Is Modernity our antiquity? What`s pure life? What to to? The three questions orientated the curators and become alive at the German event.
Texts and photos by Ana Luiza Hupe
KASSEL - The 201 thousand inhabitants city in the middle of Germany receives every five European summers during three months circa 600 thousand visitors more interested in contempling art than in observing the after-war reconstructions of the village – a mix of new-classicism, baroque and modern styles. The village’s climate encourages reflection and makes of the Documenta 12, opened to the public on 16th June last, one of the world most important contemporary art exhibitions, in a competitive year for the art scene, that simultaneously brings Venice Bienal, Skulptur Projekt Münster - open-air sculpture event happening every ten years also in Germany, and the art fair Art-Basel in Switzerland.
Documenta started in 1955. Its 12th edition shows few big world-known names and ouvres without monumental dimensions. The new trend? The artistic coordinator, Roger M. Buegel and his wife, the curator Ruth Noack, chose about 130 artists from different parts of the globe, suggesting modernity as an intercultural phenomenon and not as an exportation from the west. From Latin America there are about 13 artists and from Africa, 12.
Asia is well represented by Tsen Yu-Chin videos, painst by Yan Lei, among others. The Ai Weiwei work is one of the most discussed, the artist is a famous name in the vanguard culture in China. He spread 1001 chairs from the Qing Dynasty all around the exhibition’s space. “I thought these chairs were only an aesthetic care of the organization, I took a while to find out they were an art-work!”, tells the Brazilian video artist Alice Miceli. She visited Documenta during the opening weekend. On the 1001 chairs there are guided groups sitting and discussing. They stand there to be used. Inside a museum, everything can become the status of art.
Also outside it! The greatest polemic of Documenta is the nomination of the chef de cuisine Ferran Adrià as an artist. He`s the owner of the Spanish restaurant ElBuli, elected as the best one in the world for two consecutive years. “I`m surprised that my intervention generated this enormous debate.” – with this phrase begins the cooker an informal collective interview to the press. The restaurant is his atelier, where he chooses the ingredients and prepares the aesthetics of the plates. “Following the logic of Documenta, with art as an aesthetics experience that leads to the reflection, I think my work can be called art”, affirms Adrià. No samples of the new colors or of the reinvented tastes inside four walls. Until 23rd September, 50 people will be invited by the curatorial team to try Adriàs plates site-specifically, in the restaurant ElBuli, in the surroundings of Barcelona. ElBuli is like an external pavilion of Documenta.
The mineira (original from Minas Gerais, Brazil) Iole de Freitas, has already received her invitation. According to the installation she exhibits at the museum Fridericianum, she seems to agree with the escape of art from the institution. On the facade of the museum light squirmy movements hang from the windows arousing the curiosity of those who pass. Her installation occupies a room on the 1st floor room. The polycarbonates panels and acid structures distribute a comfortable sensation, as the artist has wished with the creation. She investigates the relationship between the body, light and space. After two months work together with engineers and German technicians she managed to interfere in the museum using what its architeture offers. “I`ve talked to Roger and Ruth the whole time during the building and everything was constructed based on way visitors would cross, I wanted to offer the public a different space.”, tells Iole.
In the neighboring room, the English artist Trisha Brown deals also with the idea of the human body in movement. Twelve dancers take turns making a performance over a clothes line full of color. There`s no choreography, the performers choose their movements and the clothes they like to dress or undress.
Video art
The media-installation of the Peruvian artist Luis Jacob, “A Dance for those of us whose hearts have turned to ice based on the choreography of Françoise Sullivan and the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth (with sign language supplement)”, with this almost auto-explicative title, exhibited also inside Fridericianum, is another reference to dance. A two meters screen shows a man dancing in the snow. Two smaller monitors on the base of it follow the rhythm of the dancer. They show a sign language interpretation; the one on the right side interpretives in Canadian-French, while the other in English, the universal language. This is one of the points touched by Jacob: the universality versus marginality. A Canadian marginal choreographer (Sullivan) and an universally know sculptress (Hepworth), were used as references with the purpose of touching these anti-theses. “It`s a political matter – who has an who has no access”, thinks Jacob. The sign language interpretations videos translate his idea: “they`re for me as a dance of the dance, as we don`t understand the language we see significant in the gestures, the faces. I tried to create a space where we realize our limits, we experience them.”
Testing other limits, the from human-being behaviour in interaction, Artur Mijewski promotes a meeting between polish people with different believing, from roman Catholics to radical Marxists in the video “Them”, exhibited in Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, distant 20 minutes from downtown. In the videos the people are supposed to discuss politics through a paper offered by the artist. One old woman draws the church while a group of young people suggests anarchism. One interferes in the drawings from the others. At he end of the enormous discussion, the room is on fire and everybody must be evacuated. An example of political-art, that shows the misunderstandings in the societies.
