#Leo. palimpsestic

[fyeahaudiodrama]

Happy @podcastgirlsweek to all who celebrate! While I haven't had the time to properly work on fics (and probably won't this week because oops, hurt my hands yesterday) I still wanted to take the time to highlight some favorite podcast girlies along with everyone else!

The prompt for Monday is highlighting podcasts with women in the leading roles, so here's a few of mine (and hopefully, some new ones of yours if you don't know them yet):

Back Again, Back Again: Ilyaas, you absolutely fantastic disaster of a fantasy ace, never stop trying.

Breathing Space: While the show is anthology with a rotating cast, some of my favorites from across its run include:

Evie Yuriskin

Amity Archer

Any characters who were introduced one episode and then started referring to each other as "my wife" by the end or by their next appearance

Camlann: Some apocalypse survivors interpret dangerous dreams about dark magic to cope. Some knit sweaters. Both are valid and should kiss.

City of Ghosts: Featuring the grungy, disgruntled, tormented-by-visions LADY detective of your dreams.

Desperado: Take note - give your ladies knives. And god powers. And witchcraft. And a sniper rifle, for good measure.

Do You Copy?: I think [REDACTED] deserves three weeks of paid vacation

Fawx & Stallion: Madge Stallion is THE moment. She's six feet tall. She can't stop making innuendos. She's not your fucking Mrs. Hudson (although, she is - no, I shan't say).

Hi Nay: Mari & Laura are my everything - the loving and self-sacrificing hero and the newfound friend who chooses to stand by her side (fire axe and all).

Inn Between: Oh, my Inn Between girlies, where do I start? Fina and Betty, the OGs and life partners that even death couldn't stall? Rosie and Zara, the new best pals who chose to stay together? Phoebe, just one step at a time learning what she deserves and what she doesn't? All impeccable, A+.

It Makes A Sound: Any show focused on music is going to be a slam dunk for me, but Deirdre's quest to reclaim her memories as well as those that tied her to her mother is so damn real and compelling.

The Kingmaker Histories: No female character in this show has ever done anything wrong. Colette gets a migraine pass. Ariadne can turn people inside out. Daphne is owed this for working in a theme park.

Life With LEO(h): Janiiiiiine, so messy and smart and dedicated and she cares so much, I love yoooooou.

Me and AU: Kate's worries and desires and doubts are some of the realest out of any audio drama so when do I find an Ella too

Palimpsest: My faaaaavorite gothic horror anthology, each one fresh with a different brand of haunted, tormented, secret-keeping (and quite frequently gay) gothic protagonist

The Pasithea Powder: Jane and Sophie. Sophie and Jane. What more could you need? <3

The Silt Verses: Women who start cults/leave cults/seek an end to the endless cycle of meaningless sacrifice as so valid. For all your wet cat(fish) woman needs.

Second Star to the Left: Because I always love a good Ishani performance. Hi Gwen, please tell Boots I love them.

Small Victories: You want sad wet cat women? How about one that literally can't stop self-sabotaging (but at least manages to draw the line at sabotaging others...occasionally). She even gets stabbed!

Starfall: I mean, kind of a given, but anyway, Leona definitely exists because she's the kind of action protagonist woman I always wanted - one that could be unapologetically powerful, but still full of flaws and desires (especially ones that weren't about falling in love and minimizing her own strengths). She's even autistic!

Stories From Ylelmore: Keryth! Keryth, Keryth, Keryth! She reminds me so much of the kinds of characters I would make up when I was younger - I love her and her small magic so dearly.

The Strange Case of Starship Iris: Hi queer space pirates <3

Unseen: Another anthology show, but Harry Winters and Never-Ending Circles remains one of the most perfect premiere episodes I've ever heard in audio drama.

The Way We Haunt Now: Get your podcast ladies here, dead or alive!

We Fix Space Junk: My favorite type of repairman is a woman who could kick my ass.

Wolf 359: I don't think I need say much more here - y'all know and love 'em just as much as I do.

