questions are: What is the mechanism of visual cultures in a mediatized democracy? Which are their effects on the production of the collective memory? The archive is always a physical and intellectual presentation and it is a matter of power. Therefore, how do we interact with this structure? What are the differences if the archive is not a fixed but a dynamic place? In the project, conceived as a live performance, a performer interacts with the archive and the audience. He suggests us to be the never-ending performer of our approach with history and ar-chives.

Pedro G. Romero, Israel Galván and Niño de Elche work together with other artists on the performance La farsa monea. They explore the meaning of being the heirs of a tradition and in particular the flamenco tradition. Flamenco is an art of the poor and of the gypsy, an  art of survival. Following Jacques Derrida’s thought, the heir is: “someone capable of turn-ing against those who claim to be the possessors of a legacy.” For this reason La farsa monea is a revolt of the body, of the music, of the thought and of the image. It is a boiling nucleus that, even if it considers history, it researches unlimited and independent tran-sformations and it makes uncontrollable life energies.

Lois Weinberger uncovers his Ruderal Society. In the poetry of “Ruderal” plants are al-ways ready to break the human presumption of cleanliness and order. The artist fights against the hyper-normalization, working and digging the underlying soil like an archaeol-ogist. The diversity of the economically undervalued and spontaneous vegetation is a “Place / where the living reveals it’s above the orderly”. The freedom to develop its own life-cycle allows an uncontrollable growth of heterogeneous plants. A reflection arouses from the work: how could the same freedom be transposed into the social human life?

Takis is interested in the structure of the urban landscape. His artwork Gong (1978) is nothing but what you see: a metal sheet and an electromagnet. The magnetic field is an enormous magnet that encircles the Earth. The artist images to make a musical sculpture exploring the repetitive structure of music’s shape. The sound is functional and spatial. The clash between the electromagnet and the sheet generates, with regular intervals, a bass and reverberating sound. Sound is deep and repetitive. The electromagnet rings the metal. The electromagnet rings the metal. The electromagnet rings the metal.

These artists tell us that what we need are different spaces and architectures. Art cannot only stay in a single and white space. Museum is just a space among others and we should rethink its spatiality if we want to break its hierarchy. Nature, sound, body and his-tory could be a dimension of freedom and heterogeneity, but be careful when normalizing body, summarizing history, considering tradition, planning nature and playing sound.