Art and politics
The presence of politics is felt everywhere through the exposition, sometimes in a more didactic way than in the last edition, when Documenta was curate by the African Okwui Enwezor. Politic is seen, for example, in the work of the Benin-born Romuald Hazoumé. It`s a big ship build with plastic bottles that normally carry oil gas. The ship, exhibited together with photographs that show Africa children in a beach, form the work “Dream”, a critic to the domain the multinationals have over the oil gas zone, exploring also minerals and ignoring misery.
Addressing another political matter, the North American Mary Kelly defends feminism in an entire room of Neue Galerie. She alludes to the feminist fights of the sixties with luminous reveling phrases by women who suffered discrimination. She build a glass house with her own reveling phrases like this: “When I went to college I couldn`t even boil an egg. My mother thought if she didn`t teach me how to cook, then I wouldn`t end up taking care of men… the way she did.”
A real husk giraffe in Documenta-Halle without any more information’s except the title “The Zoo History”, at the first view doesn`t suggest the real political meaning it hides. The animal used to live in a zoo in the east part of Cisjordany, occupied by Israel. When soldiers invaded the city in 2002 with gas bombes and explosions, the animal had panic attack, ran against an iron wall and died. The way Peter Friedls ouvre stands in the exposition space lightly resumes the way contemporary art should be comprehended: according to the interest of the spectator in knowing more about what is seen.
Small great ouvres
Black and white drawings united form the “99 fears”, by the tcheck artist Nedko Solakov. Exhibited in a small room of the Neue Galerie, at first it doesn`t have such an attractive view and the great majority of people just pass by. There are 99 disturbing situations for the artist and also for lots of us. Every drawings is disposed in A4 format, side by side. The fear number 84 is of the Yes and No. “Both of them are equally frightened. That`s why the smart people use “maybe”, says the drawing.
At Aue-Pavillon, pavilion specially constructed between two gardens in Kassel, is strangely big and without the walls the works mix and stand like lost over the concrete floor, surrounded by black-out curtains. The African David Aradeon exhibits “Movements of form, antecedents of Afro-Brazilian space.” The result of his interest in Afro-Brazilian architecture that he met in Nigeria. “When I arrived at Brazil it was far most interesting than I had thought. What they (africans) brought was a little bit of the believing system, the way of life and joy.”, tells Aradeon.
Candomblé photographs in religious places in Bahia besides photos from the religious places in Niger, churches in one and in the other countries composed the installation. “My work is the result of cultural changes, people live their own space when they can`t deal with their own ambitions.” – he philosophies. The expression “form migration”, used by the curate team is translated through Aradeons work very properly: the Brazilian architecture has migrated to Africa at the same time African culture has an influence in Brazil.
Brazilian Representation
As the reader could notice, not only through the official named artists Iole de Freitas, Ricardo Basbaum, Luis Sacilloto and Maurício Dias (from the videoarts dual Dias & Riedweg) Brazil is represented. There are tracks from Brazil in the work the Argentinean architect Jorge Jáuregui is presenting. He works with the urbanization of favelas (slams) in Rio de Janeiro for more than 25 years and presents the installation “Urdimbre” at Aue-Pavillon. There are concepts and architectonic drawings of projects already developed by him at Vidigal, Morro do Salgueiro, Complexo do Alemão (Slams in Rio). Besides the exposition space, Jáuregui coordinates a workshop to architect students from Kassel that will build a monument in the city. The most interesting part of his work is not in the gallery, but site-specific, in the slams, where urbanization is an instrument of peace. “The reality is a transformation potency. It`s important to think about new spaces for living, new ambient for the dialogue, for the interaction.”, tells Jáuregui., explaining that in the slams a building from the rubbish company Comlurb works as a monument because it represents the public sphere inside a private space. With urbanization it`s possible to create an easier access of the public power inside the community. Consequently the parallel power of the drug dealers goes down. The architect continues explaining that the slam`s population is always for the public intervention, that is done according to dialogues with the community. The drug dealers are against it.
Other works followed Jáuregui`s line in the sense that they use more content than aesthetic form. Mira Schendel is an artist that also lives long in Brazil, since 1949. She represents the country with the sculpture “Droguinha”, to be seen besides the paint “Betty”, by Gerhard Richter, one of the world-known names of Kassel.
At Wilhelmshöhe Castle, over a mountain, the best view of Kassel, in between ancient persian carpets there is the video “Funk Staden”, by Dias and Riedweg. A correct mix. The video relates Funk Partys in Brazil with the ritual of the Indians “arresting” Hans Staden. It was developed specially for Documenta. About their work, the Berlin architect Nikolau Kuhner gives his opinion: “I was a little bit confused with so many ouvres everywhere at Aue-Pavillon. What really claimed my attention was the video about Brazilian michés in Barcelona. Very interesting how they built mirrors, monitors and that machine in the middle.”, tells the visitor, alluding to the work “Voracidad Maxima”.