[between-the-architextures]

Live Jazz, Jazz Lived

Jason Moran’s art is one of textures. A sometimes dark, sometimes very light, luminous, illuminating art of bringing into a dialogue the diverse planes of human experience. It reveals the complexity of life but also underscores the particularities and interfaces of this complexity: what it means to be black and play jazz, what it means to play jazz and live in America, what it means to live in America and play jazz while being black, at a particular time and at a particular club. We see jazz life in all of its permutations. The dynamic, textured life of a cat that is irreducible to one single plane but which can only be understood as the product of all of the planes and avenues of life. 

Moran’s 2018 retrospective at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is one such texture. Arguably the most ambitious of all Moran’s projects, it unfolded over the course of several months and spanned the wide gamut of jazz performance: live music, recorded music, videos, multimedia installations, as well as visual and sculptural works. Jason Moran framed jazz not just as a genre of music but as a lively network of media and life forms. This liveness found its main source in STAGED, one of the centerpieces of the retrospective that consisted of life-size replicas of iconic American jazz stages. 

Relying on photographic evidence and the stories told by the musicians who played on these stages in the 1940s and 1950s, Moran resuscitated Slugs, Savoy, and Three Deuces and gave them new life within the contemporary art context of Walker. They may not be the real thing, but their closeness to life is quite remarkable. Not only in their general physical appearance but also in the more subtle signage of real lives lived. One could find, for example, sawdust on the floor of the Slugs stage – that really was there in the 40s & 50s and now served as a reminder of the kinds of strange and precarious conditions in which the musicians had to play and the audiences enjoy their music – or a chair lying on its side, also in Slugs, hinting at the killing of Lee Morgan by his girlfriend mid-performance. 

But life did not stop here and only continued finding new forms in the exhibit. On certain days, Moran stepped into his own creations and activated them by using them as actual stages. Together with such renowned jazz masters as Charles Lloyd and Archie Shepp, Moran played concerts for the exhibition attendees – who, all of a sudden, were no longer just observers inspecting stages qua sculptural objects but were now implicated into a mode of very deep intimacy with jazz and offered a slice of these stages’ original life, that aura or genius loci which, as they say, you really had to be there to experience. 

Still in the space-time of 2018 Minneapolis, the visitors were given a form of contact with jazz that now made the entire entourage of Moran's recent video recordings in the studio, his charcoal drawings made by dipping the fingertips in paint and playing the piano, and the sheet music available on display come alive in a brand new way. The lineage, the pulsing life force of this music was revealed. Not in a strictly linear fashion but in a way that resembles a palimpsest – that captures the continuous back-and-forth between the fixed object & the intentions it is invested with, between the now and then of jazz performance, between the clubs, the bars, the studios, and more private spaces, between being-in-the-world as a jazz artist, articulating your space, and making an utterance in time… 

To quote Moran himself, it’s PROFOUND! PROFOUND! (Sidran).This profundity lived in every corner of Jason Moran and, hopefully, will continue on living in Jason Moran – the great re-stager, re-contextualizer, and intermediary of jazz. 

Sidran, Leo. “Jason Moran”. The Third Story, Apple Music, 5 June 2020. https://podcasts.apple.com/ru/podcast/the-third-story-with-leo-sidran/id808401775?i=1000476952923.

[werateaudiodrama]

A non-exhaustive list of audio dramas I have listened to and would recommend, for reasons:

2298

A Ninth World Journal

A Voice From Darkness

Absolutely No Adventures

Alba Salix, Royal Physician

Alice Isn’t Dead

All In My Head

Among the Stars and Bones

And 195

Arden

ars Paradoxica

Brimstone Valley Mall

Caravan

Chain of Being

Childish: the Podcast Musical

Civilized

Come On In, The Water’s Fine

Cybernautica

Desperado

Directive

Dos: After You

Dreambound

Duggan Hill

Elain’es Cooking For the Soul

Exoplanetary

Finding Atlas

Folxlore

Girl In Space

Great & Terrible

Greater Boston

Harlem Queen

Hauntingly Humdrum

Hi Nay

Hit the Bricks

Hulm

In Strange Woods

Inn Between

Interference

It Makes A Sound

It Was Never Just About the Revolution

Janus Descending

Kalila Stormfire’s Economical Magick Services

Khora

Less Is Morgue

Life With LEO(h)

Light Hearts

Lost Terminal

Love and Luck

Magic King Dom

Me and AU

Megaton Girl

Middle:Below

Midnight Radio

Mirrors

MonkeyTales

Moonbase Theta, Out

Mount Olympus University

Novitero

Null/Void

Old Gods of Appalachia

Olive Hill

On a Dark, Cold Night

Oz 9

Palimpsest

Pershing Radio

Primordial Deep

Red Rhino

Scenic Byways

Second Star to the Left

Seen and Not Heard

Seren

Sidequesting

Signed, Venus

Starcalled

StarTripper!!

Station Arcadia

Station Blue

Superstition Podcast

Temujin: An Audio Drama

The After Disaster Broadcast

The Amelia Project

The Ballad of Anne and Mary

The Black Tapes

The Bridge

The Bright Sessions

The Call of the Flame

The Carlotta Beautox Chronicles

The Cryptonaturalist

The Deca Tapes

The Dungeon Economic Model

The Easiest of All the Hard Things

The End of Time and Other Bothers

The Far Meridian

The Godshead Incidental

The Magnus Archives

The Orphans

The Pasithea Powder

The Path Down

The Penumbra Podcast

The Pilgrimage Saga

The Prickwillow Papers

The Silt Verses

The Six Disappearances of Ella McCray

The Strange Case of Starship Iris

The Tower

The Van

The Vanishing Act

The Viridian Wild

The Wanderer

The Way We Haunt Now

The White Vault

This Planet Need a Name

Tides

Tin Can

Unseen

Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic Mystery

VALENCE

VAST Horizon

Vega: A Sci-Fi Adventure Podcast!

Vile Trials

We Fix Space Junk

Welcome to Night Vale

Windfall

With Caulk and Candles

Within the Wires

Wizard Seeking Wizard

Wolf 359

Wooden Overcoats

Zero Hours

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

Look, I’m going to be snotty for a minute.  I promise to feel bad about it later.

There’s been a spate of “but fanfiction isn’t real Writing, tho” on my dash today, which is whatever, very snoozy stuff, I do not care about it at all.  The only thing I thought was semi-interesting was that a few people tried in their tags to make some kind of objective case for this opinion, which never works.  The most common thing I saw was the same old-same old about how fanfiction is easier because you don’t have to make stuff up yourself -- and it’s true, there’s a thin layer of work off the top that you get out of in fanfiction, where you don’t have to spell out character backstories (except in AUs, where you normally do have to) or the mechanics of building a fictional world (except when you do have to) or sometimes physically describe settings the reader can already picture (sometimes).  But as usual, I find it really funny that people think any of that is *the hard part,* because premise and setting and basic character work is typically the part that, like, even the worst writers are capable of managing.  Because that stuff is frankly super easy, and every writer I know has a thousand Ideas I Made Up that have never been written, because making things up is a whole different practice from *writing.*

But that is also whatever, because no one is moved by hearing writers ramble on about how hard they work.  What struck me as interesting, though, was that by this logic, people who write memoirs and narrative nonfiction are also not Real Writers.  They, like fanfic writers, are taking a whole pile of stuff that exists already, events and characters and ideas, then trying to figure out how to use it all in a way that expresses something or evokes a reaction or compels attention in whatever way.  I guess you could argue that what they do is easier than writing fiction, but -- “easier” is pretty subjective, and I wouldn’t think even the most churlish literary snob would suggest that things like, I dunno, Palimpsest or In Cold Blood weren’t acts of writing executed by writers just because Vidal and Capote didn’t start from a cool white room and Make Everything Up.

