metropolis m

Serious and Optimistic
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on dOCUMENTA (13)

The preliminary trajectory had its requisite sidetracks, but now that dOCUMENTA (13) is opening, all of the attention is going to the 150 artists and their projects. Artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on this exhibition’s four central positions.Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: ‘Dieter Lesage once suggested that documenta might take place outside of Kassel. I think that documenta is grounded in Kassel, but can also take place elsewhere, in dialogue with Kassel. I am working and thinking in Kassel. And I think it is this very rootedness, or location-specificity, that allows for a resonance with other locations and places around the world. Indeed, the exhibition is both rooted and uprooted.‘dOCUMENTA (13) is not informed by a theme or a constant and therefore easily reifiable concept. The whole project is instead organised around four positions from which an artist, or anybody else, takes action. The majority of the participants in the project are indeed artists, but there are also participants coming from fields such as biology, quantum physics, and fiction writing; for instance, during the 100 days of the exhibition, several writers will come for a retreat in a Chinese restaurant in Kassel. This restaurant has glass walls instead of wallpaper landscapes and paper lanterns. When you look through the window, it is as if the wallpaper often present in Chinese restaurants becomes real. This slippage between fiction and the real, between the expected and the unexpected, is present throughout the exhibition in a very embodied way. Its particular form of embodiment, which is also a matter of location, is very much related to the way dOCUMENTA (13) is being articulated, both inside and outside of Kassel.

Positions

‘The first of the four positions can be condensed in the question: How do we act when we are on stage? What do we do when we are performing? We are in a time in which people often act from within a position of induced performativity – the Facebook-world and Twitter-moment dynamics being an example of this. Since Kassel is the ultimate stage in our field, it is also the place to reflect upon what it means to be on stage today, to be performative today. ‘Another position that is contemplated is the condition of being under siege. What does it mean to feel besieged and how do you act when you are under siege? People are under siege in a great variety of ways: because of the consequences of war, because of the financial situation, the increasing precariousness of lives, and the general disempowerment that people are experiencing today, and that results in a deprivation of experience – we are haunted by bio-politics and besieged by political powers and the media. So I thought about Kabul, and I actually did go to Kabul very early on in the process. I went for two reasons. I was interested in particular in places that were experiencing trauma after war and dictatorships. My journeys for dOCUMENTA (13) have taken me to places that have a particular past that may be similar to Germany in 1948, ’49, ’50 – when it was divided by occupying forces after the Nazi period of the 1930s and early 1940s. Alighiero Boetti always told me that the One Hotel in Kabul had been destroyed, bombed. I was doing research about Boetti and the One Hotel that he ran in the 1970s – I learned a lot from him, in particular his idea of ‘mettere al mondo il mondo’, to put the world into the world, which is also the title of a work that he realized in 1972–73. Mettere al mondo il mondo means that the artist doesn’t have to add anything else, it is just there. ‘So, it happened that at the time when everybody was looking for Bin Laden, the artist Mario Garcia Torres was doing a fax-based project of fictionally being in Kabul, searching for the One Hotel. He never went to Kabul during that project of the early 2000s. The piece was all done through Internet searches and Google maps. It was about how knowledge is constructed in the digital age. For Mario, it was based on being not there, but I told him: “Let’s go, why don’t you come with me”, and he came. I was interested in the condition of living in a place that is still in ruins, that had an authoritarian regime, that was liberated, but at the same time occupied. And how civil society emerges in that, with all its contradictions and complexities. Another reason that brought me to Afghanistan was the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. I was thinking about art and the relationship with society; what happens for instance if art is censored, put away, as with what happened after the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst. When you are in a place of conflict, you realize that there is a normal life too, and that the media, by portraying the conflict, is also producing it – and producing fear. In Afghanistan there is also a normal life: there are coffee shops where people meet, bookshops, and there is a university full of students. So we decided to start a series of seminars and workshops there and also to have people coming from there to Kassel. War makes facts. But art also makes facts, of a different order.‘The third condition is that of being in a state of hope. This position has been seen more recently, in February 2011, during the time of the revolution in Egypt. To be in a state of hope has something to do with the dialectical relation between sleep and waking, and with sleep as a position of hope. Here again, this position is thought of in terms of a mutual resonance, this time between Kassel and Egypt. A number of students and young artists from Egypt are coming to work in Kassel with artists in May 2012, and in July 2012 we will do a seminar, The Cairo Seminar, in Alexandria. ‘The fourth position concerns the status of being in retreat, in withdrawal. This position contemplates the ideas of Exodus, and of doing nothing – a doing nothing which cannot be captured in the paradigm of efficiency. A retreat will take place in Banff (Alberta, Canada), where the participants in a Summer School will discuss the subject of ‘the retreat’ and also learn ceramics.

