This month’s Retrowurst is a step away from the vulgar world of commercial creativity into the world of art for art’s sake.
Or is it?
See what I had to say about the frankly weird experience that is documenta, back in July 2007.
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This month, Extrawurst is going to be a little different. I am not going to write about brands or marketing as such, but about an event. But, perhaps, as brands are meant to be moving towards becoming total experiences, this will not be totally irrelevant.
The event in question is “Documenta”. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Documenta is an exhibition of contemporary art, held every five years in the town of Kassel. Artists from all over the world are featured and I suppose it is Germany’s version of the Venice Biennale.
Documenta was founded by the artist Arnold Bode, and the first exhibition was held in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural show) that was taking place in Kassel at that time. We are now onto Documenta 12 this year and the exhibition runs for 100 days through the summer months.
Before I get on to my experience of Documenta itself, it’s worth taking a look at the home of Documenta, Kassel. To be quite honest, Kassel seems an almost bizarre venue for such an international art event. For those of you who have been to Venice during the Biennale, I am sure you’ll agree that the whole thing “fits” somehow, with modern art works taking temporary residence in some of Venice’s most famous ancient buildings as well as the specially constructed country pavilions, themselves of architectural interest.
Kassel, however, is a lump of a town with a decidedly split personality. Although it is in the middle of Germany, topographically, it is a town that really feels as if it is in the middle of nowhere. There are no major airports nearby and one travels on the train towards Kassel through what seems like unending (if pleasant enough) countryside of rolling hills and fields. Kassel itself is dominated by fading Teutonic melodrama. A huge statue of Hercules stands atop the hill that overlooks the town. Beneath Hercules are the Schloß and its park – all grottoes, follies and classical temples. But Kassel also has a huge industrial area and one of the highest crime rates in Germany.
During Documenta, the town takes on a different face. Not only through the throngs of visitors from all over the globe but also from the works of art that incorporate themselves within the town. This can be in a way obvious to all, like the huge poppy field accompanied by “revolutionary songs” by a Croatian artist that has turned the conservative Friedrichsplatz into a “red square” for the summer, or the 1,000 Chinese nationals who have been invited by a Chinese artist to Kassel to “be” in the German city for a few weeks. Or it can be in a more subtle way, noticed only by visitors, as provocative modern works hang side-by-side with “Flemish painting of the nobility” in the Kassel gallery.
For Documenta this year, the main Leitmotifs have been based on three questions: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and What is to be done? Whether it is a result of these questions or not, many of the works of art on show are very heavy, dealing with war, dispossession, rape and torture, refugees and the aftermath of colonialism: all in all, Documenta 12 doesn’t exactly make for a fun day out for all the family! In addition, most of the visitors seem to be of the particularly earnest sort, scribbling in notebooks and fiddling with their glasses.
The result of all of this über-earnestness is that the German media and general public love to poke a bit of fun at Documenta, even if one senses a little bit of hidden pride behind it all in the “we’ve got our eccentric and creative types, too” sense. One artist ran into trouble with the Kassel Straßenverkehrsamt or municipal road authorities when she changed the white lines on some of the roads in Kassel to crosses. This conflict between German rationality and artistic creativity made for a few good news stories. Or there was a touch of Schadenfreude when the severe storms resulted in the collapse of a sculpture outside and part of the main pavilion being under water. In the first case, the artist declared his sculpture to be more beautiful in its collapsed state than in the original, so all was well in the end.
I wondered if these paradoxes are what give Documenta its charm. As an event it is unexpected and almost eccentric. It would simply not work as a concept on paper because the bits don’t really fit together. Another part of its charm is that it is almost utterly devoid of any signs of commerciality. The only sponsorship that I saw was from Sparkasse (the Savings Bank) who had sponsored the audio guide. And although a design agency had been commissioned to create signage, a “look” for the attendants and an orientation system, this was unobtrusive to the point that it was fairly easy to become disorientated and lost. But this was, in reality, not a bad thing, as the disorientation led one to works that one normally might have missed.
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I became quite a documenta fan following that visit. I attended documenta 13 in 2012 and 14 in 2017. If my memory serves me correctly, Ben and Jerry’s did some brilliant branding at 2012 which kept a certain young lad from being completely bored out of his skull. And 2017 took place partly in Athens (although I only made it to Kassel) and I recall a brilliant work which was a Parthenon-style installation of banned books.
But I didn’t go in 2022 (15). I wasn’t the only one. Like so many things these days, it all got nasty and ugly and political. Not what I needed just as we were emreging from the Covid Hell.
And 2027, documenta 16? Who knows. One thing is certain, though. I don’t think any multi-millionaires will be tempted to hold their nuptials in Kassel.
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