But as I was thinking all that, yet another iteration crossed my dash, that straight up said “fanfiction is easy the way that writing an essay about something someone else wrote is easy” and, y’all, my goddamn life ended.  I truly did not expect the More Literary Than Thou crowd to come up with this hottest of hot takes -- that essays about fiction are too easy to qualify as genuine acts of writing.  This probably comes as a surprise to -- where the fuck to even begin?  TS Eliot, Umberto Eco, Toni Morrison, Ted Hughes, Leo Tolstoy, Susan Sontag -- I mean Jesus fucking GOD.  Look, friends, it’s not news to me that my English lit degree was a waste of time and money, but I really didn’t think I’d ever hear anyone mount a serious argument that the reason for it was that I wasn’t reading Real Writing all those years.

But this is how ridiculous you end up sounding when you commit to this idea that there’s something inherently flawed or different or lesser about writing fanfiction -- you have to flounder around so hard to figure out what, specifically, that might be that you apparently end up accidentally defending the position that neither Between the World and Me nor Against Interpretation were written by people who were really writing at the time.

[caveartfair]

Documenta 14 Struggles to Make a Statement about Our Uncertain Times

Ibrahim Mahama, Check Point Sekondi Loco. 1901–2030. 2016–2017, 2016/2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

We are living in an age of uncertainty, documenta 14 curator-at-large Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung said, opening the second chapter of the quinquennial exhibition on Wednesday. The show, widely expected to issue a statement on our times, is this year split between two locations—Athens and Kassel—and the past and present of both cities is deftly interwoven here.

Ndikung is one of an extensive team of curators, led by artistic director Adam Szymcyzk. Szymcyzk’s choice to share the event with the Greek capital is in no small way tied to the uncertainties that are currently rattling our fragile planet and global community. Athens, of course, has seen a steady stream of tens of thousands of migrants arrive on its shores from the Middle East and Northern Africa since 2015, putting further strain on an already devastated economy. Its citizens have also endured severe austerity measures (not to mention international humiliation) imposed by its primary creditor, Germany.

Installation view of documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Documenta was originally founded to create cultural unity between East and West Germany during the tense and fractious years of the Cold War. By uprooting elements of this historically loaded exhibition from the quiet, provincial town of Kassel, and placing them in the relatively unstable environment of Athens, Szymcyzk and his team have asked viewers to approach their global neighbors with empathy. “Documenta 14,” said another of its curators, Paul B. Preciado, “is a process of becoming the political subjects of history.”

The presence of Greece remains strong across the Kassel edition. And if uncertainty is best conveyed through experiences of confusion and dislocation, then this component of documenta 14 has certainly achieved its goal (though perhaps by accident). To call the exhibition scattered doesn’t quite capture the disjointed, often haphazard assortment of artworks that visitors find across 35 venues in the city, which together house works by hundreds of artists—many of which, in a gesture of generosity and reciprocity, have come directly from Athens’s EMST museum, a collection of works by Greek and international artists that’s been installed in the Fridericianum.

Across Kassel, information is scant. Numerous works are accompanied by barely a shred of context. And in a handful of locations, the works’ installation borders on incoherent.  

Installation view of work by Ulrich Wüst at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

A viewer might find herself, for example, in a room that’s shared by a group of performers locked into a frozen formation on a plush, magenta pink carpet; a series of whimsical mail art pieces by Moyra Davey applied to the wall; Ulrich Wüst’s desolately empty black-and-white photos of the German Democratic Republic; and Artur Żmijewski’s silent films showing men with amputated limbs, engaged in exercises—post-World War II, one presumes? The work is strong, but when shown together, there is little to hold on to, hardly a thread to pull—save, perhaps, for the invocation of Europe’s violent past.

