d13: documenta

OCA BA and MA tutor Angela Rogers has been lucky enough to go to Kassel,  the location of the five yearly contemporary art festival documenta, 200 artists in 100 days.
She reports for OCA below:
Documenta began on a small scale in 1955 in reaction to the Nazis’ suppression of ‘degenerate art.’ It has grown into an international event with associated shows in Kabul, Alexandria, Cairo and Banff.  The curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev selected works that demonstrate artistic research and imagination, where politics are inseparable from sensual, scientific and artistic knowledge, contemporary and historical. This made for a wonderfully diverse event. From Michael Rakowitz’s, recreation of books damaged in the bombing of Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz Museum in 1941, carved from Bamiyan stone where the 6th century Buddha statues were destroyed in Afghanistan, to a pre-fab office, where art critic Lori Waxman sits and offers to write a 60 word review of your work.  In the old railway station, William Kentridge’s piece, The Refusal of Time, deals with time and the mechanics of its representation. In a three-sided projection space Kentridge uses expressionistic performance, drawing and animation of timepieces to look at the standardisation of time. It is theatrical, the action moves around the room, a large bellows-like machine breathes behind me and the sound track is full of drums and exotic instruments. Elsewhere in the Hauptbahnhof, Haegue Yang’s motorised venetian blinds open and close in a stately dance above a platform, both formal and emotive. There is a small garment factory where everything is still, all crafted from wood, including the electric cables that hang from the ceiling and curve around the sewing machines. The whole room evokes labour and its absence in this installation by Istvan Csakany  Julie Mehretu’s paintings and drawings are large scale multiple layers of acrylic on white primed canvas, overlaid with pencil, felt-pen and ink. I kept looking again and again at the conflations of fragments of aerial landscapes, architectural detail, perspective views, smudges, squiggles and painted lines. Although Mehretu references recent revolutionary squares such as Tahrir Square and questions the civic order that these public places represent, for me this is not apparent.
From the room next door, Geoffrey Farmer’s Leaves of Grass, looks like a sailing ship from the realms of the fairies. It is a long sculptural collage of hundreds of shadow puppets, images cut out from Life magazines between 1935-1985. Farmer presents photographs from different decades in thematic but incongruous groups; we see significant historical events and advertising in one continuous presentation, one minute Kennedy’s assassination and the next a display of baking.  Amongst many others these will stay in my memory – Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s sound scape in Karlsaue Park, sitting under trees listening to footsteps, voices, horses, planes overhead and imagining what might have happened in the woods. Jerome Bel’s film of dancers with mental disability, despite all its ethical questions about exposure, and Tino Seghal’s, This Variation, which took me from darkness and vulnerability and left me completely uplifted. See Adrian Searle’s review of Seghal.

Image: Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves of Grass, 2012