From 2012: Resonating throughout the exhibition is a belief that ideas ask for a physical form and that we always think with the help of the material world
The opening days of Documenta 13 soon created their own protocol. Instead of discussing what we had seen with friends encountered during the vast walks in one of the main exhibition sites, the Karlsaue park, we hurriedly checked what we had missed. By luck I caught an unannounced, mesmerising concert by Lebanese musician Tarek Atoui, in the legendary Finnish composer and scientist Erkki Kurenniemi’s installation (which included, among other things, his pioneering custom-built synthesisers). One of my ‘Worldly Companions’ (as it is phrased in Documenta lingo) had heard by chance about Haegue Yang’s theatrical adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s novella The Malady of Death (1982). Another sneaked into a late-night screening of Reel–Unreel (2012), Francis Alÿs’s film from Kabul. In short, our various paths through this overwhelming abundance of artworks, performances, screenings and talks had created a complex, challenging multitude of experiences. And yet I left Kassel knowing I had missed much. I never found the reading woman placed outside the Orangerie by Ryan Gander. Nor did I understand that the noisy helicopter hovering over us was in fact a work by the Critical Art Ensemble. It was impossible to grasp the show, with its accumulation of knowledge about everything from art and physics to ecology and philosophy, in its entirety. This made the tour around this strong, thoughtful Documenta an imaginative adventure.
A likewise heterogeneous blend of artefacts from different cultures and historical epochs constitutes what artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev calls ‘the brain’ of her Documenta. In the rotunda of the Fridericianum, she has amassed objects as various as antique figurines from Central Asia, melted objects from the National Museum in Beirut, a photograph of Lee Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathroom and a damaged drawing by Gustav Metzger, among many others besides. Taken together, these objects speak of themes that recur throughout the exhibition: the trauma of war and destruction, ecological concerns and a holistic vision of the world. Nevertheless, this magical wunderkammer, like its historical predecessors, is not without complications. Taken out of their context, the specific historical and cultural conditions that created these diverse objects seem to fade away, leaving room for a more generally formulated melancholic sense of fragility and loss.
Nonetheless, as the exhibition gradually unfolds through the rooms of the Fridericianum, Neue Galerie and various additional sites, it becomes more historically and culturally situated. Just to mention a few examples among so many significant works: Hannah Ryggen’s woven tapestries commenting on the rise of fascism in Europe; Kader Attia’s juxtaposition of repaired African objects with photographs of surgically reconstructed war victims; and Mario Garcia Torres’s search for Alighiero Boetti’s legendary One Hotel in Kabul. Finally reaching the neglected buildings of the Hauptbahnhof, I end up at the far end of one of the platforms, listening to Study for Strings (1943) by Pavel Haas, composed in Theresienstadt; Susan Philipsz’s sound installation reminds us that this railway station was once used for wartime deportations.
Resonating throughout the exhibition is a belief that ideas ask for a physical form and that we always think with the help of the material world. This interest in the sensibility of different materials, in how perception is structured and in how we are constructed as beings through interaction with the physical conditions of our existence is convincingly expressed in sculptural works such as Geoffrey Farmer’s shadow puppets meticulously cut from magazine pages (Leaves of Grass, 2012), Gabriel Lester’s perceptually tricky curved tunnel (Transition, 2012) and Lara Favaretto’s amorphous heaps of recycled trash (Momentary Monuments IV (Kassel), 2012).
In a house originally built for the black swans in the park, Tue Greenfort has put together The Worldly House (2012), an archive in honour of renowned cultural theorist and science historian Donna Haraway. Her seminal critique of the anthropocentrism of the Western tradition is one of the most favoured ideas at Documenta, and is manifest in many of the works. The break with anthropocentrism has its obvious continuation in the questioning of how the ruling dichotomies of Western thought, such as the division between normal and abnormal, decide what is defined as human: boundaries that are challenged in Artaud’s Cave (2012), Javier Tellez’s film about Artaud’s famous trip to Mexico, realised in collaboration with patients from a psychiatric hospital.
Documenta 13 seems to aim at an exhibition experience close to the heterotopias suggested in Haraway’s thinking. She imagined a multilayered space offering, instead of sameness and unity, an otherness and difference in which a diversity of living organisms could coexist. Almost at the end of the park, suggestively placed on the compost site, Pierre Huyghe stages Untitled (2012), an uncanny tableau, coming close to Haraway’s thought, suggesting a time outside and after our cultural paradigm. A sculpted female torso with a buzzing beehive for a head rests in the muddy water. She is surrounded by weeds, psychotropic plants and an uprooted Beuysian oak. All this is overseen by a dog with one leg dyed in an oddly fluorescent pink. The work seems overdetermined by the apocalyptic sublime, but at the same time strangely and shockingly new. It is like moving through unknown territory, where life forms that we haven’t even imagined fertilise and crossbreed to generate another world.
Documenta 13 at various venues, Kassel, Kabul, Alexandria/ Cairo, Banff, 9 June – 16 September 2012
From the September 2012 issue of ArtReview – explore the archive.