And therein lies documenta 14’s most cohesive throughline: that of our shared history. Various themes simmer up at moments throughout the exhibition—the rampant path of capitalism and nation-building (Michel Auder’s 14-channel video The Course of Empire, 2017, installed in the derelict former underground station of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof, plays out a collage of scenes showing military invasions, wasted towns, and industrial production and consumption); the experience of migration (Angela Melitopoulos’s video Crossings, 2017, partly shot in a refugee camp in Lesbos, captures voices of anonymous migrants as they learn the English words, “rejection,” “love,” and “care”); and 1960s-style alternative communities and nature-worship (archival documents of Anna Halprin’s San Francisco dance circles or footage of “ecosexuals” Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens being wedded to Planet Earth in a ceremony).

Michel Auder, The Course of Empire, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

But the exhibition excels when it mines the recent and earlier history of Kassel, excavating its stories and turning the city into a microcosm of phenomena playing out around the world. It does so across two venues, in particular, which are the strongest presentations of documenta 14 in Kassel: the Neue Galerie and the Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost).

The Society of Friends of Halit, for example, a coalition of activist groups that form part of documenta 14’s public programs, is investigating the 2006 murder of local Kassel resident Halit Yozgat, shot dead in a family-run internet café, the ninth in a spate of racially motivated killings of migrants by a neo-Nazi terrorist group. The sole living member of the trio of National Socialist Underground (NSU) members believed to have carried out the murder is now on trial in Munich.

However, Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, have worked to re-enact the events of the shooting and dig into the clues left embedded in the space—principally to determine whether a Hessian state secret service agent named Andreas Temme lied in his testimony before the court when he said that he did not hear gunshots, notice the smell of gunpowder, or see Halit’s body. The group has proven that this would not have been the case had Temme been in the café when the murder took place—and they have proven that he had could not have exited the café in time for the perpetrators to enter unseen. Needless to say, this raises questions.

Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

The presence of an active investigation within the exhibition space of the Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost) shows how Kassel has been touched by larger themes of immigration and racial violence, as well as the way in which the city’s space is a palimpsest of histories. Similarly, Ahlam Shibli’s Heimat (2016–17) follows the experiences of two migrant communities that arrived in Kassel in the mid-20th century, capturing them in portraits, accompanied by text that details their efforts to establish a new home and integrate themselves into the fabric of the place.

The seismic shifts that took place during and after World War II, prompting mass migrations, are further invoked and connected to the ancient history of Greece by way of the German (and Nazi) fascination with the classical world. Alexander Kalderach’s romantic renderings of the ancient Greek Parthenon, such as Der Parthenon (1939), on view in Kassel’s Neue Galerie, caught the eye of Adolf Hitler, as the wall text notes. And the curators push this connection back still further, showing the German landscape painter (and father of infamous Nazi-era art dealer Cornelius Gurlitt) Louis Gurlitt’s sun-soaked Akropolis (ca. 1858), which he painted on a visit to Greece (when the country was ruled by German monarch, King Otto I).

Antonio Vega Macotela, The Mill of Blood, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Kassel itself does not escape this study in the German infatuation with Greek civilization. Leo von Klenze, an artist-architect whose career began in Kassel (and who built Kassel’s Ballhaus building, which is one of documenta’s venues), lived for years in Athens, working on a city plan for King Otto I, and would eventually model his Walhalla—which still sits today above Germany’s Danube and appears in the form of von Klenze’s own painting in the Neue Galerie—on the Parthenon.

And then, of course, there is Marta Minujín’s giant Parthenon of Books (2017), which currently dominates Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz, a recreation of her 1980s installation in Argentina following the end of the country’s repressive Dirty War, for which she assembled a replica Parthenon out of metal scaffolding and thousands of books that had been banned during the military dictatorship. It’s a monument to freedom and humanity, and here functions as a rebuke to the Nazis’ deployment of classical civilization as an excuse for ethnic-cleansing and the pursuit of power.

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Across documenta 14, alternative “anti-monuments,” as curator Candice Hopkins calls them, stand as markers not of authority but of history’s brutalities—as in Antonio Vega Macotela’s The Mill of Blood (2017), a reconstruction of the minting machine built by Spanish colonizers in South America and powered by indigenous and African slaves, or even Máret Ánne Sara’s curtain of reindeer heads in the Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost), memorializing Norway’s more recent history of reindeer culling.

But documenta 14 doesn’t find only endless doom and gloom, death and exploitation, in march of human history. Mercifully, for worn-out visitors, there is some relief. Romuald Karmakar’s searingly moving videos Byzantion and Die Entstehung des Westens: Von den Anfängen in der Antike bis zum Fall von Konstantinopel (both 2017), the solitary installation in Kassel’s Orangerie, invoke the end of the Byzantine Empire and the fall of Constantinople through the heart-wrenchingly beautiful singing of choirs in two churches in Russia and Greece.

And Agnes Denes’s peaceful The Living Pyramid (2015/2017), composed of steps of flowers and plants, is a quiet monument to geological time and the natural world.

Installation view of work by Romuald Karmakar at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

There are also stories of individuals who have resisted persecution and intolerance, such as Lorenza Böttner, born Ernst Lorenz Böttner, who lived in the city of Lichtenau, not far from Kassel, in the 1970s. Lorenza, who identified as a transgender female, had both arms amputated as a young boy, following a crippling electric shock induced by climbing a pylon.  

Later in life, as Lorenza, she would go on to study at the Kassel School of Art, and learn to paint with her feet and mouth. Some of her canvases are on view in the Neue Galerie: romantic self-portraits that show her feminized, armless form, some of which place her within archetypal female imagery. She would become an ardent advocate for disability rights, performing her foot-and-mouth painting in public and arguing for the acceptance and canonization of disabled artists.  

Many of the subjects of this documenta, curator Paul Preciado offered, could have been the subjects of ethnographic vitrines. “We have been given agency to destroy the vitrines,” he said, urging visitors to see documenta 14 as a “new institution in transition.”

Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, 2015/2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Perhaps it’s that distrust of institutions—and of any power structures at all—that has led the curators of documenta 14 to avoid any one single narrative. “We have always been against interpretation,” Szymcyzk said. “The great lesson is that there is no one lesson.” What exactly that means is anyone’s guess. There’s no possibility of looking without interpretation; it’s the very basis of drawing meaning from the world around us.

But if there’s one idea that documenta 14 does put forth with success—the meaning that we can draw from all of this—it’s precisely that of the collective experience of being subject to power, and doing our best to refuse it, wherever we live.

—Tess Thackara

from Artsy News

[caveartfair]

In Kassel, documenta 14 Struggles to Make a Statement about Our Uncertain Times

Ibrahim Mahama, Check Point Sekondi Loco. 1901–2030. 2016–2017, 2016/2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

We are living in an age of uncertainty, documenta 14 curator-at-large Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung said, opening the second chapter of the quinquennial exhibition on Wednesday. The show, widely expected to issue a statement on our times, is this year split between two locations—Athens and Kassel—and the past and present of both cities is deftly interwoven here.

Ndikung is one of an extensive team of curators, led by artistic director Adam Szymcyzk. Szymcyzk’s choice to share the event with the Greek capital is in no small way tied to the uncertainties that are currently rattling our fragile planet and global community. Athens, of course, has seen a steady stream of tens of thousands of migrants arrive on its shores from the Middle East and Northern Africa since 2015, putting further strain on an already devastated economy. Its citizens have also endured severe austerity measures (not to mention international humiliation) imposed by its primary creditor, Germany.

Installation view of documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Documenta was originally founded to create cultural unity between East and West Germany during the tense and fractious years of the Cold War. By uprooting elements of this historically loaded exhibition from the quiet, provincial town of Kassel, and placing them in the relatively unstable environment of Athens, Szymcyzk and his team have asked viewers to approach their global neighbors with empathy. “Documenta 14,” said another of its curators, Paul B. Preciado, “is a process of becoming the political subjects of history.”

