https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6428-3156
![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Documenta 14 was a unique curatorial experiment on de-centring contemporary art and rethinking its historical development. The relocation of the first half of the show from the geographical and political centre of Europe to the crisis-ridden Southern European capital of Athens implies a decolonial attitude along with the decision to involve a different material context for exhibiting. Questioning the location of Documenta that is synonymous with the city of Kassel is symptomatic with the attempt of the curatorial team to distance the exhibition from the Western European/North American cultural axis. Actually, what documenta 14 attempted and partly succeeded to present was an alternative historical narrative about the art avant-gardes in the twentieth century and how these contributed to the constitution of the contemporary art canons. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the show and to discuss its efforts in challenging Occidentalism against the background of its own institutional history, European cultural politics, the emergence of right-wing populism and the critiques of the left.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Okwui Enwezor, a native of Nigeria, was the first non-European art director of documenta – and the first documenta of the new millennium was the first truly global, postcolonial documenta exhibition. As Enwezor explained, ‘Documenta 11 rests on five platforms which aim to describe the present location of culture and its interfaces with other complex, global knowledge systems’ (https://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta11). Building on this experiment dOCUMENTA (13) included three ‘off the main sites’, one in Kabul, one in Cairo-Alexandria and one in BANF.
2 A postcolonial critique takes up ‘the task of revising, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past’ (Gandhi Citation1998, 4).
3 ‘The [postcolonial] constellation, however, is not made up solely of the dichotomies named above, but can be understood as a set of arrangements of deeply entangled relations and forces that are founded by discourses of power. Such discourses of power are geopolitical in nature and by extension can be civilizational in their reliance on binary oppositions between cultures, which in a sense are inimical to any transcultural understanding of the present context of cultural production’ (Enwezor Citation2003, 58).
4 ‘Against the background of the European sovereign debt crisis, the AfD appeared on the political stage early in the election year 2013 as a single-issue party. However, during the Federal Election campaign its public rhetoric as an aside also alluded to right-wing populist motives, most notably a critical stance on immigration. After the 2013 Federal Election it moved further in that direction, downplaying the Euro crisis and focusing its campaign communication more strongly on xenophobic topoi and other motives from the repertoire of right-wing populism’ (Schmitt-Beck Citation2016, 142).
6 ‘The Parliament of Bodies, the Public Programs of documenta 14, emerged from the experience of the so-called long summer of migration in Europe, which revealed the simultaneous failure not only of modern representative democratic institutions but also of ethical practices of hospitality.’ More on http://www.documenta14.de/en/public-programs/
7 On this term, see de Duve (Citation2007).
8 The research project, Learning from Documenta conducted by the Athens Art Observatory (Citation2017), a collective of artists, architects and anthropologists that gravitated around the TWIXT lab in Athens, was the most visible, consistent and long-lived one, that functioned as a forum of dialogue and a voice of criticism.
9 On the presentation of the collection of the ΕΜΣΤ at the Fridericianum see http://www.documenta14.de/en/notes-and-works/23457/antidoron-the-emst-collection-at-museum-fridericianum
10 More online http://www.documenta14.de/en/walks
11 See for example the article by Frank Thonicke (Citation2017) on the local right-wing tabloid HNA that never missed a chance to attack documenta 14 and the relation built to Athens. In German.
12 For a more detailed account of the conflict see Kriki (Citation2017).
13 The resonance of the motto Learning from Athens was the object of a series of interview with folks from the cultural field in Athens, artists, curators, theorists that led to this paper. The interviews are available online at https://vimeo.com/documenta14research
14 ‘Narratives of blame have been formulated by the European right and directed at specific nation-states based on essentialist ideas of culture and economy. This methodological nationalism seeks to clarify abstract global flows of finance and accountability by making examples of peripheral states, thus distracting from substantial economic troubles at home. The focus on Greece as the par excellence example of cavernous corruption, economic extravagance, and social unrest has been manufactured in northern Europe to distract skeptical publics from controversial budget cuts in nations such as France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom’ (Knight Citation2013, 147–148).
15 The case of Sami artists, e.g. Britta Marakatt-Labba, Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Joar Nango, Synnøve Persen, Máret Ánne Sara and how they contributed to the cause of cultural and political self-determination of this people is the most prominent in D14. Also important were the contributions of Gordon Hookey and Dale Harding, indigenous artist from Australia, Nathan Pohio an artist of Maori decent, as well as Beau Dick from the Kwakwaka’wakw people or the indigenous artist collective Postcommodity from North America.