Retreat

‘These are the four positions. My intention is to unfreeze the stereotypes and clichés. Take Kabul: it is not only occupied, it is also a stage. And it is also in a state of hope. I really find it one of the most incredibly hopeful places. And it is also a retreat. Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel was a retreat par excellence: he would spend six months a year as a hotel manager in Kabul, and six months as an avant-garde artist in Italy. ‘Documenta in Kassel is certainly not just a stage: it is very much under siege. You asked me a question: is documenta over, now that there are so many biennales around the world, and I would say absolutely not, because there is so much of a need for a retreat. Documenta functions as a retreat for the artists in full visibility. The artists feel challenged by this place, its history. They are free to experiment and do things without having to be in a state of forced performativity. And it is also a state of hope, because there is such a need for intense embodied aggregation, for embodied experience. ‘So documenta can be said to have two lines: one is a visible line, totally upfront, and the other is an invisible line. By focussing on other things as a decoy there is the possibility for relations to develop. This relates as well to the way we use media. dOCUMENTA (13) has had two types of newsletters in the lead up to June 2012: one of them is about AND AND AND, the project organized by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri. AND AND AND has been all over, from Tunisia to Argentina, to the USA’s Mid-West, the South of Italy and to Rotterdam, with small events. Sometimes the newsletter goes out after the event, sometimes a day before: it is always too late. This is a temporal attitude that aims at creating a space of freedom, and of focussing on questions of scale, on what makes a big event, and what makes a small event, and what happens if a series of many small ones becomes one event. It is about what happens in that shifting moment of becoming visible. It is creating a past for a future. ‘AND AND AND is a collective interested in non-capitalist ways of life. It is not important if all the artists involved in their events are great artists or not. What matters is if they are friends, and if they share similar social and political commitments. They can even be lovers, fathers, sisters. It is an aggregation of events based on love as a political tool, not on modernist ideas of “productive professionality”. ‘Then there have been the second kinds of newsletters for the notebook presentations, which together form chapters of a novel. The 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts [also see Metropolis M No. 5, 2011 – eds.] are about publishing something that really doesn’t have a place in publishing. To focus on the space of the propositional. This project is conceived with Chus Martínez and realised by Bettina Funcke and our publications team. Authors range from artists like Emily Jacir or Lawrence Weiner, philosophers like Christoph Menke or Judith Butler, to scientists like Anton Zeilinger and anthropologists like Michael Taussig and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. These texts and newsletters, this use of media, is intended to cause a distraction from what is in the exhibition in Kassel during the years leading up to it. After the opening, the voice goes over to all the 150 artists whose great artworks have been carefully prepared and created over the past 4 years.

Optimistic

‘I would say that this documenta is based on a ‘locational turn’. The physicality of the exhibition is important. Despite the 100 notebooks – which however already comprehend a variety of positions and welcome different degrees of knowledge – dOCUMENTA (13) is not an exhibition dominated by theory. The overall project is instead, and very much, about creating a stage for uncontrolled encounters, and the unexpected. This has also to do with the condition of the ‘maybe’, and particularly with the methodology of scepticism: That is, the belief in the fact that one can know reality without being able to achieve an ultimate truth, which would be of course an oppositional form of truth. The exhibition is sceptical in that sense, and it is therefore a seriously optimistic project. ‘Time plays an important role in such an articulation. Documenta lasts 100 days, and in this edition the last week is as important as the first. Our approach is totally time-based. Within the entanglement of events that will take place during the 100 days of the exhibition, there will be a seed conference around the problem of life and, to stay on the subject, two on the measurement of time, the obsession with time, the refusal of time. We will also hold a congress about artists’ congresses after the opening week, from June 11 to June 15, where the protagonists are the artists: those who do the work before the discourse exists. In that week we go back to the early Soviet congresses of artists and many others, from 16 Beaver to The Artists Village in Singapore, to the Ho Chi Minh artist congress of 1956 in Hanoi. ‘Also responding to a logic of entanglement and non-hierarchical articulation of knowledges are the School for Worldly Companions and the Art Academies Network of dOCUMENTA (13). Generally, tour guides in an exhibition are the so-called experts. We wanted to contaminate that a bit with non-arts specialists, so for the past six months we have been doing an incredibly ambitious project of training of the “Worldly Companions”, who accompany the visitors on “dTOURS”. After an open call, 700 or 800 people from Kassel responded. In the last weekend of the past months they have been participating in courses. This is an important trial in experimental pedagogy, as well as in building a community. They bring their own specific knowledge together with the artistic teachings of our school, led by Jakob Schillinger.‘The Art Academies Network is another experiment in resistance to cognitive capitalism. Several artist’s projects are activated ones: they involve a lot of people, but we do not want to work only with volunteers and interns, nor with paid actors. To avoid the issue of labour exploitation, we decided to turn it into an educational project. We thought of the exhibition as a big school, a condition of learning, and we sought a collaboration with art academies. We now work with 100 students; they receive credits and we offer them extra seminars in the evenings when documenta is closed. ‘You asked me about the dogs. I do think that humans are more humane when they are also more conscious of the other species with whom we share the world, and stop pretending to control everything. It is part of sharing the planet to understand that a mule is not at all stupid, but is instead one of the most free-thinking animals – that mules just don’t walk if they don’t want to, and that you have to enter in a relationship with them in order to convince them that walking is a really good idea! The question of whether crows have language, or of whether animals or plants have rights, belongs to the same debate. In order for democracy to move forward, we have to constitute the subject as a subject, and give up any pretension of ownership and exclusivity that we might have about subjectivity. It is about empowering, and the right to determine the environment in which we all live.’ Bik Van der Pol, artists, Rotterdam

Bik van der Pol

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