The presence of Greece remains strong across the Kassel edition. And if uncertainty is best conveyed through experiences of confusion and dislocation, then this component of documenta 14 has certainly achieved its goal (though perhaps by accident). To call the exhibition scattered doesn’t quite capture the disjointed, often haphazard assortment of artworks that visitors find across 35 venues in the city, which together house works by hundreds of artists—many of which, in a gesture of generosity and reciprocity, have come directly from Athens’s EMST museum, a collection of works by Greek and international artists that’s been installed in the Fridericianum.

Across Kassel, information is scant. Numerous works are accompanied by barely a shred of context. And in a handful of locations, the works’ installation borders on incoherent.  

Installation view of work by Ulrich Wüst at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

A viewer might find herself, for example, in a room that’s shared by a group of performers locked into a frozen formation on a plush, magenta pink carpet; a series of whimsical mail art pieces by Moyra Davey applied to the wall; Ulrich Wüst’s desolately empty black-and-white photos of the German Democratic Republic; and Artur Żmijewski’s silent films showing men with amputated limbs, engaged in exercises—post-World War II, one presumes? The work is strong, but when shown together, there is little to hold on to, hardly a thread to pull—save, perhaps, for the invocation of Europe’s violent past.

And therein lies documenta 14’s strongest throughline: that of our shared history. Various themes simmer up at moments throughout the exhibition—the rampant path of capitalism and nation-building (Michel Auder’s 14-channel video The Course of Empire, 2017, installed in the derelict former underground station of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof, plays out a collage of scenes showing military invasions, wasted towns, and industrial production and consumption); the experience of migration (Angela Melitopoulos’s video Crossings, 2017, partly shot in a refugee camp in Lesbos, captures voices of anonymous migrants as they learn the English words, “rejection,” “love,” and “care”); and 1960s-style alternative communities and nature-worship (archival documents of Anna Halprin’s San Francisco dance circles or footage of “ecosexuals” Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens being wedded to Planet Earth in a ceremony).

Michel Auder, The Course of Empire, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

But the exhibition excels when it mines the recent and earlier history of Kassel, excavating its stories and turning the city into a microcosm of phenomena playing out around the world. It does so across two venues, in particular, which are the strongest presentations of documenta 14 in Kassel: the Neue Galerie and the Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost).

The Society of Friends of Halit, for example, a coalition of activist groups that form part of documenta 14’s public programs, is investigating the 2006 murder of local Kassel resident Halit Yozgat, shot dead in a family-run internet café, the ninth in a spate of racially motivated killings of migrants by a neo-Nazi terrorist group. The sole living member of the trio of National Socialist Underground (NSU) members believed to have carried out the murder is now on trial in Munich.

However, Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, have worked to re-enact the events of the shooting and dig into the clues left embedded in the space—principally to determine whether a Hessian state secret service agent named Andreas Temme lied in his testimony before the court when he said that he did not hear gunshots, notice the smell of gunpowder, or see Halit’s body. The group has proven that this would not have been the case had Temme been in the café when the murder took place—and they have proven that he had could not have exited the café in time for the perpetrators to enter unseen. Needless to say, this raises questions.

Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

The presence of an active investigation within the exhibition space of the Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost) shows how Kassel has been touched by larger themes of immigration and racial violence, as well as the way in which the city’s space is a palimpsest of histories. Similarly, Ahlam Shibli’s Heimat (2016–17) follows the experiences of two migrant communities that arrived in Kassel in the mid-20th century, capturing them in portraits, accompanied by text that details their efforts to establish a new home and integrate themselves into the fabric of the place.

The seismic shifts that took place during and after World War II, prompting mass migrations, are further invoked and connected to the ancient history of Greece by way of the German (and Nazi) fascination with the classical world. Alexander Kalderach’s romantic renderings of the ancient Greek Parthenon, such as Der Parthenon (1939), on view in Kassel’s Neue Galerie, caught the eye of Adolf Hitler, as the wall text notes. And the curators push this connection back still further, showing the German landscape painter (and father of infamous Nazi-era art dealer Cornelius Gurlitt) Louis Gurlitt’s sun-soaked Akropolis (ca. 1858), which he painted on a visit to Greece (when the country was ruled by German monarch, King Otto I).

Antonio Vega Macotela, The Mill of Blood, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Kassel itself does not escape this study in the German infatuation with Greek civilization. Leo von Klenze, an artist-architect whose career began in Kassel (and who built Kassel’s Ballhaus building, which is one of documenta’s venues), lived for years in Athens, working on a city plan for King Otto I, and would eventually model his Walhalla—which still sits today above Germany’s Danube and appears in the form of von Klenze’s own painting in the Neue Galerie—on the Parthenon.

And then, of course, there is Marta Minujín’s giant Parthenon of Books (2017), which currently dominates Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz, a recreation of her 1980s installation in Argentina following the end of the country’s repressive Dirty War, for which she assembled a replica Parthenon out of metal scaffolding and thousands of books that had been banned during the military dictatorship. It’s a monument to freedom and humanity, and here functions as a rebuke to the Nazis’ deployment of classical civilization as an excuse for ethnic-cleansing and the pursuit of power.

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi, 2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Across documenta 14, alternative “anti-monuments,” as curator Candice Hopkins calls them, stand as markers not of authority but of history’s brutalities—as in Antonio Vega Macotela’s The Mill of Blood (2017), a reconstruction of the minting machine built by Spanish colonizers in South America and powered by indigenous and African slaves, or even Máret Ánne Sara’s curtain of reindeer heads in the Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost), memorializing Norway’s more recent history of reindeer culling.

But documenta 14 doesn’t find only endless doom and gloom, death and exploitation, in march of human history. Mercifully, for worn-out visitors, there is some relief. Romuald Karmakar’s searingly moving videos Byzantion and Die Entstehung des Westens: Von den Anfängen in der Antike bis zum Fall von Konstantinopel (both 2017), the solitary installation in Kassel’s Orangerie, invoke the end of the Byzantine Empire and the fall of Constantinople through the heart-wrenchingly beautiful singing of choirs in two churches in Russia and Greece.

And Agnes Denes’s peaceful The Living Pyramid (2015/2017), composed of steps of flowers and plants, is a quiet monument to geological time and the natural world.

Installation view of work by Romuald Karmakar at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

There are also stories of individuals who have resisted persecution and intolerance, such as Lorenza Böttner, born Ernst Lorenz Böttner, who lived in the city of Lichtenau, not far from Kassel, in the 1970s. Lorenza, who identified as a transgender female, had both arms amputated as a young boy, following a crippling electric shock induced by climbing a pylon.  

Later in life, as Lorenza, she would go on to study at the Kassel School of Art, and learn to paint with her feet and mouth. Some of her canvases are on view in the Neue Galerie: romantic self-portraits that show her feminized, armless form, some of which place her within archetypal female imagery. She would become an ardent advocate for disability rights, performing her foot-and-mouth painting in public and arguing for the acceptance and canonization of disabled artists.  

Many of the subjects of this documenta, curator Paul Preciado offered, could have been the subjects of ethnographic vitrines. “We have been given agency to destroy the vitrines,” he said, urging visitors to see documenta 14 as a “new institution in transition.”

Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, 2015/2017, on view at documenta 14, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

Perhaps it’s that distrust of institutions—and of any power structures at all—that has led the curators of documenta 14 to avoid any one single narrative. “We have always been against interpretation,” Szymcyzk said. “The great lesson is that there is no one lesson.” What exactly that means is anyone’s guess. There’s no possibility of looking without interpretation; it’s the very basis of drawing meaning from the world around us.

But if there’s one idea that documenta 14 does put forth with success—the meaning that we can draw from all of this—it’s precisely that of the collective experience of being subject to power, and doing our best to refuse it, wherever we live.

—Tess Thackara

from Artsy News