16 ‘From its inception, the history of modern art has been inextricably bound to the history of its exhibitions both in its commodity function through collectors in the economic sphere and in its iconoclasm evidenced by the assaults on formalism by the historical avant-garde. Both the commodity function of modern art and the avant-garde legacy have played strong legitimizing roles through exhibitions. In fact, it could be said that no significant change in the direction of modern art occurred outside the framework of the public controversies generated by its exhibitions’ (Enwezor Citation2003, 59).
17 The Gurlitt estate consists of artworks and art objects amassed by the German art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956), one of four art dealers officially designated to buy and sell art for the profit of the Nazi Reich. The artworks were found and seized by the authorities when they investigated the apartment of the son and heir of the estate, Cornelious.
18 Louis Gurlitt, Acropolis (1858) and Acropolis at Sunset (n.d.). Cornelia Gurlitt, Seventeen Works on Paper (1914, 1917–18, and n.d.) and Books of Love. Humor (1914).
19 The exhibition of Christos Papoulias’ drawings, studies, and works from the project The Erichthonean Museum of the Acropolis (1990–91) in ΕΜΣΤ, offers a thoughtful illustration of this point.
20 Cultural expropriation ‘underlines’ in the words of James Clifford, ‘a more disquieting quality of modernism: its taste for appropriating or redeeming otherness, for constituting non-Western arts in its own image, for discovering universal, ahistorical “human” capacities’ (Clifford Citation1983, 193).
21 Zainul Abedin, Two Untitled Sketches (1943) from the series Famine Sketches. Chittaprosad, Eleven Works on Paper (1944) and Illustration for Brahm Daitya ki Mukti; An Old Bengali Folktale (1 February 1964). Sunil Janah, Mother and Child on a Pavement in Calcutta, Bengal Famine (1944), A Muslim Family Leaving Their Village Near Chittagong, Bengal Famine (1943), Children Leading the Blind Grandmother to a Relief Center, Orissa Famine (1944).
22 European culture, Fanon claimed, is nothing more than the consequence of the ‘Western bourgeois’ ideology which has no room for any other notion of culture except that which is modelled after itself. ‘Western bourgeois racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab is a racism of contempt; it is a racism which minimizes what it hates. Bourgeois ideology, however, which is the proclamation of an essential equality between men, manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the sub- men to become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie’ (Fanon Citation1968, 163).
23 Iannis Xenakis was presented as part of Athens’s Contemporary Music Research Center – KΣYME that was founded in 1979 by Xenakis, Giannis G. Papaioannou, and Stephanos Vassiliadis and became known for the EMS synthesizer 100, which was also exhibited in Odeion during D14.
24 The Yannis Tsarouchis foundation, hosted in the house of the artist in Maroussi, Greece, was one of the venues of documenta 14 in Athens, suggesting the importance of the artists for the show. http://www.documenta14.de/en/venues/15323/yannis-tsarouchis-foundation
25 Adam Szymczyk has repeatedly denied that D14 has received any funding from Greek sponsors, except some plane tickets from Aegean Airlines, a Greek private carrier that also managed the route between Athens and Kassel.
26 Documenta 14 had about 340,000 visits in Athens, spread across its 47 venues in the city, adding to the number of visitors in the participating institutions. In most cases the permanent collections of the venue were also on display and in dialogue with the artworks of D14.
27 There is a lot of criticism that documenta 14 drained all the funding available, but according to my research is that there was no support coming from the big Greek private foundations, i.e. Neon, Onassis Foundation or Niarchos Foundation that almost exclusively support and control contemporary art in Athens.
28 Actually Paul Preciado, the curator of The Parliament of Bodies, the public program of D14 made this argument.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Georgios Papadopoulos
Georgios Papadopoulos combines economics and philosophy with artistic research. His work gravitates around media theory and interface criticism. In 2012 he won the Vilém Flusser Award for Artistic Research by the transmediale festival and the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin for his project on the cultural analysis of the Greek currency. He has presented his work at the ICA, KIASMA, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MQ21 and the Acropolis Museum. Currently Papadopoulos is responsible for the research project Creator Doctus formulating uniform standards for 3rd Cycle Education in the Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts.